Chapter 13: First Supervised Hour
The visitation center smelled like crayons and industrial cleaner.
I arrived early, Elise in a wrap against my chest, and met the supervisor who would remain in the room. Ethan arrived on time in a shirt I had once bought him, face arranged into something between remorse and hunger. He looked at Elise as if she were a verdict and a prize at once. I did not hand her over until the supervisor nodded. Even then my hands stayed ready.
He held her with awkward care. He did not ask about my body. He asked, once, whether she had “my eyes or his.” I said she had her own and left it there. When she fussed, he looked at me with the old expectation that I would fix the discomfort for him. I waited. He found a rhythm. The hour ended without incident and without reconciliation. In the parking lot my mother, who had waited in the car, asked only, “You okay?” I said yes, and for the first time since the living room it was mostly true.
May you like
Support payments, once ordered in interim form, began to appear as line items. They did not repay the wedding or the quiet bailouts of his startup. They were not required to. They were the state’s arithmetic applied to a parent, not a partner. I deposited them into Elise’s account and continued to run the agency on its own legs. Margaret remained outside the frame. A single attempt to arrive at the center “as grandmother” met a no from staff who had read the file. I did not watch her leave. I fastened the car seat clips and drove toward bedtime.
At home I wrote feed times on a whiteboard and slept when Elise slept. The counselor had called this the fourth trimester—a continuation of the body as boundary. I practiced receiving help from my mother without hearing Margaret’s voice calling independence selfish. The practice was imperfect. It was still mine.
