A Good Mother

“Something like this comes along maybe once in a lifetime, maybe never. This military statute they’re trying her with—it’s never been used before. There is, literally, no precedent for this case. I’m not giving it up.” She blinks away sudden, angry tears, feels as childish as if she’s fighting a bigger kid for her toy at the playground. She tightens her hold on Cal. “Just because we had a baby together doesn’t give you the right to control my life.”
“Okay, okay.” Nic’s eyes are on Cal. “Look, no one is saying this is easy.” He reaches across the table to put his hand on her upper arm and shakes it gently to relax her grip. “We’ll make some adjustments, give you more of a break. You can ask your mom to help out—”
Abby snorts. “My mom lives on the other side of town. With traffic here, it basically means we are in a long-distance relationship. And she works even more than me. She thinks she’s helping out when she shows up to take Cal for a walk on the weekends.” Roz Rosenberg, the principal of one of the city’s biggest public high schools, was many things, but natural grandma was not one of them.
“A nanny—”
“We can’t afford it, Nicky. You know that, and he’s too young for day care.”
Nic pulls his hand back. “What are you suggesting?”
Cal disengages from her breast with the satisfying pop of a cork releasing from a wine bottle and looks up at her expectantly. Abby carefully wipes the edges of his mouth with her thumb and shifts him to the other side. When he has latched on again and is back at work, she forces herself to look at Nic. “That you stay home instead.”
Nic looks as shocked as if she’s just slapped him. “What are you talking about? I don’t get paternity leave. I’m not—” he gestures at her “—it’s not my body that’s keeping him alive. Yes, I mean, in three months, sure, I can take my vacation, but now, when he needs to eat every three hours? When he needs his mother? That’s crazy.”
“You can take your vacation days now. You can bottle-feed him. And you can take him to see me at work once a day. Or I can come home, we don’t live that far.”
“You want me to stay home and bottle-feed him?” Nic says the words slowly, like he is talking to someone very stupid.
“Yes. I can pump.” She pauses. “Actually, I bought a breast pump yesterday and already started to get a supply going.”
Nic stares at her. “How have you done that and managed to keep breastfeeding?”
“I’m supplementing with formula.”
“You made that decision without telling me? Did you even consider the health consequences for him?”
“Plenty of babies get only formula. It’s not like I’m starving him.”
“But the nurses said that breast milk was the best—”
“Fuck the nurses,” she says harshly. “My brother and I were bottle-fed because my mom couldn’t make enough milk to feed twins. We turned out perfectly fine.”
“You can’t just make these decisions on your own and not talk to me about it.”
“Why not? It’s my body, as you just pointed out. God, I am sick and tired of being told that if I don’t do x, y, or z thing I’m a bad mother.”
“I never said—”
“No, you don’t say it, Nicky. You just look it. Like when you come home and the house is a mess and Cal is asleep on the sofa—”
“Where he could roll off and crack his skull on the wood floor—”
“Or when you get after me because I like to nurse him in the bath.”
“When I walked in on you, you were falling asleep. Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?”
“That’s my favorite time with him,” she whispers. “And yeah, that one time, I got tired.”
“All it takes is one time, Abby. He could have drowned.”
“Fine,” she says, struggling to keep her voice low and not disturb Cal. “I’m selfish. I’m negligent. I suck at this. So let me go back to work.”
Nic sits back in his chair and folds his arms across his chest. “This is wrong. This is really, really wrong.”
She keeps going, talking over him. “There’s already a few bottles of breast milk in the freezer. And I talked to Jonathan. His caseload is slow right now and he’s happy to—he wants to come by in the afternoons and help.”
“You already got a supply going? You already talked to Jonathan? Behind my back? Our son was born six weeks ago. He’s a baby. You’re his mother. Doesn’t that even mean anything to you?”
“Of course, it means something to me,” she snaps. “I love him.” She looks down at Cal’s downy head and tears come into her eyes again. She blinks them back furiously. How could she possibly explain this to Nic? That she loved Cal beyond all reason and at the same time his existence felt entirely unreal to her. That every minute she was with her baby she was also sitting in the audience watching a play that had been terribly miscast. That when she wasn’t too tired to have thoughts, her only thoughts were of work. That she fantasized, not about blissful lazy days adoring this beautiful creature she and Nic had made, but of going back to court and picking Luz’s jury.
“I can’t do this all day every day until February. It’s not who I am. I told you, when we were deciding about whether to—” She stops. “It was a big decision for me. After we found out. Barely having dated for three months—and that was—” she swallows, remembering their first drunken hookup “—a casual thing.”
“Not for me.”
She flushes, keeps going. “Then everything with Rayshon, the investigation, me thinking I might get disbarred. It was—it was crazy. When we talked about it, about what to do, I told you I was going back to work.”
“After your maternity leave. Not five minutes after the fucking epidural wore off.”
“Nicky, you know me—”
“Do I?