a mother

She was too sick to nurse when the baby was born, so they took the infant and placed her in an incubator. It was a good incubator, nothing wrong with it. It was a good hospital, one of the best in the area. But she still felt the guilt. She’d held all her other children. She’d pulled them close, against her soft, tender breasts and held them there, passing on her warmth, her living, her breathing to them. And as the years went on, she’d recall that, how it was, what she hadn’t done, and the fact that she’d been emotionally low, not physically – she didn’t feel the connection with this child, even while inside her – and that’s why she’d feigned her inability to the nurses. She would spend a lifetime trying to make it up, make up for something that no one else knew, or even suspected, not even her husband. Problem was, she knew she never could. And only a mother could know that.