ONE DAY, THE MOTHER was a mother, but then, one night, she was quite suddenly something else.
Yes, it had been June, and, yes, her husband had been gone the entire week. In fact, it was his twenty-second weeklong absence that year, a year in which only twenty-four weeks in total had passed, not that anyone was counting.
Yes, the boy had an ear infection that week and had slept only in fitful bouts. Yes, he had not really been napping well or even at all.
Yes, she was experiencing intense PMS for the first time in her life, at age thirty-seven.
And it was then, on a regular Friday, in the deepest hours of night, when the boy awoke there in bed, between his mother and father, for he did not—he would not—sleep in his own. It was the third or fourth time that night he had stirred. She had lost track.
At first she did nothing, waiting for her husband to wake, which he did not, because that wasn’t a thing he ever did. She waited longer than she usually did, waited and waited, the boy wailing while she lay as still as a corpse, patiently waiting for the day when her corpse self would miraculously be reanimated and taken into the Kingdom of the Chosen, where it would create an astonishing art installation composed of many aesthetically interesting beds. The corpse would have unlimited child-care and be able to hang out and go to show openings and drink corpse wine with the other corpses whenever it wanted, because that was heaven. That was it.
She lay there as long as she could without making a sound, a movement. Her child’s screams fanned a flame of rage that flickered in her chest.
That single, white-hot light at the center of the darkness of herself—that was the point of origin from which she birthed something new, from which all women do.
You light a fire early in your girlhood. You stoke it and tend it. You protect it at all costs. You don’t let it rage into a mountain of light, because that’s not becoming of a girl. You keep it secret. You let it burn. You look into the eyes of other girls and see their fires flickering there, offer conspiratorial nods, never speak aloud of a near-unbearable heat, a growing conflagration.
You tend the flame because if you don’t you’re stuck, in the cold, on your own, doomed to seasonal layers, doomed to practicality, doomed to this is just the way things are, doomed to settling and understanding and reasoning and agreeing and seeing it another way and seeing it his way and seeing it from all the other ways but your own.