The Goal

by Elle Kennedy

  With a lightened heart, I hit the shower. Nana’s clearly halfway in love with Jamie already. Who wouldn’t be, though? She’s the most amazing thing in the world.

  I take a good, long, hot shower, which they didn’t allow in the hospital due to the epidural. Despite the pain, it feels good to be out of that hospital bed. After drying off, I throw on a pair of old sweats and a T-shirt and then examine my reflection in the mirror.

  My body still feels weird and not my own. The capillaries in my eyes burst during labor, so I look demonic, all red-eyed and wild hair. I could give Helena Bonham Carter a run for her weird, crazy money. My tummy is still large and round—only now it’s squishy and soft. My breasts have grown to enormous, comical sizes.

  It’s a good thing I can’t have sex for six weeks. I can’t even look at my post-partum shape without flinching, let alone want Tucker to look at it.

  “You still doing the breastfeeding thing? I always used formula, and both you and your momma turned out fine.” Nana eyes me expectantly as I join her in the living room.

  “They’ve said it’s the best.”

  “Hmmmph. I may’ve read something like that in People. Well, you should probably feed the poor tyke then.”

  She hands the baby over, and I carefully tuck Jamie against my chest and carry her to my bedroom. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I lift up one side of my shirt, holding it against my chest with my chin, and then lift Jamie up to my boob. She roots around like a little animal until she finds the nipple. Thankfully, she latches on.

  I sigh with relief and scoot backward on the mattress until my shoulders hit the wall. The lactation consultant warned me that breastfeeding is hard as fuck—well, she didn’t use those words exactly, but that was the gist—so I’m grateful that this is going okay for now.

  Picking up my phone, I one-hand type a couple of texts.

  Me: I’m home.

  Hope: When can I come over?

  Carin: NO!!!!!!! I haven’t finished the booties. Go back to the hospital!

  Me: U sound like Tucker. He didn’t want to leave either.

  Carin: Listen to ur BB daddy.

  Hope: She’s not going back to the hospital bc UR not done knitting. Hospitals only keep you 2 days for a V birth. How RU feeling?

  Me: Tired. Scared. Tucker told me he loved me at the hospital.

  Hope: OMG.

  Carin: OMG.

  Hope: What’d u say?

  Carin: She said she doesn’t believe in love, right?

  I stick out my tongue at the phone.

  Me: I pretended I didn’t hear him.

  Hope: OMG.

  Carin: See!

  Hope: That’s the worst.

  Is it, though? Is it really?

  Me: It was an emotional time. Not holding him to it.

  Hope: UR dumb. I’m ending my friendship with u.

  Carin: She’s being unselfish.

  Me: Thank u, C.

  Hope: UR still dumb.

  Me: Not dumb. Mom hates me. T’s forced to live in Bos. Don’t want him tied down. T shld b out there, hitting bars, tapping asses.

  Carin: I take that back. UR dumb.

  Hope: See!

  Carin: You’d kill any chick who looked twice at him.

  An image of Tucker with another woman, holding another baby besides Jamie, forms in my head, and a dull ache springs up in my chest. Carin’s not wrong at all. I’m not prepared for Tucker to move on, no matter how nonchalant and uncaring I try to be.

  Jamie releases a sharp cry and I peer down to see her precious baby mouth rooting around for the nipple again.

  Me: Gotta go. Baby crying.

  Hope: Good luck.

  Carin: Don’t wish her good luck. It’s not a sporting event.

  Hope: :P What’s the worst response to I <3 you?

  Carin: Silence and then, “I wish I felt the same.”

  Hope: I’m thinking “Why?”

  Carin: How about “That’s nice.”

  Hope: Brutal.

  Me: I’m done here.

  Jamie opens her mouth, and the volume that comes out of her lungs surprises even me. It’s like there’s an amplifier in her throat.

  “Shhhh. Shhhh.” I whirl around and pluck the blanket out of her car seat. It takes a few tries before I have her bundled up like a burrito. All the while, I’m shushing her. A ton of people online swear by a system called the Five S’s where you shush, swaddle, swing, side or stomach position, and…dammit, I can’t remember the other one.

  Jamie doesn’t like that I’ve forgotten. Her face contorts into a puckered, unhappy mess as she belts out her opinion of my mothering skills.

  “Shush, swaddle, swing, side or stomach, sing?” I hum a few bars.

  Jamie wails on.

  “Jesus Christ, what the hell is going on in there?” Ray’s up and pounding on my door.

  “Come on, Little Jamie. Stop crying. Mommy’s here.”

  Little Jamie doesn’t give a fuck. She screams even louder.

  “Suck!” I shout in triumph. “Suck is the other one!”

  I lunge for the dresser in the corner, where all of Jamie’s paraphernalia is stored. The door bursts open and Nana comes bustling in.

  “What are you doing to that child?” she yells over the baby.

  “Told you she was going to fuck up.” Ray’s right behind her and can’t wait to offer his unwanted two cents.

  “Ray, that’s enough. You go eat your French toast.” Nana pushes me aside. “What’re you looking for?”

  “Pacifier.” I fumble through tiny onesies, blankets, and burping cloths until I find a paci.

  “Thought you were breastfeeding,” Nana comments as I try to shove the pacifier into Jamie’s mouth. Her tongue is stronger than Tucker’s ninth grade girlfriend’s. I give up after she spits it out for the fifth time.

  “What do I do?” I ask Nana in desperation.

  “She wants the nip,” Ray says from the door.

  Is he right? Panicked, I flip up my shirt, not even caring that Ray can see my bare breast. Jamie latches on almost immediately, her whole body shaking from the crying. Small hiccups interrupt her sucks, but at least the crying has stopped. I sag onto the bed in relief.

  In the middle of the room, Nana shakes her head. “You shouldn’t have ever got her hooked on the boob. Now that’s all she’s ever gonna want.”

  “I like it.” Ray gives me a smarmy thumbs-up. “Nice tits, Rina.”

  “Get out,” I snap, letting go of my top. Jamie gives a little cry as the fabric falls over her face. “Seriously, just get out. Nana, please.”

  “You should’ve used a bottle,” Nana chides.

  “You should take your shirt off,” is Ray’s helpful suggestion.

  I clench my teeth. “I need some privacy. Please.”

  “How you going to feed her while you’re at class?” Nana asks.

  Jamie starts crying again. I pull up the shirt despite the fact that Ray is leering at me. I send another pleading glance to Nana, who finally moves toward the door.

  “You go on now, Ray. Your breakfast is going to get cold.”

  “This isn’t going to work, Joy,” he mutters. “That kid can’t be attached to Rina’s tit all day.”

  “Leave them alone.” Nana shoots him a dirty look before addressing me. “Babies cry.”

  Even before the door shuts, I whip off my shirt. Jamie quiets as I direct my nipple into her mouth. When she latches again, the tension starts to leech out of me.

  Holy shit.

  I don’t know if I can survive this. Her little head is dwarfed by my giant boob, but when her eyes open and her hand starts kneading me, so much love floods through my system that I grow weak.

  The whole feeding process takes less than fifteen minutes. It’s the only fifteen minutes of peace I have for the next two hours. I can’t put her down. Every time I try, she starts to cry, which sets off a bout of screaming between Ray, Nana, and me. So I end up carrying her around, learning to eat with
one hand, changing her diaper using three diapers because I tear off the tapes of the first two.

  By the time Tucker checks in at noon, I’m an exhausted mess.

  “Your daddy’s calling,” I tell Jamie as she stares at me out of slitted eyes. I’ve collapsed onto the floor, holding her bundled frame in my arms.

  “How’s it going?” he asks when I answer the phone.

  “I’ve had better days.” I hitch Jamie a tad higher on my shoulder. Her face burrows into my neck. “But I think you’re right. We shouldn’t have left the hospital.”

  “There’s no going back now.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Tell me about your morning.”

  And I’m so grateful to hear his calm voice, I nearly burst out in tears. Somehow I manage to hold it together, telling him about how Jamie’s going to win Olympic medals in weightlifting because she’s already strong as fuck or that she could be a magician because she’s able to wiggle out of every blanket I’ve tried to wrap her in.

  Tucker laughs and encourages me, and by the time I get off the phone, I’m convinced I can do this.

  34

  Sabrina

  September

  Motherhood is hard. Harder than I ever imagined anything could be. It’s harder than studying for my SATs. My LSAT. More challenging than that paper I had to write for the Women’s Studies course in my freshman year that came back to me looking like two red pens had engaged in a murder/suicide all over my typewritten words. More tiring than working two jobs and taking a full load of classes for four years.

  My respect for Nana is through the roof. If I had to raise one kid after the other, I’d be a little cranky too. But with her help and Tucker’s, I’ve fallen into a routine that seems to work, and by the time the second week of classes launches, I’m convinced I’ve got this. After all, I’m only in class three hours—at the most—a day. And I’m not working two jobs.

  This is easy.

  Easy.

  Until I stumble out of my last class Friday of that second week, laden with my bottles, tubes, five pounds of books, and my computer with a class assignment of more than a thousand pages of reading for the weekend. They keep piling up. When Professor Malcolm announced we’d need to read the entire chapter on culpability and intent, I waited for someone—anyone—to object. But no one did.

  After class, none of my peers appear to be affected by the fact that we’re pretty much required to read what seems like an entire semester’s worth of coursework in two days. Instead, three kids in my row decide to conduct an intense discussion about Harvard’s grading system, which they already should’ve known about before they even enrolled.

  I wait impatiently for them to wrap up the conversation so we can all get the hell out of the classroom. I need to start reading, but more importantly, my breasts feel like they’re about to burst. I haven’t fed Jamie for nearly three hours and if I don’t get to the library’s lactation room, I’m going to end up leaking all over my damn shirt.

  “I don’t like this no letter grades thing. Honors, Pass, Low Pass, and Fail?” grouses the sharp-nosed blond boy next to me.

  “I heard that LPs are really discouraged. It’s either Honors or Pass. You really have to fuck up to get a Fail,” says the girl beside him. Her cheekbones are so fierce they could cut through my entire textbook.

  I make a big show of gathering up all my shit and stuffing it into my messenger bag, but no one’s moving. Instead, another girl, wearing a peasant skirt that triggers bad memories of Hippie Stacy, chimes in.

  “My cousin graduated from here a year ago and said that BigLaw calculates their own grades based on your H, Ps, and LPs, so it works all the same. H is an A, and so forth.”

  “My big complaint is that only one person gets to be summa cum laude. At any other law school, if you get the grades, you get the designation. Having only one is shitty,” Cheekbones declares.

  Peasant Skirt reassures her. “You can get the DS, though.”

  “Still, only a couple people get the Dean’s Scholar too.”

  “They’re so stingy with their honors,” the guy adds.

  I clear my throat. They continue to ignore me.

  “But it’s Harvard, so the bigs are going to look at you anyway,” Cheekbones says with the nonchalance of someone who’s secure in her postgraduate prospects. “How soon can you start bidding in EIP?”

  “Early interview program?” Peasant Girl smirks. “Settle down, gunner. Second year only. Learn how to write a memo first.”

  She shares a look of derision with the boy as Cheekbones flushes slightly. It’s no fun to be the butt of jokes, which spurs me to unwisely jump in.

  “I’m not so worried about the grades as I am the amount of reading we’re going to have to do. I’d like to get a head start on it this afternoon.” Hint. Hint. Move the hell along, people.

  Cheekbones lifts her chin, happy to be the insulter instead of the insulted. “That isn’t hard. Hard is picking the right Law Review article topic. Reading and digesting a few cases is a cakewalk.”

  She turns with a contemptuous swish of hair, gathers her books and leaves me open-mouthed behind her. The two other students follow. The guy whispers to Peasant Skirt, “Hey, I heard there’s an application-only study group. I’m interested. How do I get in?”

  She sniffs. “If you have to ask, you don’t belong.”

  Lovely. At least we’re moving.

  My boobs ache as if my body is getting ready to let all the milk out. Hurrying, I move toward the door, brushing by two classmates who have stopped to chat with another student. Don’t these kids have anything better to do than stand around and shoot the shit?

  Outside, a student is handing out brochures. I grab one and stop in my tracks. It’s an invitation to attend an informational course on how to get on Law Review. The meeting is in fifteen minutes. My chest throbs.

  “Your shirt’s sprung a leak,” an amused male voice says.

  I drop my chin to see what he’s talking about and blanch at the sight of two damp spots right around my nipple areas.

  “I don’t know what’s going on, but maybe you should see a doctor for that infection. That’s nasty.”

  I recognize him instantly. Kale something or other, the asshole from the legal clinic. His hair is Ken-doll neat, plastered to the side of his face. Everything about him screams expensive and privileged. He nudges the guy next to him, who looks utterly grossed out.

  I slap the brochure against his chest. “I’m breastfeeding, you douche.”

  I swear I hear a mooing sound behind me, but when I turn around, both guys are walking away.

  It takes me fifteen minutes to walk across campus. With each step, I drip more. My emotions are a cross between embarrassment, anger and frustration. Embarrassment that I’m leaking all over. Anger that I even care what that fuckface thinks. And frustration that all my precious breast milk is filling my bra cups and staining my shirt. Crossing my arms over my chest doesn’t do any good. The pressure makes the milk come out faster.

  By the time I get to the library, I’m a fucking mess. The reference clerk who holds the keys to the lactation room gingerly hands it over, careful not to make any contact with my flesh.

  A woman is just leaving as I arrive. “All yours,” she says cheerfully.

  “Thanks,” is my dour response.

  She catches the door as I start inside. “Bad day, huh?”

  Her voice is so kind and understanding, I nearly break down. “You have no idea,” I answer, but then realize she, of all people, probably does have an idea. “Or maybe you do. But yeah, it’s been a shit day.”

  “Hold on a sec.” She digs around in her bag. “Here.” She hands me a small plastic package. “I actually have a second set and I’ve never used them.”

  “What’s this?” I turn the package over, examining the petal-shaped silicon pads.

  “You stick them on your nipples and they stop the leaking.”

  “Seriously?
” I gape at her.

  “Yep. They’re not perfect, and if you wait too long, the milk will eventually wear the adhesion off, but they do work.”

  I clench the package tight in my fist, filled with overwhelming relief. I have to fight off the tears again. “I would hug you right now if I wasn’t all gross. But thank you so much.” I spot a distinctive red textbook with black and gold lettering on the spine sticking out of her bag. “1L?” I ask.

  “Third year, actually. I was hoping to wait until I was done with school before this all happened.” She waves her hand at the insulated lunch bag she’s carrying. Her milk must be in there. “How about you?”

  “1L.”

  She grimaces. “Good luck, honey. Just remember, every year gets easier after the first one. And the first one is really just a war of attrition.” She pats me on the back. “You’ll be fine.”

  I slip inside and attach myself to the medical grade pump. It’s a trek to get to Widener Library from the law school, but the pump engine is here, which means I only need to carry my bottles, horns and tubes, and I didn’t have to spring for the cost of an expensive portable pumping machine. My checking account is already weeping from the ravaging that my textbooks did to it.

  I undo my silk button-down and pull off my bra. I should be grossed out, but I’m too damn tired. I’m mostly vaguely irritated given that it takes twenty minutes for the stupid machine to pull out two ounces of food from my boobs that Jamie doesn’t even want to eat.

  Rocking in the chair, I pull out my phone to read my texts. Hope and Carin messaged me, but I skip those and tap on Tucker’s name.

  Tucker: Went over to see J over lunch.

  Underneath the message is a picture of Jamie sleeping in the crook of his arm. My heart squeezes, and the place between my legs—which I figured was dead from labor—pulses wildly. There’s nothing sexier than a loving dad.

  Tucker makes all my hormones do a giddy dance.

  Me: She’s such an angel.

  Tucker: I hate leaving her.

  Me: I leaked breast milk all over my shirt. It was horribly embarrassing.

  Tucker: Awww. Poor baby. I’ll come over later and rub ur back.

  Me: I have 1000 pages to read and that’s not even an exaggeration.