The Photo That Left The New Mother Out

“We’ll get the photo while she’s calm,” Lynette said, nodding at the baby, and reached for her before I had said a single word back.

“You can wait right outside the door, Brianne. It’ll take two minutes.”

Like I was a kind visitor who had wandered in at a bad time. Like I had not been the one on the table nine hours earlier when the monitor screamed and four people in scrub caps came through a door at a dead run.

I did not hand her my daughter. That much I could still do. I held her a little tighter and said I wasn’t ready to let go of her yet, and Lynette’s face did something complicated, somewhere between hurt and offended, like I had been the rude one.

My own mother, Gail, was still an hour and a half out. Her car had thrown a serpentine belt that morning on the county road outside Preston, and she was sitting on the shoulder waiting for a tow while I was lying in that bed being asked to leave my own room. I had nobody of mine in that building yet. Just Tanner, who had gone quiet, and a baby who did not care about any of it.

I thought about yelling. I am not a yeller, never have been, but for one clear second I pictured it, pictured throwing every one of those cousins and the great aunt from Nevada, Missouri right out into the hallway myself. My hands were shaking against the blanket just thinking it.

Then I thought about crying instead, which would have been easier and would have accomplished exactly nothing, because crying in front of Lynette had never once in four years of marriage made her reconsider anything.

I was too tired for either one. Nine hours since surgery and I had slept maybe ninety minutes in pieces, waking every time a nurse came in to press on my stomach and check how the uterus was contracting down. My body did not belong to me yet. It belonged to recovery.

Tanner finally pushed off that window ledge. He crossed to the bed and put his hand flat on my shoulder and said, low, “Mom, I think she needs a minute,” which was not nearly enough, and even he seemed to know it the second it left his mouth, because Lynette was already talking over him, already shoving the recliner another foot toward the window like her own son had not said a word.

So instead of a scene, I did the only thing I had enough strength left to do. I pressed the call button clipped to my rail, the same one I had already pressed four times that day for ice chips and a second pillow, and I waited.