Her oldest child
Amanda Schmidt
She spends the rest of her life trying to think of ways to keep them safe.
She could turn them into a hummingbird and put them in her pocket. But would a pocket be too small? Would they suffocate? Would the friction from the wingbeats be too much, would they catch fire, would they burn themself up and then her coat and then her?
So she’d keep them on a leash, maybe, just the thinnest thread, knotted loose around their throat—their throat would be blue, she thinks, sapphire blue—and held close but not too close, because they would need space to fly. But what if the string were too thin? Would it get tangled in the branches, would it snag, would they choke in their effort to fly away? Would their neck snap against a string that was too strong? She’s heard that the bones of birds are fragile. Hummingbirds especially, probably.
So she does what she can. She gathers all the sharp things up and puts them in a cardboard box labeled “Scissors and Knives”— although it is also pinking shears and razors and one unusually large sewing needle—and puts it in a locked room in the garage. The room holds lighters, too, and a three-quarters-full bottle of gin. She thinks about putting all of the medication in the house in the locked room, too, but eventually decides no, that would be too much. To travel into a damp locked room every morning? For every headache, every cough, every period cramp? But then, isn’t
that the kind of sacrifice a mother should be willing to make? In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a very big one.
Her younger child, a daughter, complains that she can’t cut through poster board with children’s scissors. She’s thirteen. The mother tells her to fold it over a couple times and try again, see what happens. The daughter will complain but it will eventually cut through. Years later she’ll confide in the mother that for the rest of her life she couldn’t look at anything sharp; if a knife or a needle or a particularly sharp pencil was pointed at her, she’ll say to the mother, she would have to swivel it away, point it somewhere else.
She could turn them into steel. All their skin, their bones, their heart and their liver, all the important bits. But what if they couldn’t carry the weight? What if they woke up steel and weren’t strong enough to stand?
She looks up the strongest lightweight metals and tries again. She could turn them into aluminum, magnesium, titanium, beryllium alloy. But she doesn’t know anything about those metals. Does magnesium corrode in water? Does titanium? What if her child took a walk in the rain and came back like rusted iron, or the sickly teal that copper turns? What if they couldn’t move their arms, twist their wrists, bend their fingers? They love to play the piano, and throw toys to the cats (who will sometimes play fetch), and to type up stories and movie reviews on the computer. Could they type without using the joints in their knuckles? Could they sing without parting their lips?
A month before they were born, she was flown by helicopter to the hospital, because of sharp pains in her abdomen and because of the three miscarriages in the last five years. This time, everyone was fine. A month later, a successful C-section led to a ten-pound, living, breathing child. And she promised herself that
her fear would not make her the type of mother to seal her child away in a tight, hidden place. She would let them play outside. She would let them touch the hot stove, because that would be how they learned. She would let them bike around the block and out of sight. But no further.
Because she cannot turn them into a hummingbird or steel or any lightweight metal, she does what she can. She goes to the public library to look for books on what it means to be nonbinary and how best to be supportive and finds none—unsurprising, in a Midwestern town of a thousand—so she reads articles about it online instead. Don’t say it’s a phase, the articles say. Give them space. Touch base. Show them you love them.
Her younger child, the daughter—thirteen still—confesses to the mother in a fit that she does not want to go to the public high school, does not want her sibling to approach her in the cafeteria or the gym or by her locker. She does not want people to know she is related to them. But the daughter never gets their pronouns wrong, and the mother slips up constantly.
I read that in Finnish, there are no gendered third-person pronouns, the daughter tells the mother once, after correcting her at the dinner table while her oldest child naps nearby, as if this explains everything.
She could turn the whole world into feathers. There would be no sharp things for them to hold, no solid ground to hit if they fell. But wouldn’t enough feathers, packed tight, still be heavy? Wouldn’t an avalanche of feathers still be suffocating?
When they were four, they slipped while jumping on the couch and bit down so hard on their lower lip that they cut right through. There was blood all down their chin and on their hands
and on the good couch and the green shag carpeting that she and her then-husband hadn’t had the time to tear up yet, and the mother rushed them to the hospital in tears. But when the mother and her oldest child got to the hospital the doctor calmly told her that everything was fine; they didn’t even need stitches. And she swore again that she would be the type of mother to let her children continue to jump on couches, to climb trees, to bounce on friends’ trampolines.
Her oldest still has a scar, just a little white line that’s nearly invisible under their lower lip unless they want to show it to someone. This is where I bit right through my lip, they would say to their friends. Do you see it? My mom was so scared. There was blood everywhere.
She does what she can. Tells them it’s okay to stay home when they’re too exhausted to get out of bed, picks up their assignments from the high school, drives them to the psychiatrist in St. Louis once a month and to Harriet, in town, every week. She stands next to them when they take their pills and replaces the bottles in the cupboard above her own bathroom sink when they’re done. She stays awake and warms up dinner at 10 p.m. on the bad days, when they are unable to make it out of bed until then, holds their hand as they sob unless they tell her to stop, which they almost never do. And on the good days she reads their stories and edits the papers they write for history class and teaches them about Ancient Greek mythology, just for fun.
She could turn them to water, maybe, and keep them in a sealed jar on the kitchen counter. If it were held at just the right angle, the jar would catch sunlight from the kitchen window, cast rainbows onto the walls. But if the jar leaked? What then? Would she be forced to watch them drip slowly away onto the counter
and then into a thin stream and onto the floor? And what if the cat jumped onto the counter, knocked the jar to the ground? Would they go flying across the linoleum and under the refrigerator, the oven? Even if she left them exactly how they were, would they not eventually evaporate? They would disappear, leaving in their place only air.
When they were barely fifteen she found them alone in the bathroom with the bottle of Prozac. She did what she could. That night she drove to the hospital with her ex and her oldest child, her daughter left safe at home with the cats, and she sealed her oldest child away in a tight, hidden place—finally that kind of mother— and visited twice a day for the next week.
On the last day of the week she takes them home. It is just the two of them this time, the mother driving, the child in the passenger seat. They talk about what the food was like, and some of the funny things their roommate said, and what they painted yesterday. And then they ask if the mother can put in the old Taylor Swift CD and she does and by the time the mother pulls into the driveway, they are just starting to sing along. She spends the rest of her life trying to think of ways to keep them safe.