Supermommy
Wears a cape made from a child’s beloved blanket when asked.
Wears a corset after a C-section to feel like her insides will stay in.
Doesn’t flinch at the crash of ice-fall from the eaves.
Marvels at the orderly miracle of morning drivers actually slowing
to 20 mph in front of the middle school as required.
Knows that the word shuttle carries with it the bobbin traveling from
one side of the loom to the other, and also harpoon, dart, missile:
swiftness, lethality.
Once watched a robin peck and tear at a worm until it was in two
pieces, and then a second robin landed, ready for the shared meal.
Brings her children squares flavored like cheese, bears that taste of
graham flour, toast with the crust cut off, various seeds and beans
and nuts.
Figured it was a lie that we conducted nuclear tests in outer space
until she read about Starfish Prime.
Doesn’t tell her children about Starfish Prime or the rest of
Operation Fishbowl. Or about why they have to be quiet during
lockdown drills. Or about the C-4 wedged in her genetic code,
predisposition for spondyloarthritis, that she hopes they don’t carry
too.
Feels guilty that she’s not preparing them for the rigors and
pungency of corporeal existence because she hasn’t told them these
things.
Slows the car as she approaches a traffic armadillo flashing her
speed for all the suburban audience to see.
Displays a picture of her children prominently on her desk at work,
which is part of the formula for work-life balance. That and the
right shoes and quick-prep meals.
Doesn’t really like the word mommy, wishes she were Supermom or
Superwoman or just Super, nonessentialized.
During any shuteye, flies above her childhood habitat—crabapple
tree, cranny behind the pine, frozen-custard stand, highway
overpasses and interchanges—there and not there, trying to get
back to something she doesn’t understand.
Pretends she’s not Super so as not to embarrass the other parents
at afternoon pickup: wears the required athletic leggings and
minimal makeup, just a soupçon of eyeliner; lets her son chatter as
he tries and fails to buckle his seatbelt, holding up the entire line of
vehicles, until she unbuckles, runs around the car, and buckles him
in herself, despite his vehement and shrill protests.
Knows that Hans Mark, a NASA center director, thought in the
’80s that the development of Shuttle technology meant “even
poets” could go into space, “then share the experience with
everyone.” Turns her cape into an orange pressure suit, plugs into
the O2 line and the communications cap, packs a life raft in her backpack.
Suspects that those with large families think she doesn’t have
enough children, and others think she has too many, shouldn’t have
had any at all, the climate is cratering, the earth is feverish.
Prefers the third person, the distance it engenders, the way it makes
the quotidian sound like a myth, a cautionary tale, a hagiography.
How in such fiction she can have as many children as she wants,
can brag, blue-ribbon paragon, plucky.
Sometimes wants to visit Point Nemo, where space agencies send
orbital junk, all those boosters and satellites and failed space stations
rusting in the nutrient-poor water, just crabs and bacteria clustered
around the deep volcanic vents, no fish, the South Pacific Gyre
keeping organic matter and cool water away, no humans for more
than a thousand miles; wants to fly there with her animal-print cape
with the nubby gray side, spend some time alone in the quiet.