A Tiny Crackling Ember
The night I knew I was pregnant, I didn’t need a test. A slight accidental brush against my breast as I sat in my graduate school night class in education was all my body needed. The strangeness of the dull tender ache made way for the quiet but unambiguous visceral voice calling to me.
It started as a whisper, a hissing, a tiny crackling ember, a foreign feeling that was instantly made familiar. I discreetly pushed my palms against my breast again, testing, wading in the water of knowing, adjusting to the temperature—finding it not fleeting or invented, but rooted and warm and safe. The whisper, the planting of a tree. Inside my body, something had begun.
Walking towards the apartment that night, euphoria held both of my hands in hers. Surprising joy in my fingertips, hope I didn’t see coming and didn’t know how much I would want. A projector played an imaginary film in my head as I walked, overlapping images of things that could become. I watched a round smiling baby whose eyes locked with mine, the image of a wedding with F, who after three years had not proposed, had not mentioned marriage or children or that he wanted anything beyond what we had. I never said anything either, afraid, maybe, of what he might say. Afraid, maybe, that I wouldn’t be able to say what I wanted. Afraid, maybe, I couldn’t have what I wanted. Afraid, too, of the sound my voice would make saying it, and what might come afterwards.
The projector played on, cinematic fantasy in so many colors and pictures, watching things fall into place as if by magic. F and I, holding a toddler in the middle of a dance floor I had never seen before. Just the three of us as one being, the tow-headed baby between us resembling the photos I had seen of F at that age. Me, the archetype of a young blissful mother, high on love; F, holding me and the boy who was a younger version of himself close, so present with us, almond eyes so clear. The child, so beloved and wanted and safe between us.
Entering the apartment, the film stopped playing inside of me. Luscious joy tempered slowly, the blowing out of a flame. My world went dark at the sight of F on the futon, staring at the Yankees game on the screen with the dullness of a blade that has sat unsharpened for years. The air in the living room felt cooler, less breathable. I looked at the soft yellow walls we had painted ourselves, remembering how I felt when I first saw the color on the swatch in the store. As we painted, I had felt the magic of erasing everything before that moment, each stroke exchanging the pain and loss we’d both experienced with fresh coats of sunshine.
F didn’t reach for me in love or greeting, instead acknowledging me with the hey of a ventriloquist, eyes not leaving the screen.
I have to tell you something.
I felt him awaken, a sleeping animal rising to attention, sensing danger, smelling change.
What? What? What do you have to tell me?
Something primal was released into the already dense and unforgiving air. We were on two teams all of a sudden: I was on mine and he was opposite, back arched, features angular as if made by a sharp metallic cookie cutter, alert and waiting for what was on the other end of my words.
I’m pregnant.
The words hung in the air for a few seconds until they were shattered by F’s hand hitting the coffee table. Now everything was jumbled: the words, the feelings, the joy that was in my fingertips. Everything shifted. I became a fully bloomed dandelion, feathery tufts of white, blown like a birthday candle, whose seeds dance in the air, unsure where they will land. The cinematic version that played minutes before was gone.
How could you do this to me? What? Fuck.
I waited to speak. I was a whiptail lizard, a starfish, a python snake, a marbled crayfish. I was every creature in the universe who impregnated herself, alone, without asking. I felt deceptive, selfish, thoughtless. I wanted this, I thought. I wanted this and made it happen, maybe. I did this to him. I felt my body shrinking in unexpected shame. Tears formed as the joy I felt earlier slipped away. I imagined the women who deserved that joy and a hard lump grew in my throat: women who were with partners who made them feel loved and safe; women who were cradled by more than just yellow painted walls and cinematic fantasy.
You know I have things I want to do? I still want to play music. I started the band again. We are playing real shows. I don’t even know that I want to be a father. What the fuck? How could you do this to me?
How could I do this? I absorb his words and hold them close. I did not use the pill for more than a week. I did not insist he wear condoms. Our method of birth control was not a method at all, according to my nurse at Planned Parenthood. She told me if I did not insist on the use of something, I would become pregnant. I let him pull out, fearless and excited at the prospect that this might be how a baby is made. This is how I wanted it to be. Me, the object F desired, someone cradled in love, someone who could create a person from her own body.
I think I longed for a baby without saying the words. I think I longed to be pregnant, to grow from seed to plant. I think I longed to be swept into more intimate loving, answering the call to be a mother in the wild forest of wherever I nested. Perhaps it was outside of my control, primal, instinctual. Maybe I was powerless. Or perhaps I assumed I could not only create new life, but also change the lives of those already living.
F went into the bathroom and slammed the thin wooden door. The sounds of running water masked the digging for his stash. Despite the charade, I heard him suckling from the nipple of the joint, hungrily. Long winded hits into the belly of the beast.
He returned from the bathroom subdued again, the other F, who would not yell or accuse or cut with words. The stiffness in his eyes relaxed. His chest and arms seemed gentler, unguarded.
It’s going to be cool, he said. We are going to have a baby. I hope it’s a boy.
About the Author
Deborah Richardson lives in Brooklyn, New York. She holds a B.A. from Goddard College in Creative Writing and Women’s Studies. She has a Masters Degree in Special Education and has been teaching diverse populations of children for two decades. Deborah is working on a memoir of linked essays that focus on the impact of generational trauma on her life and family. She is an editor at Literary Mama. Deborah lives with her husband and four teenage children in a blended family full of chaos, love and many, many stories.
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