Worth Everything (Worth It 4)

That’s when I decided I wasn’t cut out to be a mother. I was always the better student, anyway. I focused on school and let Paige focus on motherhood. She found her husband, her scrapbooking group, her happy domesticity. I went to grad school and fooled around in an unserious way with unserious boys.

I pet Josh’s back, breathing against the solid weight of his sleeping body pressing into my neck, my breasts, my belly. I wouldn’t trade him for the world.

I want him to have everything, but all he has is me.

Lisa’s students call her Lisa. Mine call me Professor Sharp. I suspect this is no mere accident. I’m a nice person but a hard grader. I kick them out of my classroom for texting, and I tell them things about Indian nations and white-male privilege that disturb their comfortable worldviews.

My students walk into my classroom expecting odes to the American frontier and walk out disgusted with their ancestors, incapable of waving a flag or watching a Fourth of July parade without deconstructing it.

Some of them dislike me for this, but the best ones love having their eyes opened. They sit in my office and wax enthusiastic about prejudice and abuse, nattering on about how the readings I’ve assigned them have recast the way they look at everything.

I used to be like them. It’s hard to remember now, but that sort of critical idealism is what got me into grad school in the first place. These days, I fill my grocery-store cart up with packaged baby foods and state-government-subsidized milk, and it’s harder to get fired up about any of it. The condition of my bank account and Josh’s diaper seem to be about all the worries I can handle.

I’m a professor of American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, the most recent hire in an abysmal job market. I got the job three months before I got Josh. I was packing up to move when Paige died and everything changed.

Now I’m in my second year in Green Bay, and I like it well enough. It’s the sort of place people don’t move away from, which means I’ll be an outsider even if I live here until I die. Which I might. There are pitifully few jobs in my field, and I hadn’t liked being on the market. So many sharks fighting over so little chum.

I’m Mandy to my friends, Amanda to my mother when she calls, which is not all that often. She lives in Oregon, and she’s mourning Paige’s death with long stretches of silence and solo camping trips that worry me. I’ve tried to talk her into relocating to Wisconsin so we can have each other for company and she can help me with Josh. She says she needs the quiet and the high desert to heal.

Josh calls me Mama, which is my favorite name. I love him with a ferocity that scares me. I once made myself retch thinking about what would happen if he died in a plane crash or got sick or abused.

But having a baby is like having a bad boyfriend. Josh will kiss me one minute and smack me in the face with a sharp-edged block the next. If he could talk, he’d say, I need you, Mama. I need you so bad.

It wears me out, being needed.

Lisa calls me a martyr and tells me to stop trying to save everybody and take care of myself.

I do, I tell her. I do.

But it’s not exactly true. One night a month, I let somebody else take care of me.