The Nursery I Moved Into Her Room
A Hundred Dollars a Month
I want to be fair to my mother, because she is my mother and because being fair is the only way I know how to tell it true.
She is sixty three. Daddy left her the farm and not much else, and the farm costs money to sit on. The taxes come due in October and she sweats them every year. She heats with wood and a little propane and the propane man wants paying by the first. Jesse losing his job and his apartment landed on her in January with the cold coming on, and Jesse is her boy, her baby, and she has never in her life been able to tell him no.
A hundred dollars a month is not much. But a hundred dollars a month is the propane bill, near enough, and in my mother’s arithmetic that room was sitting empty thirty one days with a baby who might, the doctors had been careful to say, not come home at all.
That is the part nobody will say out loud. For a while they did not know if Ava would make it. Mama heard those careful hospital sentences the same as I did, in the hallway, from the doctors who will not promise you anything. And somewhere in there, I think, my mother started protecting herself from a nursery that might stay empty. She filled it so it could not sit there and break her heart.
She did not grasp the oxygen. That is the plain truth of it. She never came back into the unit after that first night. She saw a tiny baby in pictures on my phone, pink and sleeping, and to her that was a baby like any baby, who would sleep in a drawer if she had to, the way babies did when Mama was young.
She did not understand that the red clip and the humming machine and the cannula taped to that little face were not hospital leftovers. They were the deal. They were the terms Ava came home on.
I did not explain it to her in the hallway with the dish towel. I was too tired and too far past it. You cannot teach a person the weight of a thing in one sentence when they have already decided it is light.
So I did not argue. I have learned that arguing with my mother is like pushing on the barn, it does not move and you are the one who ends up sore.
I just made a decision, standing there with my daughter asleep on my shoulder and the monitor clipped to her foot. I made it quiet and I made it all the way.