Don't Blink and Other Bad Advice for Mothers
By N’tima Preusser
@ntimapreusser
A year on Jupiter takes twelve Earth years—which is to say, you are still a toddler, somewhere
in a Minnie Mouse dress, your bangs a shoddy safety scissor tragedy,
pronouncing the name of the foam planet you are painting “My Ranus”
I do not remember anything else about that day.
And yet, I am changed by it.
***
They tell you the cardinal rule of motherhood is to never blink. So I clawed my eyes open, set up camp, and vowed to spend the rest of my life looking at you both.
I made plenty of mistakes, but I haven’t stopped looking, damn it. Despite my desperation, I have still lost the details.
They don’t tell you about the alarming amnesia of it. The fading of you that happens without fanfare or announcement, right in my face.
Forgetting feels impossible while bearing witness to such a tragic, lucky, miraculous death.
It’s like how we are spinning 1,000 miles per hour on a dying paradise—and we don’t even notice it.
We don’t feel it because every part of the universe is in one big synchronized dance with us. We don’t feel it because we are moving together.
***
When the oldest of you were born, your first APGAR score was zero.
Activity: none. Pulse: absent. Grimace: floppy. Color: purple. Respiration: missing
It took eight minutes of chest compressions before your heart started beating again.
It takes roughly eight minutes and twenty seconds for light from the sun to reach the earth. I wonder now, if that’s where you were. Spit out by the sun eager to find your way back into this orbit with us.
I don’t remember the noise of your first cry, but the silence of your birth sits right along the grooves of my spine.
***
The scientists say the universe’s memory is found in how She moves with time. That everything that ever happens inside of her; be it a birdsong, a shiver, a baby’s funeral, a gasp—even when forgotten—changes the vast mass of her. The injuries are irreversible.
Her body does not atrophy, she wipes the blood off her mouth, and then she lays the table for dinner.
***
Last week, The Artemis II crew discovered craters on the backside of the moon for the first time. I wonder if the universe had already named that cavity Lovesickness. She has to have somewhere to store the longing for the baby, in another lifetime, who finally succumbed to sleep, her neck damp with curls.
Personally, I keep mine at the base of my skull.
***
I do not remember what else happened, the day we painted the solar system, but the memory probably lives somewhere in the tangled jungle of my ribs, right alongside Melancholy.
Which is to say, when the universal law of Forgetting finally destroys me, you will be kept within the sponge of my marrow. I will look for you in my silvering parts, in the celestial rot, in the small of my decaying back. Your impact eternally alters my gait, your names are an echo inside the archived water of my body.
I will not leave this life pristine.
This is the memory. This, the proof.
I was here. I loved you.
N'tima Preusser is a thirty-something year old theater mom to (pre)teen girls, kindergarten aide, and photographer living in Southern Utah. Being published with Coffee + Crumbs again after a decade+ long hiatus is a full circle dream and she is so grateful to be here!
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.