Jade Sharma - Problems

A white yuppie woman with a baby slung over her shoulder. The children looked like trophies. The women were mocking me, Haha, we got a man to have a baby with us!

I was pissed at Peter for not having a kid with me.

“My mom is so cool. She smokes pot with me, and she’s always encouraging me to do whatever I want,” my future kid would say.

I would be one of those sick mothers who was fat and forever complaining. “I spent my childhood taking care of my mother. She was always sending me to the store to buy two-liter bottles of Diet Coke with her disability checks,” my future kid would say.

Women with kids talk about how they are so busy and tired, but in their eyes they are saying, “Envy me.” I did. I wanted to be so tired and busy.

If I believed in God, I would think he was waiting for me to get my shit together.

It didn’t seem that long ago that I would freak out every time my period was late, running into the all-night pharmacy to pick up a pregnancy test and ending up in a girlfriend’s bathroom, where we would chain-smoke and then gasp with relief when the plus didn’t appear in the oval. And now every second week of the month, I was met with the familiar disappointment when confronted with the smear of blood on toilet paper. A marker of yet another thing not happening. All those years imagining the horror of a screaming red-faced alien forcing its way out of me somehow morphed into the ultimate climactic conclusion of my biological longing. To lie there with a baby sucking on my nipple in a symbiotic bubble of warmth and love. To never be alone again. To have a reason to take care of myself. To love something more than myself. To have a clear and understandable answer to the question, “So what do you do?”

I wanted to erase myself. Where there was a picture of me, there would be a picture of a snotty, pudgy infant, new to the world, with its tiny hand out, grasping at nothing. On my Facebook page, above my name, there would be his or her little face. Take the best of me, take this genetic line further, and then a little further, till the sky turns black and we freeze and we melt. We are all babies. We will always be babies. All the babies will die. And one day they will be dead forever. But it was nothing to get stuck on. It was nothing to get snagged on. Enjoy the rolling skies of your time-lapsed world: This was where you crawled out of the ocean, and this was where you walked. That was where you were running, and then you were lying, and now you’re looking up at the ceiling, and above the ceiling is the same sky that rolls ahead and will keep rolling on after you are gone. Say, “Look at that.” Think, I can do that . Don’t be scared. It will all be over long after no one remembers you.

When I was in India to scatter my father’s ashes, I saw children just crawling around in the garbage. Better that way — set the standard low. So you could think, At least you’re not crawling around in the garbage , if you ended up fucking up the kid’s life somehow. But of course, you would never say that.

“What size is your shoe?” a hunched-over woman asked me. I thought of that film The Conversation . How everyone was once someone’s child. Someone once loved this woman more than anything else in the world. Or maybe someone didn’t, and that’s why she was fucked-up.

“Eight,” I said, looking down to avoid her stare.

“Looks bigger,” she said. Was she crazy or lonely? Crazy people could be lonely. Loneliness could drive you crazy.

I put my bus pass in the slot. The driver smiled at me. Hot black guy. He had a shaved head, and I could see how muscular his body was through his blue MTA shirt. I imagined lying flat on my belly. How he would spread my ass cheeks so he could get a good look at his cock going in and out of me. Take out all his aggression about his stupid life driving in circles. The smell of potato chips hit me as I walked toward the back of the bus and sat next to a window. Someone’s headphones were too loud.

My phone was ringing.

“Have you heard back about your thesis?” my mother yelled into the phone.

“No.”

“You should e-mail him.”

“It’s only been three days since I turned it in.” This was a lie. I hadn’t turned in the fucking thing. It was another cloud hanging over me.

“If you don’t hear back by the end of the week—”

“I will, I will,” I said, regretting I’d picked up the phone.

“Did you read the story I sent you about the baby eagle in Mexico?”

“No, I didn’t,” I said, feeling guilty I had deleted the article.

“There was this boy named Miguel,” she started.

The guilt instantly turned into annoyance. Not now. Not now . “I’m on the bus,” I said, digging around for ChapStick.

She kept saying, “What?” and I kept screaming into the phone, “I’m on the bus, Mom. I can’t talk right now!” Why did the whole bus decide to be completely silent while I was on the phone? No teenagers laughing, no cell phones ringing, no mothers yelling at their kids not to touch the gum squished between the seat and the window. That feeling of embarrassment that fills you when you see people be mean to their parents. “I can’t talk to you! Because I’m on the bus!”

Finally she understood, but she took it as a piece of information, not as a reason to stop talking and get off the phone, because she wasn’t a normal person. She was a mother. Her frontal lobe had come out with her placenta. “So what day will you be coming up for your uncle’s retirement party?”

This was a setup. She asked the question as if we had previously discussed it. When I told her I wasn’t coming, she would act shocked and demand to know why, and then it was just a short hop and skip to the guilt trip, with a brief layover in Obligation City. These were our roles. This was our script.

“I can’t come because I have to work.”

There was a pause. I was off script. She had to improvise.

“Why can’t someone just cover your shift?” Pretty good.

“I asked, but nobody can.” Volley it back.

“It’s just a bookstore! It’s not like a real job.”

“Thanks. It’s just my life!” A fat woman I didn’t know existed till that moment turned around to stare. It was as if God had put extras on a bus to remind me what a brat I was.

“When are you going to start sending out those applications for teaching?”

“I have to graduate first! God! I told you that!”

“Then if you turned in your thesis you need to bother them.”

“It’s only been three fucking days since I turned it in!”

When I was a kid, I brought home a picture from art class. My mother stared at it with a puzzled look and said, “Trees aren’t purple. What is wrong with you?” I watched it sway in the air before it landed in the garbage. On the fridge was a test my brother had gotten an A on. A concise little story that played well in therapy.

Before I was about to hang up self-righteously, she said, “I’ve had trouble swallowing lately.” And just like that, she’d won. It didn’t matter what she had ever done to me. She was sick, and she was my mom. Emotional kryptonite. The lump in my throat. With a snap of her fingers she could turn me into a lost six-year-old with tears running down my face, just wanting my mommy. Somehow that’s what happens when you deal with the very first person you met on Earth.

I stared out of the messed-up bus window at a drunk taking a piss. This dirty town. “I don’t know where all this mucus comes from,” she said. I listened with an overwhelming sense of fear and dread as she told me all the fucked-up things her body was doing.

It doesn’t matter how old you are, after your mom dies, you will feel like an orphan, out there completely alone in the world.