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Show Motherlunge a novel 246 38. In Which I Apologize for My Material Today my Bishop score-the clinical measure of cervical ripeness-is twelve. I'm ready. I'm like a rubber jar today, upended and distended. I feel your weight in my mouth-the other one-as you curl there in it, waiting. / You're past due but don't worry: you're not really late. I've needed the extra time even after all the years trying to get pregnant, all the medication and artificial hormones that I finally self-introduced, all the genitourinary rifling by others' cold (if expert) hands. I wanted time to write down some things for you, and I had to do it now-before I cease to be myself and start becoming yours. Some advice. Some medical history. Some back story. A kind of excuse. I only made it to the part of the story where your dad and I decided to stay together and have a baby, maybe you. It took ten years by the way, during which we did eventually marry. We had the wedding at the chapel at Sunnydale, where your dad teaches. It was fall, an afternoon. Beforehand, by the girl's bathroom sink, Cassie dressed me in a long green gown that fell around my legs like a new husk; by eight that evening she had met and fallen in love with the (unmarried) school chaplain. They have three little girls now, all named after flowers, and they live in a school-owned house at the cemetery's edge. |