Every mother at the park has got it wrong. Sleep training, bassinets that rock themselves, little packages of Cheerios and Goldfish. I push my stroller through the underbrush and whisper, “They don’t get it. They don’t get it!” Why am I fourteen again? “They don’t fucking get it!”
My husband definitely doesn’t get it. He shrinks into the bed every night as I transform into a tiger. I prowl around the room on my four strong legs, wishing there was someplace I could swim. “Come on,” I tell my daughter, who transforms into a bear. We crawl along the ground together, purring, laughing. “Lions and tigers and bears,” I tell my husband, but he just sits there, shrinking until he is a mint left on the pillow.
Sometimes my daughter and I become wolves, just the way we were when she was born. That day I’d been my sweet old self until the moon came out. “Uh oh,” I said as my hands began to lengthen and sprout claws, my arms already thick with fur. “It’s happening,” I said as my eyes went yellow and the fangs split through my gums, blood and water everywhere. Every contraction was a white light ballooning up my torso. I was Zeus, trying to unzip my head so the goddess could come out. After that, for a long time my daughter and I were two wolves covered in blood, happy as kids on a sugar high. “So warm,” we’d say, nestling each other’s matted fur.
Nowadays, my daughter tends to stay a bear. Sometimes my husband is a bear, too. The two of them roam around the bed together licking honey off their paws, digging out holes in the mattress. Meanwhile my hair turns yellow as the moon; I wander around eating all the porridge in the house. “This bed’s not right,” I say, tossing and turning, while my daughter spread-eagles between us, taking up all the room. “It’s too hard, too soft,” I say. “Where the fuck is mama’s bed?”
At the park, the three of us lie down on a green and gold blanket. We watch the other mothers walk back and forth as we drift towards the horizon. When my husband sits up, the joints of his elbows creak. “Oil your jaw already,” I tell him, tossing him the diaper bag. My daughter is a flying monkey wreaking havoc on all the neighborhood dogs. It’s daylight and the moon has punched a white hole in the sky. “Come on,” I say to no one in particular, thinking of black hats and striped stockings and every house I’ve ever lived in falling down. My daughter has a sweet little dog in her mouth, just waiting to see if I will let her eat it. I weave my hair into two stiff braids, click my heels, dust off my little blue dress and say it’s time to go home.
Susan Holcomb holds an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and studied for a PhD in physics at Cornell. Her writing has been published in the Southern Indiana Review, Epiphany, The Boston Globe, Moon City Review, Crab Creek Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles.
Photo by Honza Reznik