What We Want

My friend, who's recently become a parent, is venting 
again about the ways working moms are so unnoticed 

and undercompensated, if at all.  Her LinkedIn profile
has descriptors like results-oriented and self-starter;

public policy analyst, program director. She owns  
and can actually pull off wearing a fancy gold-colored 

jumpsuit; she leads a nonprofit organization and hops
on planes to attend conferences out of state— but

I know too well that kind of physical, mental, and emotional 
exhaustion though we might have gentle, supportive 

partners, and a freezer drawer packed with microwavable
meatballs or emergency dumplings. After I delivered

(such an easy-sounding word, like something one does
with takeout pizza or wings plus extra fries) my last

child, groggy and sleep-deprived, I went back to work 
after only ten days, since I had no maternity leave benefits. 

Lecturing on critical analysis and Woman Warrior before 
a roomful of mostly bored students, I'd feel my milk-

engorged breasts leak underneath my blazer and flush 
from embarrassment—but mostly from the fear

I'd be reduced to just a body that did whatever things
a body did before pushing another body into the world.

I do but also don't want to tell my friend that it all gets
easier somewhere down the line—untruth that rolls off 

each page of books with titles like On Becoming a Woman
or The Housewife's Guide to Becoming Wealthy, slick covers

depicting impeccable houses and the women with impossibly
narrow postpartum waists who live there. But I do want to say,  

this has not and never has been a country of easy, whichever  
way we look at it. There are parts of me that want to answer  

an ad for caretaker of a remote island between the West 
Coast of Scotland and the Isle of Skye, and parts 

that want to stay writing in a coffee shop, until 
the baristas kick me out. Parts of me want

to scream and scold or throw pots at a tiled
wall; and parts of me will sob, wring their hands

and want to die but not do it after all though life,
as we know, is so hard and people so heartless;

but tomorrow is Wednesday and there's a farmer's
market where one can get the crunchiest peas

and fresh strawberries. I want to make something good
from that, and just watch the people I love eat it, the way 

my mother would stand at the kitchen door watching me clean 
my plate after school, eyes puffy after a good cry of her own.