Several minutes later Hycymum, panting at her effort to run down the road—an activity she hadn’t engaged in for over forty years—pushed open the front door of her daughter’s house. She listened for a moment, then did her best to move up the stairs as quickly as possible for a woman her size and age.
In the bedroom she found her daughter curled up like a squirrel, sobbing.
“My poor girl!” Hycymum rushed over, climbed onto the bed with a grunt, and cradled her daughter’s head. She rocked and soothed, “I’m so sorry it hurts. I’m so sorry it hurts,” while Mahrree’s gasping body shuddered and shook.
After a while, neither woman could say how long, Mahrree sobs finally slowed. Between gasps she asked, “Where are my babies?”
“Safe, with your very worried husband, at my house.”
“Your house isn’t very safe then, is it?” Mahrree whispered.
“Don’t you worry about that. I can always get more seashells.”
Mahrree trembled. “Mother, no one said it would feel like this.”
“No one ever will, my poor girl. And I am so sorry about that,” Hycymum smoothed her hair. “We never speak of it. It wouldn’t help if we did.”
“I don’t mean the pain, Mother,” Mahrree said hoarsely, “I feel some cramping, but nothing unbearable. What I feel is, what I feel is . . .” She began to sob again.
Her mother hugged her head awkwardly. “I know what you feel. The pain of what could have been. You’ve lost the ability to give more life.”
Mahrree sat up with effort and wiped her wet face. “I knew I would feel some sorrow, but this—This is far worse than I imagined! Why didn’t you tell me?” she demanded between sniffles.
Her mother shook her head apologetically. “For the same reason you won’t tell little Jaytsy when it’s her time. Could you have gone through it—willingly—had you known?”
Mahrree hadn’t considered that.
“No. I was already having some doubts,” she confessed. “But then of course we hear from the Office of Family,” she spat contemptuously, “that the herbs are safe, that there’s little pain, that it’s our duty.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve.
“It is safe,” Hycymum admitted bleakly, handing her a handkerchief a bit too late. “I don’t know of any women who died. But were depressed or grief-stricken? Yes, all of them. For a few, dying might actually have been easier.” She scrunched her mouth and looked at the ceiling.
Mahrree could tell she was searching for the right words. It wasn’t really her strength, but the dear woman was trying.
“It hurts . . .” Hycymum began, paused, then said, “it hurts because the Creator can’t work through us anymore. When we become mothers we enter into something like a sweet bond with Him. Oh, expecting and birthing is painful, and it’s ridiculous to see how our bodies become shapes we no longer recognize! But there’s . . . there’s still something sweet about it all. And then it’s taken away. Forever. And that’s agony.”
Mahrree had stopped crying, amazed at her mother’s insight. She thought her head held only cotton.
And fine linen.
And a bit of worsted wool.
“Oh Mother, that’s it exactly!”
Hycymum sat a little taller. It wasn’t often she got a compliment from her daughter.
Mahrree stared at the woman who seemed to get a little smarter each year.
“I just realized how selfish I am to complain. Here I have two babies, and you had only one. I’m so sorry.” Because her eyes were finally clearing up, she looked at her mother properly for the first time. Her gray and brown curls were in disarray, her sweater didn’t match her dress, and bits of white sugar clung to her round face.
And her mother went out in public like that?
Of course she did, for her daughter.
“Thank you, Mother. I don’t think I say that enough. Sometimes we’re so different, but I do appreciate you.” She brushed some of the sugar off her face.
Hycymum rubbed her other cheek and frowned at the sugar on her chubby fingers. “That bag cost three slips of silver this week. Ah well. I’m merely doing what mothers do,” she said dismissively, and with a tinge of embarrassment.
To get a compliment from her daughter was quite unexpected, but gratitude as well? Hycymum could barely take it all in.
“You make up for what was lost,” she added mysteriously, wiping her nose for sugar grains.
Mahrree cocked her head. Something in the tone of her bubble headed mother sounded as heavy as a boulder. “Lost? What did you lose?”
Hycymum stopped fretting about sugar and sighed loudly.