Determinant

The Invisible Mother

20 t H e i n v i S i B L e m o t H e r This was a practice where the mother, often disguised or hiding, often under a spread, held her baby tightly for the photographer to ensure a sharply focused image. Late night, on my side of the bed, i think of hidden mothers. i imagine faces buried beneath quilts, rising like patterned mountains: Wedding Knot, Star of many Points. Their hands made velvet cups from drapes and held limbs still. Still. my pale stomach trembles with my pulse. i feel them both: the child’s grimace, elbow caught in an unseen hold, the mother’s greed and grief. it’s wrong, i think, to think of sex, of my face pressed down into the pillow— strange, how love erases you. i’ve learned that envy means to want what you don’t have. Jealousy means holding on to what you do, the way a cool window opens out to colder night and keeps the heat inside. all those mothers, curtained, faceless, in love. nights in this bed, his nails marking a soft red pattern on my hip. The pins-and-needles love, the unlikely pain of blood’s return. i know her grip and fear, her own hands hurting her flesh-of-flesh, the silver nitrate fixing invisibly as she sits beneath the quilt, holding her child. How terribly love fixes to stillness as it makes the death it fears, as it drives the pull away. ...