To the Mother Who Lost Track of Time
You were a young woman, freshly turned mother. Like me, a postpartum mama prone to pushing our babies strapped to the swing, pushing and pushing, days in and days out, our minds unhooked from our bodies. It would be years before I’d hear of you, read about you on the news.
I see you now, with your baby boy in the playground, his little body frozen solid like a Butterball Thanksgiving turkey by the time the police find you two. For forty straight hours, you stood in one spot and pushed your son on the swing. Caught in the wild hairs of motherhood, alone, you pushed, you pushed, as night came and night went, the moon keeping vigil. Your son had no socks or jacket on, they said. When did the hypothermia set in exactly? When did he stop pleading for his mama to stop the swinging already? These are the details I need to know. I sense every twitch in your movements, every leaf turning with the passing hours like time-lapse photography. I see your eyes bloodshot, your soul split, its pieces spilling onto and blending into the wood chips in the playground. I lost track of time, is what I hear you saying, in your tight Midwestern drawl.
It’s easy to lose track of time as a new mother. I did once, twice, three times...before I lost track. The year my daughter was born was the same year I packed up a few books, pictures of my dead mother, and other less sentimental belongings, uprooted the barely-there roots of my life as a 1.5 generation immigrant single woman, surviving, not at all thriving, in the Northeast pocket hole of America, and moved one thousand miles away to pursue an arguably useless advanced degree in poetry writing. The year of survival, I’d later quip. Looking back, it’s fitting that I became a mother at a time when I sensed a certain urgency to unload the glut of griefs I’d been hoarding, to unpack the immigrant survival narrative I’d been living unknowingly through—a notable inflection point in the trajectory of my artistic exploration and general humanity. I needed to subvert that narrative, a stereotype of sorts, to stop it in its tracks, I told myself, and not just to do so theoretically, but in art and in life. What better place to do this than in the middle of America, where I knew no one.
“I took my bug-eyed nymph, just hatched from my insides, from a country I didn’t know to another country I didn’t know, so I could write out the heretofore incoherence of my life, the glut of it, out of me.”
I was in my third trimester when I found myself in Southern Illinois. Backcountry, not front country. Country of Walmarts, not one, not two, not three or four or five, but a dozen big box warehouses that sold mayonnaise by the gallon stacked next to bins of the latest James Patterson novels. Country of all-you-can-eat restaurants containing words like cracker or corral, and of the white folks sometimes with cracked or missing teeth who ate there, and of the one Thai restaurant.
It was the same year I woke up to the cicadas calling lest I forget to feed the baby. When your circadian rhythm fails, count on the cicadas to save you. I’d never heard cicadas so megaphone-loud before the summer I moved into my little Midwestern bungalow to house myself and my not-yet baby. The same year I learned the names of insects and trees and other stark, beautiful, brutal things with multisyllabic, hard-to-pronounce Latin names off of conservation catalogs to use for my poems: Cicadoidea (cicadas), Rhododendron ferrugineum (rhododendron), Nymphaeaceae (water lilies), Gleditsia triacanthos (honey locust). I took my bug-eyed nymph, just hatched from my insides, from a country I didn’t know to another country I didn’t know, so I could write out the heretofore incoherence of my life, the glut of it, out of me.
Importantly, it was the year of gluttony, of ordering off the dollar menu day after forsaken day in the student union lounge, stuffing them fries down my postpartum hatch, because. Mama don’t need a because. I know you know. Because when masticating, nothing else matters, the ground shifts, the stars rip open, your baby cries out for mama from deep down in your past-life womb; yet, all you can think about is stuffing your face numb until you’re whole again, if even for five minutes. So she ate and kept on eating—I mean I—alone with my baby.
Sometimes, Tammy ate with us. Tammy was my babysitter, who lived in an apartment even smaller than mine with her seventy-something-year-old, chain-smoking grandma with an oxygen tank attached to her wheelchair, who was supporting herself and Tammy with her social security checks. Tammy was willing to work for almost nothing so she wouldn’t jeopardize going over her grandma’s SS disability threshold, saving up a hundred under-the-table dollars at a time for years to pay for gastric bypass surgery. It was a barter system really, since I still didn’t have a driver’s license and Tammy drove us around town in her Buick, and I paid for our meals from my below-minimum-wage Graduate Assistant salary. Turns out Tammy and I had a lot in common. What Tammy didn’t know is that I knew all about working for almost nothing, about saving up under-the-table dollars, and about the barter system, instinctively and experientially.
Tammy liked our monthly dates to The Buffet. It was the best deal in town for us, where we could get heapfuls from every food group, return for seconds and third servings, all for $12.99. Tammy loved, too, itty bitty things like children. Tammy would send me pics of my baby looking like a rag doll less than the size of her forearm. Tammy loved her men and men loved her back. Tammy with her fishnet stockings and fake eyelashes and full-mouth dentures. Tammy sure knew how to get her way with them men. It’s all about confidence. You need to be more confident!, she’d quip between smokes. Go get yourself some, you deserve it, woman! Tammy was making waves, subverting stereotypes in her own way, throwing me a lifeline when I needed it. I admired Tammy.
Sometimes, if the mood was right, if the weather cooperated, we’d drive up to a parking lot, didn’t matter which one, the emptier the better. Truth be told, my months-old nymph was a crier; her crying stopped only in the back of Tammy’s Buick. There, I’d dish on my baby daddy, who was elsewhere, mind and body. Since you had your baby, you’re not the same anymore, he sometimes mused aloud on his occasional visits to see us, his gaze downcast, his mind asunder. He’d dubbed us—the newborn and I—the Mother & Daughter Show. He, the show stopper, now replaced by his daughter.
When Tammy wasn’t around because she was out on the town, I’d strike out alone, taking my Mother & Daughter Show on the road. Me & my baby, just us two in an empty supermarket parking lot, circling it and circling it, figuring eights, wide under the stars. We could have stayed there all night. Through the next day, then the next night, then the next, and so on, until someone found us.
You & your little boy, and me & my little girl. Together, we could have driven ‘round and ‘round that empty parking lot until night sank its teeth in and another senseless dawn broke, and we’d do it all over again, our collective wailing—unheard and unnoticed—bouncing off the night sky, until all the pushing, all the circling, and all the driving around inside that deep emptiness would puncture the wooden souls ailing us.
Alone is the only point here.
I know you know.
When you have a baby alone, you’re always alone, no matter how many other incidental human beings roll in and out of your lives thereafter. That’s how lonely works. And that’s why the good doctor did prescribe some pills for the pain of birthing my dear big-headed baby, for the fourth-degree perineal tear I sustained. And I sure did squirrel away those pills. Just another form of glut is all.
“When you have a baby alone, you’re always alone, no matter how many other incidental human beings roll in and out of your lives thereafter.”
Maybe you were behind on deadlines and life-tasking like I was. When mornings came and I still owed the day before and the one before that, an endless loop of catching up, or trying to anyway, to something, somewhere, someone I was trying to be: Mother-Mate-Woman-Writer, in that order.
Cicadas were calling.
Nobody, not even the people in the apartment complex behind the playground noticed you and your boy, the news reporter mentioned—you in your catatonic state, swinging and swinging, your boy stuck inside his little seat, crying Mama, push me higher, higher, your ears tuning out the rush hour traffic of squealing children and the cacophony of screaming moms and other jingles. I hear him pleading with you that morning: Take me, take me to the playground, mama! Push me on the swings, mama!
How did the most unthinkable happen in small-town America without much anyone noticing? What stark, beautiful, brutal thing called out your name, mama? What ghost did you wake up to that morning, what uncanny syllables filtering in from the other side, desperately calling out your name and your boy’s name, what filled your days and your ears with a thousand cicadas drowning out your infinitely droning days? I want to know.
Without Tammy, my only real witness and companion in that cavernous hole of America, without our gluttony, I don’t know that I would have survived that year. I pushed and pushed, I ate and ate—nay, we—The Mother & Daughter Show plus Tammy—ate and ate through spring, then summer, then fall, and again winter. Hamster wheel on repeat. Without the gluttony, without the rhyming action and the anaphoric swell of emotions engendered by all the circling in that big ol’ parking lot, without Tammy and the glut of America itself, and without those cicadas shocking me into recognizing the ball of human I’d been called to care for on this earth, I might still be hoarding my grief, swinging away in a playground somewhere.
In that final year before the playground, before the deafening quiet set in, what did you and your boy eat for breakfast each morning? I want to know how the world stopped spinning around you. When did you notice the change in the decibel count? As the night fell, when did the shape of your son’s body become one with the moon? When did your boy close his eyes? When did you? Who among us would have been Tammy enough to notice, to recognize your humanity?
Reader, I lost track of time once. It was winter. I boarded a train traveling north. I was going to see the star, the baby’s daddy, and bring our now-toddler daughter with me to show him how much the fuzzball had grown to resemble his head. Trains are so romantic. An ember, of a lost love, even a dying one, is what I must have been fantasizing in my baby-confused head. But this city was not backcountry. It had movie-set-worthy Starbuckses and take-away cartons made out of recycled bamboo. The conversation didn’t go the way I expected. So I ran, with my deluxe running stroller gifted to me by my much younger, baby-less graduate assistants, with my baby inside it strapped to her little plush seat, me pushing it and pushing it. I ran, I ran. It rained harder and harder as I ran. No one would have noticed the tear drops as they became one with rain. Awww, someone would have said if they saw me, a mom running to stay fit, even in bad weather.
A Mother & Daughter Show is what we were.
A Mother & Dead Son—another kind of show—is what you were. What would the gawkers have witnessed through bad weather, had they tried?
It was night when we arrived by train in the backcountry. I watched as passengers filed out of the train cars, one by one, and were picked up by their family and loved ones, hugging and smiling their Midwestern nice smiles, piling into their sedans and trucks, driving off to their modest American homes, a wholesome picture I had always been outside of. Soon, we were the only ones left in the parking lot as we waited for a cab to take us home. It was February and the snow had started to come down. I looked down at my daughter, sound asleep inside the stroller, kept safe from the elements, while some snowflakes landed on the umbrella. Alone, we were the two loneliest people on the earth. And yet, right there in that empty parking lot, against the sooted darkness of the concrete wall around us, all the cosmos’s beauty blazed. I stood, in a daze, watching the snow fall patiently in our midst, lights in the distance blinking on, then off, then on, and off again.
About the Author
Jung Hae Chae is the author of the forthcoming memoir-in-essays, POJANGMACHA PEOPLE, winner of the 2022 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. The book explores the matrilineal inheritance of han in the Korean diaspora. Her writing can be found in AGNI, Guernica, New England Review, Ploughshares, swamp pink (formerly Crazyhorse), and the 2022 Best American Essays collection, and elsewhere.
Read Jung Hae’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
Header photo by Aaron Burden.
