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“How’s mama doing?”
CJ shivers at the word.
Danny’s placing down two mugs of decaf coffee and the warm but dry pieces of toast that are the only thing she’s been getting down her throat without vomiting it back up. He’s placing them down, so he doesn’t see that she shivered.
He cares so much he’s blind, she’s learned. It’s better that way.
“Thank you,” she says without answering his question, something he also doesn’t notice when he’s fluffing up her pillows without being asked to. They didn’t need to be fluffed. It makes her feel incapable. She thanks him anyway.
As it’s been doing since the day she took the test, CJ’s hand floats down to her stomach — not undeniably pregnant yet, but not flat anymore. Past the point where it’d be out of line to ask. Feeling that bump might be the only part of being pregnant that really truly makes her smile.
Danny pecks her lips before he sits down and she smiles at him. He helps, too.
Not with everything — no amounts of decaf coffee and dry toast he makes for her will make the ache in her back go away, and that’ll just have to be her cross to bear until she’s finally done. But with plenty. She tends to forget to tell him that, she’s realised.
She doesn’t do it now, either. It’d feel forced if she did it after realising she never does.
That’ll just have to make sense somehow.
It’s not like Danny didn’t know she wouldn’t be good at the wife thing. She hopes she’ll be better at the mother thing — even if being called mama by her own husband pierces the back of her neck in an unpleasant way. She can’t be worse at it than she’s been at the whole woman thing. She hopes not.
CJ wants to say she learned eventually, but that’d feel like a lie. She’d rather not lie to her baby before it’s even born.
She’s not good at the woman thing. Never has been. Being pregnant has just made it worse. She really hopes motherhood won’t keep that going.
The distinct way in which she’s always been wrong about how she is a woman has never been more painfully obstructive to her sense of self than it has been since the day she took the pregnancy test.
Mama.
She grimaces and blames it on heartburn when Danny asks again if she’s okay.
An infiltrator, she feels like she’s become. A spy of some kind, taking a place inside the world of being a woman that she never earned or asked for but fought to maintain anyway.
It crawls up her spine every time she’s reminded that she’s entered some club she never meant to and she can’t reasonably extract herself from without blowing up everything. Crawls up there, sinks teeth into the back of her skull and won’t let up until she’ll either pull it out with sheer will or acknowledges its presence.
It clamps down more painfully every time her mother in law now talks to her like she’s been finally let in on a secret between women that’s been kept from her al these years; each time Abbey, Andy, or Liz sighs in recognition when she complains about her nausea and brain fog and each of them slips in a “oh, the joys of being a woman”, every single fucking time Danny comes into a room and calls her mama.
“Sorry,” she manages, when Danny says something she doesn’t catch and he looks at her like he’s said it a few times already. “The— the fog, you know— I—“
He shakes his head quickly. Ever understanding. “Don’t worry about it,” he promises. “It wasn’t important.”
He doesn’t repeat what he said. People have placed down all these eggshells around her that she has no need for and now they’re all tiptoe-ing around her trying not to break something she never wanted. She’s too sick to tell him to just talk to her.
Danny means well. They all mean well. It’s not their fault that this pregnancy has punched her right in the face with the understanding that not even the fucking pinnacle of womanhood can make her good at it. Can make her want it.
CJ tightens her hand on her stomach and breathes out slowly. She pictures her little girl — the doctors told her, but Danny wants it to be a surprise. CJ’s more than done with surprises after that pregnancy test.
She thinks about her little girl and wonders if that’s wrong, too. Wonders if her daughter will feel as wrong about being a daughter as CJ has her whole life. Wonders if her baby will have a word for it that CJ never managed.
She hopes it.
Last week a woman she’d never met stopped her on the street, having recognised her from the tv, and said she hoped CJ was having a girl because, in words that CJ memorised without meaning to, “with such a badass lady for a mother, she’ll always know what a strong woman looks like.”
The spider crawling up her spine bites down hard again. CJ rubs her chest anxiously, and Danny asks if she wants him to get something for the reflux. She nods and says please because she couldn’t start to explain the teeth at the back of her skull.
“Here you go,” Danny says with a smile, kissing her forehead before he clears her plate and their mugs. CJ takes the tablet because she’s not sure what else to do.
“Thank you,” she tells him. She leans up and tilts her head so she can peck his lips again. It’s easier to smile then; the apology she’d like to offer him dies on her lips.
An apology for what, she couldn’t say. For not knowing to what degree she’d be bad at this, maybe. For not being a woman in the right way, or at all, even though that thought makes her want to cry and Danny lives in a blissful ignorance of it that she envies him for.
She has one for her daughter, too. She hopes her little girl can feel how sincerely she means it. At least there’ll be plenty of actual strong women around for her to model.
CJ doesn’t have an apology for herself. She wishes someone did, somehow, but couldn’t even tell you who.