I am bodily in good health--if not robust yet durable, as a mother
should be: I am always tired as if from touches and weights of
living as a loving mother should be: I am warm of blood, latently
savage-toothed like a jungle-mother, deadlier than the male, as a
brave mother should be. Though I have no child I have an ancient
right in my Child, and I want my Child. My Child _is_, but has not
been, born. Merely to want my Child makes me a fitting mother.
My Child often is realer to me than books I read and walks I take
and the friend who writes me frequent letters.
Sometimes my Child is a soft pink baby smelling of rain-water, milk
and flowers: lying close to the curves of my breasts in the hollow of
my arms: feeding soft insistent baby hunger and feeding soft strong
living hunger of my kissing mother-lips--
More often my Child is a little happy-voiced fellow, my small brave
boy three years old: he clings to my skirt with his sweet tiny hand
as we hurry along a frosty pavement in an early December morning.
We live in New York in a little common quiet apartment and are
gratefully poor, and I work in a factory for a little weekly wage for
the living of my little fellow and me. Every day in the early morning
we go out to a corner bakery to buy a long crisp loaf of French bread
for breakfast. And in the December morning my heart contracts with a
sort of happiness and a sort of grief at the sound of little feet in
stout shoes yet frail shoes pattering-pattering gaily along beside me
on the frosty flagstones. We start out hand-in-hand--his small hand
is wonderfully firm and virile--but presently I let go his hand as we
hurry along, to feel it instantly clutch the folds of my work-skirt:
it pulls and drags at my waistbands and my Heart together with
twisted sweetness that makes me ache from head to foot. ‘Mother,
wait,’ he says in his happy voice, ‘wait for me.’ But I hurry faster.
Always I hurry faster when my happy brave little fellow cries, ‘Wait,
mother,’ for the sweet feel of that dragging at my mother-skirt--
More often my Child is the little girl six years old of the shy eyes
and the sun-kissed hair and the firm child-mouth, full of high temper
and strong will. All over her is need and demand of her mother to
guard and adore and cherish her every moment of her life. We are
together in a country field with oak-trees in it, and poplars, and
daisies and bluebells and other field-flowers, and it is overgrown
with long coarse fragrant wild grass. The noonday sun is bright-hot
and I bring my Child there to dry her hair, for I have newly washed
it with a square of white soap and a porcelain bluebird bowl: the
feel of her small round wilful head was marvelously fulfilling in
my cupped hands. She wanders around in the hot-brightness through
the tall grass, gathering the hardy scentless field-flowers with
her little brown fingers, and she shakes back her beautiful thick
short damp curls. I sit on a flat stone like a Sioux squaw and watch
her. The grass brushes her bare legs: the magic sun mixed with a
faint cool breeze plays upon her head: the tragic delicate music of
rustling poplar leaves comes down from tree-tops and catches her
in a fairy song-net. She is always very new, very incredible, my
Child. She looks toward me with her shy radiant eyes and she says,
‘Mother, look, my hair is nearly dry.’ Her hair is thick and heavy.
In my experienced subdued mother-wisdom I know it will not be dry for
an hour. I feel the damp of her hair rheumishly keen all over me: a
menacingness for me to guard her from: a dear anxiety: an ancient
mother-note in the long human gamut of sounds.
--it is precious wearing racking colorful romance to be her mother:
each mother-day holds gold-and-blue foreboding: each mother-day
holds thin insistent gold-and-purple sorrows: each mother-day holds
deep gold-and-gray care, incessant and absolute: an aching wealth
of beauty: no more but no less than the damp of her hair in the
noonday field. _My_ Child!--herself incessant and absolute: warm pure
palpitant gold-of-my-life--
Someway realer than books I read and walks I take my Child clamors to
be born.
My Child will never be born to any other woman. While she hovers and
flutters on the edge of Mist-and-Silver--a border edge--there are
ten million fertile hot milk-teeming bodies of women each ready to
gather her in and wrap her in delicate-sweet flesh. Ten million other
children hovering on the edge will drop off into the ten million
matrix-cups--each woman mysteriously a fitting mother so only she
wants her baby--though she be, besides, a thief or a traitor or a
weakling or a murderer or a harlot or a drunkard or a fool.
Let them come, the ten million. The chrysalid children are clamoring,
clamoring always for their birth: a wide ‘melody unheard.’
But my Child will never drop over the edge to any woman but me. She
calls with veiled and dazzling flames of eagerness for her Birthday:
but she will await my made-readiness through a long night, though it
should last till the day-break of another age. Dimly I weep for her,
my needing-me Child. I weep that she must come to this richly-cursed
me. But I weep more that I have not got her in this sterile now,
where is flawed passionate wealth of intangible life-stuff: but no
small round wilful head of hair to wash: no little fellow’s feet on
December flagstones and sweet dragging at my skirt: no soft pink-baby
hunger--
It is hunger I feel from her. I feel her always _hungry_ where she is
and I can give her no nourishing--no warming _food_ in all my strange
unfertile passing life!
It is that less than my empty arms that makes blurred unrests and
writhings in my Dreaming Womb.
_A right shape and size_