Page 13 of The Other Mother
Instead, I feel nothing but cold.
The baby in my arms is beautiful. Perfect features, tiny fingers, dark hair that looks almost black under the harsh hospital lights. But she doesn't feel like mine. She feels like a stranger's child that someone has placed in my arms by mistake.
The detachment terrifies me more than the pain of surgery, more than the exhaustion, more than Adam's absence during the most important moment of my life. I'd read all the books, taken the classes, prepared for everything except this complete absence of feeling. The other mothers in my prenatal yoga class talked about instant bonding like it was guaranteed, like love was just another part of the delivery process.
I try to summon something. Anything. I study Eva's face for traces of myself or Adam, searching for familiar features that might trigger the recognition I'm missing. Her nose is tiny and perfect, nothing like my own whichhas a slight bump. Her lips are fuller than mine, more like Adam's, but even that feels like reaching for connections that aren't really there.
The silence in the recovery room is suffocating. I should be crying with joy, calling family, taking a thousand pictures to commemorate this moment. Instead, I'm holding a baby and feeling like an imposter in my own life.
A memory surfaces from childhood, unbidden and unwelcome. I was eight years old, staying at my grandmother's house in Bakersfield for a week while my parents worked out the details of their divorce. My grandmother had a neighbor, Mrs. Barbery, who had just adopted a baby from China. I remember watching through the kitchen window as Mrs. Barbery held her new daughter in the backyard, both of them crying.
"Why is she sad?" I asked my grandmother. "Doesn't she want the baby?"
My grandmother was washing dishes, her hands moving mechanically through the soapy water. "Sometimes love takes time, sweetheart. Sometimes you have to grow into it."
I didn't understand then. Love was immediate in my eight-year-old world, as simple as liking chocolate ice cream or hating vegetables. You either loved something or you didn't.
Now, holding Eva in the sterile hospital room, I understand what my grandmother meant. But understanding doesn't make it easier. If anything, itmakes it worse. Because what if I never grow into it? What if Eva and I are simply incompatible, two strangers thrown together by biology and circumstance?
As I hold her, a flicker of memory punches through the fog of exhaustion and medication. There was someone else in the room. Not hospital staff, not a nurse or doctor. A woman sitting in the corner, crying silently.
I try to focus on her face, to remember what she looked like, but the harder I concentrate, the more the image slips away. Like trying to hold water in cupped hands.
Was she real? Or just another hallucination brought on by pain medication and trauma? The memory feels important somehow, but I can't grasp why.
I bolt upright in bed,my heart racing. Adam stirs beside me but doesn't wake. The red numbers on the clock now show 4:57 AM. I've been lost in the past for over half an hour, reliving that night in fragments that don't quite fit together.
Was that real? Was someone else in the room when they gave me Eva? Was I even fully conscious when it happened?
I slip out of bed as quietly as possible and pad to the living room on bare feet. My phone is on the coffee table where I left it, and I scroll through the photos until I findthe ones from the hospital. The first pictures Adam took after Eva was born.
There I am in the recovery room bed, holding a tiny bundle of blankets and baby. I'm smiling, but it looks forced. Exhausted. Like I'm performing happiness for the camera instead of feeling it.
I zoom in on the details. The bed, the machines, the generic hospital artwork on the walls. Everything looks right, looks familiar. But something about the lighting is wrong. In my memory, the room was dimmer, softer. In the photo, everything is bright and clear.
In the photo, Eva is wrapped in a blue and white striped blanket with the hospital logo. But I remember her being swaddled in something different. Something plain pink with a brown trim, soft like it just came from the dryer.
I flip the photo over and find Adam's handwriting on the back: "Our first day as a family."
The word "our" stands out like it's been highlighted. But what if it wasn't our family at all? What if the woman in the corner was the real mother?
The thought is insane. Hospitals have protocols, procedures, systems designed to prevent exactly this kind of mistake. Bracelets that match, footprints that are taken immediately, DNA that can be tested if there's any question.
But mistakes happen. Even in the most careful institutions, human error creeps in. Tired staff working double shifts, similar names on charts, chaos in busymaternity wards where babies are born around the clock.
I think about the plain pink, brown-trim blanket hidden in Eva's closet, the one marked "G. Matthews." I think about Mara's hollow eyes and her certainty that something was wrong. I think about the voice through the baby monitor, trying to tell me something I'm not ready to hear.
What if my instincts about Eva aren't maternal failure but maternal protection? What if some deep, primal part of me recognizes that this child isn't mine and has been trying to warn me since the moment they placed her in my arms?
The thought should be comforting, but it's not. It's terrifying in a way that makes my chest tight and my hands shake. Because if Eva isn't mine, then where is my real baby? Where is the child I carried for nine months, felt kicking against my ribs during late-night bathroom trips, sang to through my stretched skin during quiet evenings when Adam was working late?
I remember a conversation with my mother, months before she died. I was visiting her in the hospice, trying to pretend that the yellow tinge to her skin and the way her wedding ring slipped around her finger didn't mean what I knew they meant. She was talking about the day I was born, how she knew immediately that I was hers.
"The moment they put you on my chest, I felt complete," she said, her voice weak but certain. "Like I'd been missing a piece of myself my whole life andsuddenly found it. That's how you know, Claire. When it's your baby, you know."
I'd nodded and smiled and filed the story away with all the other pieces of maternal wisdom she was desperate to share before it was too late. But now, sitting in the dark with Adam's phone casting shadows across the hospital photos, her words feel like an indictment.
When it's your baby, you know.
