I shift my son from my left hip to my right, and he whines and squirms for escape. The diaper bag over my shoulder slips to my elbow and I stop to reposition it.

My husband stops beside me, reaching for the bag, his wheeled bag toppling.

“You got it?”

I nod but hand him the diaper bag, again repositioning the eight-month-old rock squirming in my arms.

My son smiles and reaches for his daddy, but I pull him close to me. We walk. Up the escalator and we’ll be there, here, done, finished, back again, finally returned.

If he wasn’t born by 3 p.m., I would die. I would quit, that’s all.

“I can’t do this!” I said again.

“You are doing it!” the midwife repeated.

At 3 p.m., I decided not to die. Thirteen minutes later, with one long push, my son appeared, blue and squirmy and tiny.

That night, alone and exhausted, I held my fussy newborn in my arms, willing him to sleep: “I can’t stay awake much longer!”

And I realized I will never quit on him: after birthing him without medication, I can and will handle anything in the challenge called motherhood.

Fiction response to Write Anything prompt for Picture This

I knew it was wrong to marry him. But he promised me riches and comfort, and it was easy to believe as I watched him pay $400 for my nine-course meal at the nicest restaurant in town. We would be so happy together, he said, as he added me to his credit card account. We’d never see the bill: it was covered by his employer in total, no questions asked.

In the end, he convinced me. It was partly all the fancy dining he treated me to, with the season of box seats at the opera. But I wanted that four-bedroom home with the manicured garden and gourmet kitchen. I wanted the brand-new BMW every year, complete with a new car smell. I wanted the free travel around the world, and I certainly wanted the comfy leather chair in the library with unlimited books. He had his employer write it all into the marriage contract. But I know now I should have read the fine print.

We found the perfect house. It had a white picket fence in the back yard. During his first two weeks’ leave, we decided on paint colors for the walls. During his next leave, we married and moved in. I was so happy.

It was not very long before our baby was on the way. I was still getting used to all the household servants (I didn’t like telling them what to do and kept apologizing) and I was still building the library. But it was a perfect excuse to add pregnancy self-help books and children’s books to the shelves. I was excited to find that it was a girl. I bought pink bows and dresses for her. I canceled our trip to London and painted the nursery lavender. His employer gave him five years local work so he wouldn’t be away. We would have a wonderful little family.

I realized in the hospital that something wasn’t quite right. He took her away from me after the first night. I asked him to bring her to me, and he started talking to me about protocol. I was a bit exhausted from the labor, so I did enjoy a little rest and pampering. But by the end of the first week, I was ready to see her a lot more than I had seen her!

It was then that he got out the marriage contract and showed me the fine print. I thought the Rumpelstilskin Program was about being a soldier for life in exchange for every comfort you could imagine.

I didn’t realize it meant my daughter’s life, too.

I’m sitting now in my chair. Twenty books are on my side table, but I can’t bring myself to read any of them. Kate is about to bring in my supper, but I don’t have much of an appetite. The house is immaculate—all four-bedrooms—and the flower garden is perfectly groomed. I believe the lilacs are out this week, but I haven’t walked in the garden all spring. I have a new Mercedes in the driveway, but it still has only 78 miles on it.

They will be home from work late tonight. That is why I sit and look at their photograph: my husband and my daughter, Soldiers.

Yes, they have a good relationship. They work together most of the day, Daddy showing her how to do the job she will have to do for the rest of her life.

She thinks it’s a game. I am dreading the day when she finds out it is not.

I lift him above my head: his mouth opens wide in a baby-grin and he laughs loudly, soaring above me, arms outstretched. I smile too, my heart memorizing the sound, the sight, and the feeling of chubby childhood joy.

***

I turn away: in my mind I still see the tears on his pumpkin-covered face and in my ears I still hear his constant scream of baby indignation. I sigh and grab a towel to wipe away the blood on my finger, wishing someone would kiss my sore better.

This is motherhood: a daily dichotomy.

How the Dog Got his Bark

(With apologies to Rudyard Kipling)

Long ago, when the world first began, dogs were quiet animals. They did what they were told, particularly when it came to fetching things, and lived a quiet life, usually.

One particular dog, named Terry, liked to jump on people to get their attention. He lived with a man named Joe. Joe did not like to be jumped on. Every time Terry jumped up to get Joe’s attention, Joe hit him with a stick.

This was not very nice. Terry did not like to be hit with a stick. But he still wanted to get Joe’s attention sometimes.

One night, Joe was asleep and Terry was resting at the foot of Joe’s bed. He wasn’t quiet tired yet, so he just rested. Then he heard something approaching. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew it wasn’t good. He stood up on his four legs. Joe kept sleeping. Then Terry realized that it was a big bear. The animal was coming toward Joe in his bed. Terry realized that Joe was not going to wake up before the bear attacked him.

Terry knew he would be hit by the stick if he jumped on Joe. But he wanted to protect Joe. He jumped up on Joe. Joe, as was his instinct, grabbed the stick, which was under his pillow. But Joe missed Terry. Terry, in his excitement, swallowed the stick. Joe was still kind of asleep. Terry didn’t like the feeling of the stick in his throat so he tried to cough it out. It wouldn’t budge. But instead of silence, a sound came out:

“Rroof! Rroof!”

Joe jumped up. The combination of the noise from Terry and Joe’s movement caused the bear to flee. And both Terry and Joe were safe.

From then on, whenever Terry wanted to get Joe’s attention, he would simply “Rroof”, and Joe would respond. Joe liked that much better.

And that is how the dog got his bark.

[Note: Technically, I don’t think I quite followed the prompt, as it was supposed to be a “modern” take on a fairy tale. Instead, I did my own take on Kipling’s "Just So Stories" idea. It’s the first thing that came to mind.]

I scrawled in five-year-old writing on the cover (The Three Little Pigs) and on the last page (THE END). For the other pages, my mother was my scribe. She wrote my words on ruler-straight lines underneath my crayon illustrations. Then, I took a stapler and bound my first book together. My first experiment with the written word—my written word—was thus published for all to see. Although I simply retold a story, for the first time I had expressed my own creativity through the written word.

Then, in first grade, my teacher gave me lined pages. I wrote my stories carefully on the lines. These stories were no longer simple retellings, but my own creations. The class published them at the elementary school publishing center: plastic comb bindings.

At home in the afternoons, my classmate, neighbor, and friend became my co-writer and illustrator. We sat, side-by-side, at a plastic blue Smurf table. Together, we wrote and illustrated stories set in all times and settings—from orphans in our day to dinosaurs that traveled through space and time. I wrote words. She drew pictures. She wrote words. I drew pictures. We stapled the pages together.

As I moved through school, our Smurf table publishing world came to an end, and the elementary school publishing center was no longer a monthly destination. But my interest in the written word remained at my core. Anytime anything even remotely interesting happened in my family, I produced another issue of the Family Tribune and delivered it to every member of my family and to my grandparents who were far way. I wrote a play and my friends and I acted in it. I wrote stories and half of a novel. Then, come high school and college, I wrote term paper after term paper.

Now I write for myself, I write for my family, and I share my words online. I suppose writing on a webpage is much like stapling my books: it’s not professional, and few will read my words. But the words are mine. As I improve my ability to write, I will better find my voice for expressing my own experiences—whether those experiences focus on travel adventures, nonfiction research, or the creative explorations of my imagination.

Someday, my words will be bound between covers.

Amateur that I am, I know that I am a writer: I have always been a writer.

One of the most helpful tools a writer has is his journals. Whenever someone asks how to become an author, I suggest keeping a journal. A journal is not a diary, where you record the weather and the engagements of the day. A journal is a notebook in which one can, hopefully be ontological. [A journal is] a place where you can unload, dump, let go. A journal is also a place in which joy gets recorded, because joy is too bright a flame in me not to burn if it doesn’t get expressed in words.

Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet, page 197

My unpacked bags were under the kitchen table. It was Saturday morning, and I perched on the edge of a kitchen chair, drinking a glass of water and telling my mother about my amazing week at the religious retreat. Then the telephone rang.

The excitement of my week of teenage socialization hadn’t worn off on the one-hour drive home. I wanted to tell her everything: she could not get off the phone soon enough.

I don’t recall how she told me. I just remember the feeling of euphoria ebbing out of me, like the sands in an hourglass.

I like the name writing practices better than Creative Writing. Nobody can teach creative writing: run like made from anybody who thinks he can. But one can teach practices, like finger exercises on the piano; one can share the tools of the trade, and what one has gleaned from the great writers: it is the great writers themselves who do the teaching, rather than the leader of a seminar. It doesn’t take long for the gifted student to realize that there are certain things the great writers always do, and certain things they never do; it is from these that we learn.

Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet, page 60-61