The Robin's Beak.
Thoughts on motherhood.
She ran in, through your front door and into the evening lounge and her mother said: “Do you want to go and have a look? Have a fiddle?”
There was no answer, but for a head nodding in double time. The eagerness of it - the wonder they called ‘childlike’ enacting itself in real time. Feet on your carpet now, starfish hands scuttling over the length of the grey couch.
And you looked at each other, you and her mother, eyes rosied, wordless but for a world of feeling between you. You were heart to heart then - you knew everything. Your love was telepathic.
You watched her - her tiny steps, tripping. Pink boots clicking over the tiles, ringlet head scanning the room - what to see, what to uncover first.
“Go inspect,” her mother said. “See what your Auntie has to find.”
And she ran the circle of the room, then straight to the small faux-wood table in the corner on which sat a pile of unused recipe books and two fatted ceramic robins.
She picked up the larger - her small hands folding around its plump pomegranate body. The shine of a gold beak peeking under a pea-sized thumbnail.
Your sister sensed something then, and ran to lay a blanket on the floor - glossy polyester puddling into smooth folds at her feet.
“Those are Aunty Gina’s special ones - be careful.”
As she said it, the child looked up, wanting only to please. But her hands were too little, too young, to know their way around the shapes of the adult world and the politeness with which one must cradle an item deemed to be precious. And so she didn’t so much throw it, as merely let the trinket fall from her hands, where it dropped, clunking and heavy, a thud of quick gravity, onto the blanket.
She was only doing what her mother had told her: in her marble eyes was the immediate recognition that hers were not the hands allowed to hold it. Dropping the robin was obeyance.
And you thought her so smart for doing that. So urgently lovable - as if there was more love to be found within you. As if she had made room for more; had unearthed a new slice of the world - a place you never knew existed. A raked garden ready for fresh flowers - carnations and peonies, and white roses - to sow, and to bloom.
But her mother ran up, lifting the bird from its nested carpet pool, her head shaking. And you want to hold up your hands and scream. You want to run into the dark road of life, arms flailing, flagging head lights, shouting: “No! It’s meaningless! Don’t open your mouth! Don’t speak!”
But it is too late. For already the words have pierced the air like a gunshot and the murder is complete:
“See now. The beak is broken. You’ve broken it.”
And immediately you decide right then and there that you would never have a child. For the ways in which your heart is breaking are profound. The pain is acute, beyond anything you’ve felt before. That this, most perfect and beautiful creature, whose shape made the world become real, who breathed life into the word ‘love’ - could be scolded for doing the exact thing she was told to do.
It was too much for you. And you knew then that you could never do it. Your heart was too full of feeling, your days already robbed of breath just from the sight of a falling leaf or a sky pinked at dawn or the high and distant call of a bird. You were overcome with life - it filled you up. You were “intense” with it. And so you knew it could never be you. You could never, ever manage the whole universe that was motherhood. You would wilt. You would weep at the feet of the stars. The light of it would consume you - a burning galaxy, eating you up in its wake.
The irony would be that, in loving so fiercely, you would fail at the very thing you set out to do. You would be swallowed up - burnt into moon glitter by your love - before the child had even turned five, or ten, or fifteen. Before you even had the chance to teach her the music of the world, the poetry that might rescue her from the insistence of living. Before you could teach her the tricks to survive, you would suffocate her with your love. A murder of adoration. A double suicide. Death by the hand that had birthed it.
Three months later, you prepare to leave. You remove the Barcelona fridge magnet and peel the photographs off the walls. You strip the linens from the bed and consider washing them, but don’t. You collect your most precious breakables - your grandfather’s Irish beer mug, the dipping plate from Evora with an inlay of the Roman Temple, the porcelain rabbit rumoured to be valuable - wrap them in cloth and lock them away. Room by room, you remove all signs of life, so that someone else can crowd the space with their own. Your only calling card is the Prestik ghosts - oily shadows that dot the walls; spectres of the former you. On the last day, you push back the grey couch and sweep. A nub gets caught in the bristles of the broom and you bend, shaking the nugget loose into your palm: the robin’s beak.
You obliterate.
