“Pull the Stopper” by Sarah Ann Noel
The smell of my daughter’s cheek makes me salivate. I love its smoothness, the tenderness of rubbing my own, less plump cheek and lips against her round, new face. But even without touch, the scent of her sour breath, pacifier mouth, drool across the plane of her porcelain face after a sweaty afternoon nap incites a maternal urge I don’t have language for. But I understand the phrase, “I could eat you up.”
I don’t know what is happening to me in motherhood. I feel everything, and I can communicate none of it: the exhaustion, the love, the fear and loathing, the confusion. The self-hatred. These sensations in my gut or my heart or even, I guess, my breasts, they are beyond the reach of words. I claim to be a writer, but maybe I only am what User78594736362 called me on “Get Off My Internets”: just a mom with a nice camera. As I flip back through the photos I’ve snapped of Harriet’s first cereal, her first bike ride, her nap under the felted mobile a friend from college made by hand and sent to us as a surprise, I understand that the feelings are beyond my camera as well. It isn’t that I’m not a writer. It is that humankind has not uncovered words to define the—even now I cannot name it—wildness? instinct? animality? of motherhood.
This frustrates me. Even before Harriet was born, I so desperately wanted to be seen and known. “To be is to be perceived.” Is that why we all chose to start plastering our lives on the Internet, as if my $5 latte was interesting? As if I was the first person to admit that it wasn’t and still post a photo of the foam art. Ironically, of course. Now I exist for a small person, do not eat or dream or shower or send a text message without considering her: the effects on her well-being, her needs before mine, her tiny size in the vastness of the world, the monumental way she has consumed my being.
Instead, I bounce her on my lap after her nap and I unplug her pacifier from her mouth with my teeth. The plastic is warm from her sleepy skin, and it carries the aroma of her cheek with it. I bite my teeth over it, inhale and pull it flush against my face, backwards, right beneath my nose. Harriet finds this hysterical. She squeals and laughs. A tingling fires from the depths of my womb. It spreads through my thighs, up into my chest, through my heart, out the backs of my arms. I have nerves everywhere, but this joy, her joy, touches only my motherly places.
Tom walks in the door as she is giggling, and at the sight of her daddy, Harriet’s smile grows wider. She reaches for him, and he casts his briefcase on to the velvet couch, the one we never use since it is beautiful but not comfortable, to take Harriet from me. I am so relieved. I breathe into my body without the extra twenty pounds on my chest, but as I exhale, all the corners of my body that lit up at her laugh now ache instead. Something is missing from me.
What are you doing, Tom laughs.
The pacifier is still plugged into my face, nipple out, and I’m suckling at the plastic back, as if I have become Harriet, as if this act of self-soothing and oral fixation belongs to me. I feel shame at what he must see, but I don’t want to stop. I want to succumb to impulse like my baby, I want to live only for our comfort. I unstop my mouth to answer him.
I like the way it smells, I tell him, dancing it through the air toward Harriet.
What? He is confused.
I can’t explain it. It’s like sniffing her face. The scent of her. It makes me salivate.
He thinks it’s strange, I can tell, but he has learned enough about my postpartum state to not say a word. These thoughts I attempt to express to him in the name of intimacy are tucked away on some corner shelf of our family culture, icons similar to older adages like, “a face only a mother could love.” My affinity for my daughter’s spit is, according to the thoughts I’m reading in my husband’s brain, a practice only a postpartum mother abides and is otherwise, to everyone else, grotesque.
I am not the baby, I am the mother, and so I do not exist for my own comfort. I am only trying to survive. I have adapted to my new environment, building a habitat on the couch with nearly all my needs within arm’s reach. I have learned to subsist on soggy cheerios and bits of fruit leftover from the baby foods I puree during her naps. I horrify Tom, sampling my own breast milk, and I hadn’t even given it a thought other than to check the temperature, to check the taste before feeding it to Harriet.
I’ll give her the bottle, he says. You take some time.
I have become a creature to him. I tell him, I’ll go for a hike around the property. I grab my flannel coat from the peg by the door, as if an invisible mother had commanded me to take a jacket! As if all my thoughts and actions are now derived from a sense of Greater Motherhood. I don’t want a walk, but the Mommy Blogs say it is good for me to connect with nature. I stomp around the pine needles on our sloping acreage, weave through the rough pillars of our lodgepole pines.
A twig snaps ahead of me and I look up, make eye contact with a doe, ragged, regal at once. The fear on her face is overlaid with fury, and her ears twitch with tension in my direction. I look between us. I have nearly stepped on two fawns, spotted ribs rising and falling with the quickness of sleep. Their mother watches me, watches everything, even my breath. I smile at her, and my maternal fires rage again. We understand each other, I tell myself, slowly backing away. I swear she nods at me as she moves toward her babies.
When I return inside, I don’t mention the encounter, though it is the most alive I’ve felt in months. Everything I’ve bottled up because there have been no words to spill it out, released in those quiet, knowing seconds with the Mother Doe. I begin to imagine myself like her, acting purely on instinct, navigating each day with no other purpose than to be alive, to keep Harriet alive.
When there is something I feel but cannot say, I tell Tom it is primal.
I sniff Harriet’s cheek at-will.
Mother Doe nodded at me; I know she did.
The months meander by and they are stolen away from me. I can’t keep track of which. The stretch of time from breakfast until bedtime seems the entire expanse of human existence, but when I finally tuck Harriet into bed, I grieve the day’s end, endure unnamed shame. My emotions are ripped to opposing ends, across a spectrum I didn’t know humans were capable of, and it isn’t just a roller coaster of feelings—happy and sad then, happy then sad, like Momstagram makes it out to be. It isn’t an emotional spiral driven by hormones and exhaustion, as if to be a postpartum woman is a return to my prepubescent girlhood, though the force pulling my body in these different directions is akin to puberty, a physical coming-of-age that cannot be stopped. Harriet pulls herself up at the edge of the coffee table, and exuberance rushes up and down my spine, my jaw aches with glee and cheering, then suddenly it throbs with pain and loss and regret too: regret that I didn’t take a photo and sadness that I witnessed a fleeting thing and despair that a once-in-a-lifetime moment has come and gone and I’ll never get it back and she’s that much further away from me. I weep, and I don’t know if I’m leaking happiness or sorrow, rather it feels like these tears are washing everything away. I beg them to. Wash away all these emotions because my weakened bones cannot bear the weight of this, and I begin to fear that becoming clean—becoming nothing—is the only way I’ll survive.
Outside the fawns have learned their legs and their mother’s coat is shedding. The babies bound through the growing grasses, and they are curious about what happens behind the walls of our house. One is feisty and brave, peering at us through the fence as I push Harriet in her swing or pluck basil from the pot. I smile at the thought of granting my daughter her own private zoo. Then I realize that the deer exist in the open, watching us live behind fences and glass.
Mother Doe is always near, always watching, catching my eye before returning to her steady graze beside the boulders. I imagine her assessment of my life in these snippets, lined up in a grid of square, orchestrated scenes. Her approval means more to me than anyone else’s. I’ve always wondered if animals feel emotions, if we have any way of knowing for sure. When a dog wags its tail, it’s happy. When they pant, we say they’re smiling. Is this true because it is, or because we need it to be? The fawns are growing up. They’ll mature faster than my Harriet, and the realization is enough to siphon my anguish once more; but the doe is steadfast, feeding her fat store for the winter, leading her young by this example. I clutch the flubbery wing formed along the back of my arm and try to learn a lesson.
Isn’t it amazing, Tom exclaims when he returns home, clapping as Harriet pulls up on the table and collapses on to her diaper-butt, again and again, like it’s new every time for both of them. I want to tell him that it is unlike any miracle I’ve ever witnessed, but these words are wrong again. They’re flat and too much, and my eyes have been opened to the changing seasons ahead. I am flat and I am too much, and maybe my body isn’t ravaged, just readying itself. I answer him, it is, and I see he thinks I am cold toward our daughter, cold toward him. He thinks my distance is depression or assumes I’m angry about something that has happened in my day. What happens in my day other than snacks and television reruns and poop explosions and the most remarkable feats of human existence I’ve ever been privileged to see? I am not angry, neither am I joyful. I know what I am not, I do not know what I am. My husband and his daughter play at my feet while I am perched on the couch folding laundry, clipping coupons, watching and alert.
As the weather turns, life becomes a flurry of no. Harriet is constantly telling me no but then, so am I always in her way. Don’t touch the outlet. Don’t throw your food. Don’t eat sand. No, no, no, as if I can hardly fault her saying it back. It’s all she ever hears. This is what I’ve modeled for her, that the world is full of boundaries and stops, and now she’ll ape and assert all of hers. I curb every thought to control every behavior, aware that I am the world to her. How I survive in the world is how she will live one day too. Don’t eat the sweets. Don’t leave dishes undone. Don’t raise your voice or cry too much or forget to exercise. No, no, no. I reject my urges like I once shut down my emotions. I don’t consider them instinctual. They’re only in my way. I remember the feeling of Harriet’s pacifier in my mouth. She hardly takes it anymore. No, I tell myself at the mortifying impulse to dig it out from my purse, to smell it. I collapse into other self-soothing and there is always a tub of ice cream in the freezer.
A new neighbor has moved into the cabin above us, Carla. She has come from the city and the natural surroundings are novel to her. She is novice. She leaves her garage door wide open and has her bird feeders installed at the edge of her deck. The bears will find her before they waddle off to sleep. I took her pumpkin bread to be neighborly. I can’t remember how to make friends. At first, she calls to me from her window any time the deer pass between our properties, the boundary between which isn’t really observed. Finally, she understands this will startle them, and every time they dart away, the Mother Doe rolls her eyes at me.
Eventually, Carla begins leaving carrots and bread crusts in her yard, attracting the animals to her. I want to say, you’re killing them. But it doesn’t feel like my place. The lines weren’t drawn which means the roles haven’t been set, and I’m not sure if it’s more important to preserve the potential for new friendship or preserve the deer. Mother Doe understands me, but she isn’t my friend. With horror, I watch her begin to disregard her instincts too, like she’s following my lead. She lacks the discipline to stay the course. She takes the easy road, the trail of breadcrumbs to Carla’s. She succumbs to comfort, free food—indulgence. The Mother does this and her growing boys follow suit.
For the first time in a long time, emotion returns to me. My motherly places rev to life, and I’m nervous the feeling is rage. I’m so mad at Mother Doe for failing her young, when we’ve worked so hard and come this far. I’ve needed her example, and instead we reversed roles. I’m so angry at Carla for upsetting the balance, for spoiling nature and behaving so selfishly. I wanted a friend, but we have nothing in common. I’m most upset my daughter watches me and does what I do. Motherhood is a long line of potential failure, and I have hit every milestone. In a few more weeks, the young bucks will leave their mother, join the males in the canyon for a romp before the rut. The burden of survival, for me, has only just begun. Harriet will look to me forever, and even with all that time, I’ll never be perfect for her.
It doesn’t feel primal anymore, I try to explain to Tom. I question everything. How many more doubts will haunt me before she comes of age? We are slicing avocados and boiling rice, foods our daughter can feed herself by the fistful, foods we pretend are a full meal if we stuff them into tortillas for ourselves.
Tom chuckles, you don’t want to smell her cheek anymore? He winks and my rage returns. Harriet’s cheek is crusted in banana and milk, and I nearly gag. I click on the gas to light the stove, warm the tortillas like they do at the restaurant in town we used to frequent when food was more than fuel. Fancy, Tom says. His smile is sweet. He jokes like things are unchanged, like we are the same. He jokes like we are human beings in love, living life like regular people do. I can’t reach the olive oil from the shelf. He brings it down to me and I return his smile, desperate to be in love, living life like regular people. But the cork is stuffed too deep into the neck of the bottle, and I know he is to blame. He jams it in every time he uses it because society has not conditioned him to consider every possible consequence beforehand. So, I am torn between the love I wish to cling to and the fury of protecting what is mine alone to carry.
Outside it is dusk, and I catch a glimpse of the doe bounding up the hill. Something has spooked her, and her flimsy intuition has snapped back with force.
I clench my teeth around the cork and start to work it from the bottle. Harriet finds this funny. She points, chants Mommy, Mommy, and Tom turns to look.
Don’t do that, he says. As if I am a child. As if I am anything other than the mother who birthed and nurtured and kept alive this human who now speaks to us, participates like regular people do.
We’re not animals, he laughs to me.
I clamp down harder. I pull the stopper with my teeth.
About Sarah Ann Noel
She/Her/Hers
Sarah Noel holds an MFA from NYU’s Paris Writers Workshop. She is working on her first novel. Sarah lives in Evergreen, Colorado with her husband and daughters.