At 36 weeks pregnant, I stood in my mother-in-law’s kitchen holding a gravy boat while she dug five orange-painted fingernails into my arm and told me to stop using pregnancy for attention. My husband was six feet away with a basket of dinner rolls in his hands, strong enough to carry roofing shingles up a ladder all day, and he stared at the gravy dripping onto the tile instead of telling his mother to let go.
Chapter 1
“Gloria,” I said, keeping my voice low. “You’re hurting me.”
“I’m embarrassing you?” she shot back. “You embarrassed me in front of my sisters.”
“I asked you not to grab my stomach.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
Her grip tightened.
Gloria had turned sixty that day, and the whole family had gathered at her house outside Providence for lasagna, salad, garlic bread, and a birthday cake large enough to feed a wedding reception. During dinner, she had come up behind me without warning, planted both hands on my belly, and squeezed under my ribs.
“Let’s see if there’s really a baby in there,” she had announced. “Maybe Rachel just ate too much lasagna.”
A few people laughed.
Not because it was funny.
Because Gloria had trained everyone around her to laugh when silence might offend her.
I had taken her wrists and lifted her hands away.
“Please don’t.”
That was my crime.
Now, in the kitchen doorway, she leaned close enough that her perfume filled my lungs.
“I had four babies,” she whispered. “Four. I carried Brian through a summer without air-conditioning, and nobody acted like I was some delicate little princess. You’ve been rubbing your back and sighing since the day you found out.”
“Let go.”
“People are tired of it.”
I looked past her.
“Brian.”
My husband shifted the rolls from one hand to the other.
He said nothing.
Gloria noticed.
“See?” she said. “Even he’s sick of the performance.”
Then she released me.
She patted the bruised spot twice, almost affectionately.
“Now fix your face and bring the gravy in. It’s my birthday.”
I carried the gravy to the dining room.
That sounds ridiculous when I say it now.
I should have put it down, taken my purse, and left.
Instead, I sat between Aunt Connie and one of Brian’s cousins and ate roast potatoes while my upper arm throbbed beneath my cardigan.
Gloria was charming for the rest of the evening.
That was her particular talent.
She could humiliate you at 5:40 and make everyone believe she was the injured party by 5:45.
During cake, she gave herself a toast because, as she explained, “Nobody else was going to get the important details right.”
She thanked her husband, Frank, thanked her daughters, thanked Brian, thanked several people from church, and then gestured toward me.
“And our little invalid is almost at the finish line.”
She blew me a kiss.
People laughed nervously again.
Aunt Connie leaned toward me.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
She looked at my sleeve.
“She did something similar to me at your wedding.”
I turned.
“What?”
But Gloria was calling for Connie to pose for a photograph, and she got up before I could ask.
The pregnancy jokes had begun almost as soon as we announced.
At Easter, Gloria passed around slips of paper so relatives could guess how much weight I had gained. She read every number aloud and gave a chocolate bunny to whoever came closest.
At a cousin’s baby shower, she told six women that I had Brian tying my shoes at fourteen weeks.
I had influenza at fourteen weeks.
On Mother’s Day, she pressed both hands against my stomach in a restaurant and told the waiter, “Don’t get excited. Half of that is gas.”
I had tried laughing.
I had tried changing the subject.
I had tried avoiding her.
Once I told her that if she enjoyed guessing weights so much, perhaps we should start with hers.
She disappeared into a pantry and cried for twenty minutes.
Three relatives stopped speaking to me until dessert.
Eventually, I learned what everybody in Brian’s family already knew.
Resistance cost more than surrender.
Brian had known it since childhood.
He was the youngest of four, and he had survived Gloria by becoming invisible whenever she became difficult.
I had understood that before marrying him.
I simply had not understood how invisible he could become while his mother had her hand around my arm.
On the drive home, I waited for him to say something.
He didn’t.
We crossed the bridge.
Streetlights slid across the windshield.
Finally I said, “You saw that.”
He kept his eyes on the road.
“I saw you two arguing.”
“She was holding me.”
“It was her birthday.”
I turned toward him.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“She’d been drinking.”
“So?”
“You know how she gets around her sisters.”
“What did you want me to do? Wrestle my mother in her kitchen?”
“I wanted you to say, ‘Mom, let go of my wife.’”
He sighed.
“Rachel.”
“That’s five words, Brian.”
He drove another mile.
Then he said quietly, “You could’ve just let her feel the baby.”
I turned toward the passenger window.
For the rest of the ride, I watched dark houses slide past and tried not to hate the man beside me.
In our bathroom, I took off my cardigan.
Five purple marks were already forming above my elbow. On the inside of my arm was a larger oval where Gloria’s thumb had pressed.
Brian appeared in the doorway.
He looked at the bruises through the mirror.
“She doesn’t know her own strength.”
“She knows.”
“Rach—”
“She knows.”
He went to bed.
I stayed by the sink.
For several minutes, I stared at my own reflection.
Then I made one of the stupidest decisions of my life.
I decided Gloria would never see me complain again.
If pregnancy was a performance, I would stop performing.
No sighing.
No rubbing my back.
No asking for a chair.
No saying I was tired.
No asking anybody to carry anything.
If she wanted to see a woman endure pregnancy without “milking it,” I would show her exactly that.
I thought I was taking back my power.
Two weeks later, my obstetrician would tell me I had been in active labor for nearly fifteen hours without admitting it to anyone.
