PenWomanShip

I am reading a newspaper story about a woman whose baby drowned in the bathtub. The other women in the room don't really believe it was an accident. They think she drowned the baby on purpose. The woman's deranged, they say.

If they knew everything there was to know about me, would they say I'm deranged? But I am not ready to tell. It is enough that I know what I have done, could have done, didn't do.

I too had a baby. A quiet girl. Everyone said she was such a good girl. A miracle. People would stop us on the street, to look at her, talk to her, as if she had deliberately come into being to be noticed and admired.

I was not a young mother. If truth be told, I never wanted a child, but her father said it would make our union complete. Those were the words he used.

The night my daughter was conceived, we were living in an upper flat, on Trafalgar, just north of St. Joseph's Hospital. It was hot and humid. We pulled our mattress onto the balcony. We lay naked, spread-eagle. The wooden siding on the railing secluded us from the street and the neighboring apartment buildings.

Jason convinced me that this would be a perfect place to start a baby. He talked about need, and the circle of life, and I let him in. Now I know it would have been better not to have listened, to have zapped the sperm dead before it reached me.

I was a big woman, then. Not fat. Sturdy. With the baby I became huge. I wore bold print caftans and walked around like a Samoan queen. Jason massaged my feet, rubbed coconut oil into my heels and between my toes. He fed me strawberries and cream. I could sleep and dream nothing.

When my baby came, I read book after book on babies and children. But she grew too fast. There wasn't enough time to understand one thing, before it changed, and something else came into being.

Her father fretted so. He kept asking why I was neglecting his baby girl, as if he couldn't understand.

Weeks and weeks I tried. Feeding. Bathing. Feeding. It's hard to explain how overwhelming it was to be burdened with an infant's perfection. I made mistakes and I couldn't start over.

One day I stopped everything, put her on the balcony and shut the glass doors. Why bother? I knew her father would mollycoddle her when he came home. Wash and feed her. Be perfect with her.

I laughed from relief, when he told me I needed a rest and brought me here. Not to hear crying babies. Not to feed or bathe them. Nothing to know.

I am reading a newspaper story about a woman whose baby drowned in the bathtub. The woman could have been me.