The Long Drive to Bring Grandma Home

The best three hours of sleep

My mother set up her old pack-and-play in the spare room, the one she had bought at a garage sale the month I told her I was pregnant, before we even knew if Hazel was a boy or a girl.

She took the first night feeding herself, with a bag of my pumped milk and a bottle she warmed in a pan of water on the stove, the way she did with me.

I slept three hours straight. I woke up confused, reaching for a baby that wasn’t there, and then I heard my mother in the next room, singing very low.

She was singing the song she used to sing when I had the flu. It was an old hymn with half the words wrong, the way she always sang it, and Hazel was quiet.

I lay there in the dark and listened, and for the first time since the hospital, I felt like I was somebody’s daughter instead of only somebody’s mother.

That is a thing nobody tells you about having a baby. Everybody wants to hold the baby. Hardly anybody thinks about holding the mother.

The morning in the driveway

We planned to start back Friday morning and take two days, stopping overnight in Des Moines so my mother’s knees and my stitches could both rest. That way we would be home Saturday, a day early, and she would have the full week.

The next morning was cloudy and cool, the sky one flat sheet of gray. The oaks and hickories around her little brick house were still bare, with only the faintest red at the tips of the branches.

I was still in the gray hoodie I had driven down in. I had my hair up in a bun that had given up somewhere around Kansas City, and I hadn’t looked in a mirror since.

I slid open the side door of the red minivan, leaned in, and buckled Hazel into her rear-facing car seat. She was asleep in the pink knit hat my mother had made her, the one she had mailed in a padded envelope in January.

I checked the straps twice. I checked the chest clip. Then I checked them again, because that is the kind of mother I turned out to be.

Behind me, my mother crossed the gravel yard in her navy rain jacket, carrying her little floral bag. It was the same bag she took to my college graduation and to Dad’s sister’s funeral. It had a zipper that stuck.

She had packed it the night before and set it by the door, and then I heard her get up twice in the night to unzip it and check something.

That’s when my phone rang in my hoodie pocket.

Travis.

I almost let it go. I was standing in the driveway with one hand still on the car seat, and I looked at his name and felt every mile of that drive in my back.

“Answer your husband,” my mother said. She said it quietly, but she said it the way she used to say “Clear your plate.”

So I did.