“If you’re interested, I’ll send you the birth video when she releases it. You’ll see how beautiful it can be,” Daphne said.
Sasha walked a lap in the tub and then climbed out. Then she said what she knew Daphne wanted to hear: “Sure, yeah, send it to me.”
While Jay did the dishes in the kitchen, Sasha and Daphne sat on the couch, each of them scrolling on their phone. Sasha typed Angeni Luna’s nameinto Instagram. She looked familiar. Sasha was sure she’d come across her before. She didn’t appear to be a typical #tradwife, but she had some of their characteristics. She was a pretty white woman who looked to be in her early thirties. She spoke reverently of her husband, Erik, a very good-looking man by conventional standards. Clearly, Angeni Luna worked, though. With just a few taps, Sasha could see that she had somewhat of a social media empire with @conscious.co.official and @mother.nurture.official. Her link tree showed various course offerings and workshops, things she was selling to make enough money to live on a large amount of land on Bainbridge Island. Sasha guessed that had piqued Daphne’s interest—the fact that Angeni Luna was a local, just across Puget Sound from Seattle.
Many of the posts showcased a kind of homesteading lifestyle, a glamorization of a slower pace and deep connection to nature. That all seemed well and good, in theory, though Sasha was always skeptical. She’d learned about tradwives who had this type of lifestyle, and their days were so occupied with making cheese and dusting baseboards with cloths—never paper towels—that they simply did not have time to think critically about the larger world. It was pitched as “wholesome,” but ultimately supported a patriarchal agenda.
Angeni Luna was obviously obsessed with her baby, who had been born the previous month. This must have also appealed to Daphne—the nearness of their due dates, the parallelism of their paths. There were lots of posts about attachment parenting, which also concerned Sasha. She’d been following the resurgence of attachment parenting, seeing it as similar to the tradwife movement in that it encouraged women to put so much focus on caretaking that they had no choice but to sacrifice any other pursuit. Was this what her sister wanted, a life dedicated to making baby purees from scratch and washing cloth diapers? If that was what she wanted, could Sasha support it?
“Have you thought any more about if you’ll go back to work after having the baby?” Sasha asked. She couldn’t help herself.
Daphne looked up from her phone and sighed. “I don’t know. I’ll have to feel it out, I guess. Day care would be so expensive, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to want to be with the baby, you know?”
Sasha didn’t know, but she nodded.
“I know you probably don’t agree,” Daphne said.
Sasha shrugged. “I just want you to be happy.”
That was the truth. All her feminist theories fell by the wayside when she was sitting there next to her sister. She just wanted her to be happy.
Daphne and Jay walked Sasha out to the front porch. Daphne reminded her about the candy bars for the shower, and they made tentative plans to meet up at Kerry Park the weekend after the shower. Daphne and Sasha had always loved that park, with its views of the water and Seattle skyline.
Sasha hugged Jay, then Daphne. Her sister held her longer than usual.
“I love you so much,” Daphne said.
Sasha felt Daphne’s body tremble against hers. She leaned away to confirm her suspicion: “Are youcrying?”
Tears started to roll down Daphne’s cheeks as she waved Sasha off. “Shut up, it’s the hormones!”
“The struggle is real,” Jay said, shaking his head.
Sasha put a thumb to her sister’s cheek, used it to wipe away the tears.
“I love you, you hormonal weirdo,” Sasha said.
They all started laughing, though tears were still rolling down Daphne’s cheeks.
“Sister date at Kerry Park, okay?” Daphne said. “Don’t flake.”
“I won’t. I promise!”
But the Kerry Park date never happened. It rained the weekend after the baby shower, so they postponed the meetup. Neither of them firmed up a reschedule date as a few weeks passed with Sasha busy in her world of academia and Daphne busy in her world of impending motherhood. Then this terrible thing happened, and Sasha would never see Daphne ever again.
Chapter 5
Gwen
The day Gwen and June came home from the hospital, Gwen was overcome by the sheer unoriginality of her feelings. She thought what every new mother thinks:How did they let me leave the hospital with her? I am not equipped for this.It was an avalanche of self-doubt and dread that, despite its unoriginality, caught her by complete surprise. She had done so much research, so much prep work, for this. She had assumed she would transcend the usual insecurities by being soready. But, of course, the things she was ready for were not the things that had happened.
She had a mental list of everything she needed to recover from a vaginal birth—witch hazel sprays and hemorrhoid cream, just in case; a freezer full of pads to stuff in her underwear; a donut-shaped pillow to sit on while the tender life-delivering parts of herself recovered. She did not know the first thing about recovery from a C-section and hysterectomy.
It hurt to move, but she hadn’t wanted to take the painkillers since discovering that they made her extremely constipated. Two days into being home, her incision opened more than it was supposed to. She stared at the ooze and thought of herself as a filleted fish. She needed to go in and have the stitches reinforced.
With all the stress to her body, her milk production waned. Or she assumed it waned. There was no way to tell exactly how much she was producing, which was maddening. Why hadn’t anyone invented a pacemaker-type object that could be implanted to measure the ounces? Was she supposed to just trust that her body was meeting her baby’s needs? She didn’t see how trusting her body would ever be in the cards again.
All she knew for sure was that June was inconsolable. She cried constantly. All mothers said this, but Gwen knew they didn’t really meanconstantly. They were exaggerating. But with June, it was constant.
