She Matters Read Online Free Page A

three or four of us nursing at the same time, the room quiet, except for our voices, delicate and pitched to reverberate through our chests, another calming trick to mothering that I could see at work around me. We hoisted car seats, strapping in extras for the afternoon while someone went to her shrink, while my husband and I went to our shrink. Christopher and I had become workers, united in dry tasks, neither noticing what the other did, just needing the other to do it. I saved romance for Patricia, Liza, and Judith, thinking up cards for them, or corn chowder, coaxing out their triumph or woe, sharing the hardest, storing my best till Monday.
    Our husbands were undone from us, phantoms of some former interest. I had nothing to say to men. Men! I could barely fathom their use, now that we’d made children. The men didn’t speak our minutiae, or pass hours gathered with toddlers and strangers’ babies, overhearing bad parenting in waiting rooms and supermarket aisles. They did not gentle the kids’ stiffened legs as we did, lifting them from the carts. What else could be important? Today, I could say to my three friends, on the weariest, hopeless days, I fed my family . That is enough, they said back. That is so much.
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    Just because we were friends, Patricia let me attend the birth of her second child. When I’d asked, she hadn’t hesitated. “I’d love it,” she said, as if I’d come to her with a great idea. “Let me check with Mark.” Daniel was a year and a half old, and I’d been trying to make sense of the reordered self. I’d already done so much of that in Patricia’s encouraging company, becoming a mother. She trusted me, which made me feel trustworthy. Mark called me when her labor started. I drove fast, slammed into a parking spot. I needed to be back in the delivery room, to revisit this gamble and inside-out undoing, where my boy had changed me. How could that be an ordinary room? The hospital door slid open for me, time machine, on my way to my crucial friend.
    Patricia didn’t greet me. Next to her Mark looked up, said hi. I went to the elevated head of the bed and pressed my forehead to hers. “You’re doing it,” I said. We knew the body’s dire work.
    She moved deeper into labor, and Mark whispered at her ear, face turned against hers and hers altered by the fury of intent. I couldn’t hear, but I watched his words form. Her arm in Mark’s grasp, his hand inside her thigh, her head tilted to him, her chin squarely into her sternum. The couple’s gravest truth, never meant for exposure. It backed me away, this haunting privacy beyond friendship. The baby’s head crowned, and he was properly born, and there was a sweep of activity, paparazzi movement around them.
    Patricia was gone into the baby, and as I quieted my absurd emotion, the little-girl feeling of What about me, I knew I should leave. He’s beautiful, I said, kissed her. I made my way to the car and sat cupped in the seat. The ecstatic adrenaline of a birth wasbuzzing through my body, and I cried. I cried for all I’d lost when I gave birth, the unbidden changes, and for all I’d gained with the enormous, replenishing love for my son. And I cried, amazed by the friend who would share her private efforts with me, without worry. Uninhibited with her intimacies, Patricia assured me of a way to be the right woman and right friend. She didn’t demand more or prepare for less. She gave me a closeness I hadn’t known how to have without its being awful. How could I thank her?
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    When Patricia’s father died, I understood that it was major, or rather, I had a mere sense. By then, our kids were in middle school, uninterested in one another, which seemed incredible to us, the linked mothers. We no longer met on Mondays, sometimes went weeks without calling, but at the service I found