Motherhood is an MLM

on motherhood, memory and swimming in waterfalls

Lately I have been wanting a baby.

The trees clang against each other and it's the hottest summer ever after the last hottest summer ever. There is sun flaring so bright into your eyes you forgot you’ve seen anything but fires before. Lately I have been wanting a baby. I usually don't want a baby. I look at what the world does to mothers and I see it as an agility challenge I don’t have the skills to perform.  I want whatever seed was planted in my mind, the thing that compels me to want to have a child, to be uprooted. To have the gift of not even wanting to consider. I am jealous of the people who simply do not want children. The people that feel clear in their decision to be childless. Or like there is a decision to be made at all. The black and white is compelling in a world I find non-linear. 

I worry having a child will change my routines. The Mothers around me try to convince me that having a baby wouldn't change my routine. They pitch me at Christmas and baby showers, “when are you going to have a baby”, discussions of “bloodlines continuing” as if my blood is less than the men in my family. Motherhood is an MLM women sell to each other. We buy into it to never make a profit, thinking that if we convince just one more person, our investment and pain will be worth it. It’s the best thing you'll ever do and you’ll never love as much as I love right now, and it’s fine and you get used to it and it's not that hard it's actually fun and you just figure it out. 

The air is heavy on your shoulders like the backpack on your walk home from school and smoke pours from your fingers like waterfalls you swam in as a girl. Cars giggle and children screech. You read in the newspaper a decade later about the sewage leak City Hall “chose not to disclose”. The water is brown in your polaroid pictures.