Paula Bomer: Nine Months

February 7

“I DID IT!” She screams, “I DID IT WITH MY OWN BODY!” Her voice is ungodly deep. The veins in her neck thick with blood. And it’s true. Her body, once more, did it. What’s left of it. Bleeding, bloated, bruised inside and out. Ripped and torn, the yellowish, green umbilical cord resembling some sort of proof that aliens do indeed exist, they exist inside of our very bodies. The slimy, luminescent cord is proof of universal mystery, this strange device that attached her to her daughter — it’s from inside of her body, just like her daughter, too, the red-faced infant screaming in the doctor’s arms. Her insides came out. It’s the end of the world.

Because each time it happens, she swears, never again, never again, even as she holds the tiny infant that, unbelievably, unfuckingbelievably, grew inside of her. She’s in awe of her daughter, in awe and also, not so oddly, rather unmoved by her. She feels no love, just wonder. No love surges forth, like it did with Mike her youngest (but not with Tom, it’s like it was with Tom, the confusion, the mystery). Funny, bluish, screamy wormlike thing. She puts her on her left breast and prods at the little baby’s mouth to take the nipple. The baby’s mouth roots around like a baby bird, unable to grasp on. So Sonia squeezes her nipple and colostrum comes out and the infant’s lips touch the pre-milk milk and then, it works — the baby tries to suck. First slowly, and then, as if something in her wired-for-survival brain clicks, she ferociously latches on to Sonia’s nipple and sucks on her like that’s what she’s been put on this earth to do. Which is, in fact, true. Her daughter is here to suck the life out of her, and leave her for the spent, middle-aged woman she soon will be. Nothing will be remotely the same again. No one has ever threatened Sonia as much as this unnamed infant. No one has ever made it clear how useless and spent she really is.

She grew her, like she grew Tom and Mike. Like a plant, but inside of her, and with a brain, too. Sonia stares at the doctor for a minute. How can someone do this for a living? How can they do this for a living, watch women turn themselves inside out, and not have nervous breakdowns? It’s not that different than being a gravedigger. It’s just not. And then, Sonia, still deflating like a balloon, as a large liver-like placenta hurtles out of her, starts shaking with pain. Her teeth chatter. Her vision blurs. Is this the part where she dies? That was supposed to be earlier, thinks Sonia. The nurse, Beatrice, who is once again a normal, nice nurse — this, after Sonia saw her with that hallucinatory vision, with rainbows surrounding her and light glowing around her head, she had a fucking halo, she did , Sonia was sure of it — now this nurse is just a nice, normal nurse and gives Sonia a shot of Demoral in her thigh to stop the shakes.

“Sometimes people shake real badly with the postbirth contractions,” Beatrice says. “The fluid leaving them so quickly sets the body off into convulsions. You’ll be fine. It’s nothing abnormal. Nothing to be worried about.”

Sonia was in love with this woman only a few hours ago. And she still likes her, but now she just likes her. The magic is gone. Nothing abnormal? Everything is abnormal. There is nothing normal about what Sonia just went through. There is no normal.

BUT THAT WAS LATER. First, there was more driving to be done. Sitting with her pregnant self in the black leather bucket seat of her Volkswagen Passat station wagon.

It just crept up on her. She was never so lucky, with any of her kids, as to have the drama of her water breaking. No, for about two weeks really, her lower body ached, and then hurt, really hurt, increasingly so. For two weeks, she felt so tired, so exhausted, with intermittent sharp headaches, that whenever she walked, even the littlest bit — from the hotel room to the car, from the front seat of the car to the McDonald’s, from the parking lot to the mall — she felt as if she couldn’t go on. Just physically moving her big body drained her utterly. She wanted to lie down. But then, as soon as she lay down, she wanted to move again. She was never comfortable.

Exhausted restlessness. Bothness. It was time. It was going to happen soon.

SHE’S BEEN DRIVING EAST for some time. She missed Christmas, which was the guiltiest pleasure of all, but the guilt almost ruined the pleasure. No wrapping presents. No buying presents for anyone. No in-laws. No decorating a tree. No goddamn cards to mail out. No having to do a million things at preschool. No singing. No special meals to prepare for her ungrateful family. No pretending that she lives for trying to make everyone happy, when no one noticed that she wasn’t happy herself, that she really didn’t give a fuck. She didn’t believe in Jesus Christ anyway. She didn’t believe that the son of God came and saved everyone’s souls, or just those who prayed to Him. Although, she did pray, just in case, because even though she didn’t believe in Jesus Christ, she didn’t believe there wasn’t anything out there. She prayed desperately to the random molecules to be kind to her. But Jesus? No. And yet, they were Christians in some vague, historical way, Dick and she, and they played the whole game. Told themselves it was about the kids. Every Christmas, they gave five hundred dollars to City Meals on Wheels and bought a ton of cheap plastic toys that made the boys freak out for about two days. It depressed her. It made her feel oddly guilty, an empty sort of false joy and yet the boys were genuinely happy, wasn’t that enough?

This Christmas she spent laying her fat butt down at a Ramada Inn in Nebraska, watching TV and eating bags of chips and boxes of créme-filled oatmeal cookies. She fell asleep with the TV on. For some reason, she didn’t feel depressed and guilty about that. She felt guilty because she did nothing that she was supposed to do anymore. Missing Christmas was like having her very own Christmas for the first time since Tom was born five years ago. But the guilt was a wicked tongue telling her that she really was the devil. Jesus held no sway with Sonia, but evil was a scary force one saw on a regular basis. And who’s to say it wasn’t inside of her? For weeks and weeks now, the guilt ate at her as she ate her way around America. Her conscience spoke to her, and it told her horrible stuff about herself. She’d listen, and then move on. She wasn’t a monster as long as her conscience spoke, she reasoned. As long as she had a conscience, she wasn’t actually the worst person on earth, she was just rebelling. Or so she told herself. But everyone knows a mother who leaves her children is the worst thing on earth; a sinner, a loser, a person whose life isn’t worth living.