Now, Khash was already making noise about her perfect, sunny little house being too small for their growing family.
“Kids need room, Bluebell. We barely have space enough to stretch here, and they’re going to need a real yard. Room to run, room to play, room to grow.”
“You’re making it sound like I’m giving birth to a puppy,” she’d interrupted that day, grinning as he scowled. “I’ll remind you that until very recently, you lived in an apartment with a mastiff.”
He’d sputtered, predictably, and she’d laughed at the predictability.
“Darlin’, you know as well as I do that dog is as lazy as a toad in a puddle. Don’t go gettin’ me off track here. We’re going to want more space eventually.”
“Eventually, I will probably agree.” She’d kissed him, the best way she knew to shut him up. This house held both the life she had built up from scratch, completely on her own,andthe life she was building anew, a husband and a baby, nothing she would have envisioned when she first toured the little yellow bungalow. The two chapters of her life were layered over each other like transparencies, and she wasn’t ready to separate them just yet. “But eventually isn’t here yet.”
The third bedroom would be the nursery. The workmen had already finished, leaving the room still smelling faintly of sawdust and fresh paint. The walls had been painted acreamy pistachio green with white wainscoting and trim. It was neutral and calm, the perfect atmosphere for both playtime and lullabies.
She'd wanted built-in bookshelves on the shorter wall, the sort she'd always dreamed of having as a bookish little girl. The changing table sat between the shelves at the center, and once it had outlived its usefulness for diapers, the top section pulled away, leaving a tufted bench beneath, a perfect spot for small bodies to sit as they put on tiny socks and shoes. A small dresser stood waiting, its drawers empty and ready to be stuffed with miniature clothes, and on the opposite wall, the main attraction.
Lurielle ran her hand along the crib rail, feeling the perfect smoothness of it.
Perfection isn’t realistic or attainable.
“I promise I’ll never wake you up too early in the morning to tell you about fiber and bloating,” she said to the empty room. “And you only have to eat grapefruit if you like it. Not because it’s 80% water.”
No answer came, but she hadn’t been expecting one.
The crib she’d chosen was simple and sturdy, like something that might have been passed down through the generations.All of the charm with none of the lead paint.Beside it was the matching rocking chair, and it was there that she sank down just then.
Like the crib, the rocker felt classic without being overly precious. Lurielle couldn’t stand old antiques that looked beautiful and had all the functionality of a broken whistle. She wanted to be able tosit. Sit without worrying if the chair beneath her was up to the task of its singular job. She’d spent a lifetime hovering on the edge of delicate, beautiful Elvish antiques, afraid of putting her full weight down, and that had been her only request with this chair.
“Something sturdy. I don’t want to worry about 200-year-old wood when I’m breastfeeding in the middle of the night.”
Sturdy and classic and functional, perfect for rocking and singing, perfect for a messy, imperfect real life.Kids need room to grow.
They hadn’t picked a theme for the nursery. Everyone told her the baby would wind up sleeping beside their bed for the first year anyway, and this room would be for clothes, toys, and naps if she was lucky. She hadn’t chosen any twee mobiles or rugs, hadn’t picked out any storybook designs. The only thing hanging on the wall at that point was an art print she’d picked up at the Makers’ Mart, and Lurielle had no doubt it was the exact sort of soppy, bad taste, overly sentimental nonsense shewasn’tmeant to hang up, but she’d loved it then and still loved it now.
It was a small piece of handmade cardstock, grey and speckled with wood pulp. On it, the charcoal sketch of a heart-shaped balloon, in danger of floating off the page. The lettering in the lower left corner looked like it came from an old typewriter.So loved. She’d almost started crying the day she’d bought it, holding her emotions back as she listened to Rourke natter on about something that had happened to him at work.
She didn’t need to hold back her tears then.
Lurielle pushed up on her toes, wrapping her arms around the swell of her stomach as she rocked. Six months didn’t seem like enough time for as big as she was, but she would only continue to swell.So loved. That’s what they already were. Like the balloon in her art print, she felt tethered to this tiny life in a way that transcended her body’s temporary necessity. Like a mooring line pinned to her heart, she felt the tug every time they turned beneath her breast, each soft movement strengthening her resolve thatherlove would never be conditional.
“All the kids on the block went sledding this week. There’s a big hill on the side of the cul-de-sac behind us, and that’s wherethey all go. You’ll be able to go with your friends, once you’re big enough.” No answer, but she felt a small shift, as if they were turning in interest at the news. She continued to rock, holding her bump. “I don’t know how to do this,” she whispered to the empty room. “I don’t know how to be a good mother. I didn’t have one, so I don’t know what it looks like. But I promise I’m going to do my best.”
She imagined her own mother standing in the doorway, offering judgment disguised as advice. Her calls had been almost daily for the past two months. The sudden warmth, the pride that had never once been shown previously. Lurielle knew it was temporary.Conditional.
She tried to imagine them still in this room in another two years, in this house that had been her sanctuary when she’d first broken away from her family. Tiny hands and feet, running down the hallway, opening drawers, rocking on the hand-painted wooden dragon she’d already been gifted, a long dark braid and tiny tusks. Climbing onto her lap in this very chair to listen to a story.
“You can read as much as you want,” she burbled, knowing she was meant to be getting ready to leave for the day, not getting herself all splotchy and runny-nosed. “I’m never going to tell you that you can’t. Unless it’s bedtime.”
But how do you give what you’ve never received?
It was the question that had been turning over and over in her mind these last two months, her mother’s reappearance in her life bringing the supposition to the forefront.
Childhood had been a test of endurance, surrounded by her perfect peers, the children of her mother’s perfect peers. They’d all fit the mold, looked the way they should, had appropriate interests, excelled at the right activities. What she’d learned was how to make herself smaller, how to accept affection with caution. None of it felt like a blueprint for motherhood.
“I’m never going to do that to you,” she murmured, tracing shapes and patterns against the swell of her stomach. “You’re never going to have to earn me. Daddy and I already love you so much, and that’s never going to change.”
She could still see her smaller self, sitting with one of her books. It was hard to admit that little elf was still there inside her, still trying, still hoping. Still foolish enough to believe that this time might be different.
Lurielle knew she needed distance, needed her boundaries back in place. Her out-of-control hormones were making her weak, and she needed to redraw the line around herself . . . but she needed to be gentle with that little elf who still lived in her, because she would need to be gentle with her own child someday, and wanted to remember that she could be.
