Husband, thank you for tolerating my mild obsession with eggs. You are a good man to straighten the decorative nests that have taken up residence on your bedside table, and for agreeably hanging my egg-themed artwork in the kitchen: blue, pink, brown eggs snuggly fitted in their twiggy cradles. The eggs are a metaphor, but of course, you know that. And you allow me this small obsession because despite their painful reminders, their oval shape just small enough to be hugged in the crib of my hand comforts me. I run the pads of my fingertips over the otherwise smooth surface and feel the subtle stubble of bumps in my bones. I imagine the stirrings of life within.
Husband, you deserve more than I can give you. On days I punish myself, I recall your quivering question about my procrastination: We’re never going to have children, are we? I knew how badly you wanted a child. I answered you: In time. Back then I didn’t know, I just didn’t know, what parts of me were unfixable. On the brink of forty, ten years of trying, doctors insinuate it’s too late. And I must live with that.
Husband, remember last year on the way home from visiting both our parents for Mother’s Day, we stopped at McAllister’s. We took our meal to an iron table outside where the sun was setting softly behind us and we smiled at each other. Remember the little girl with those bouncing curls and those ballerina curtsies, how strangers giggled at her antics and told her mother and father how lovely she was. Remember her small fingers couldn’t hold on to her pink balloon and it floated up into that great glowing sky. Eventually the balloon was too far out of her reach and her grasping fingers settled into her father’s hand. Remember how we turned away, how we left our uneaten meal on the table, how we rode home engulfed in the void experienced only by those who have lost a child or those who will never have one.
Husband, sometimes I daydream I am the balloon. You grasp for a while but eventually I am gone and you are with a woman who can give you children. You would not like that I think this way. You would tell me to stop, assure me it’s not my fault. But as with the eggs, it’s both an ache and a comfort to imagine you with children.
Husband, mostly I have accepted that I cannot make my body do what I want it to do. But some days, when you’re away, I howl like a wounded animal. You come home and my throat is closed. The words have been said a hundred times. What’s left but the quiet nod of each other’s pain? You unwrap a lozenge to help soothe what aches—I take it because it is offered from your big, warm hand.
Michelle McMillan-Holifield is an MFA Candidate at the University of Arkansas/Monticello. She studied poetry at Delta State University in the Mississippi Delta and recently completed a writer’s residency at Wild Acres in North Carolina. Her work has been included or is forthcoming in Boxcar Poetry Review, poemmemoirstory, Stirring, and Windhover, among others.