Mother of All Secrets by Kathleen M. Willett EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Kathleen M. Willett
- Genre: Domestic Thrillers, Mothers & Children Fiction, Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- Publish Date: 1 August 2022
- Size: 2 MB
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Avail for Download
- Price: Free
Thursday, October 1
Screams woke me, as they had every night (and morning, and
afternoon) for the past eighty-six days. Immediately, my heart
started pounding. Despite eighty-six days of practice, I still
wasn’t used to being yanked from sleep by shrieks.
There was
something so violent, so merciless about it, like it was some
kind of military training drill I was being forced to undergo.
Except this wasn’t a drill—it was my life, and there was no
end to it in sight. I felt fairly certain I would never sleep again.
I looked to my left and could just make out the slow rise and
fall of Tim’s shoulder blade. Could he honestly be sleeping
through this? I wondered with an anger that surprised even me
a little bit. Seriously? I checked my phone for the time, hoping
it was at least 2:00 a.m. That would mean that I had been
sleeping for nearly three hours. That maybe I’d feel okay
tomorrow, even if the rest of the night was a disaster. Three
hours was pretty good. But, predictably, I had no such luck. It
was 11:53 p.m. Great. I had been sleeping for a glorious,
blissful forty-five minutes.
I sighed as loudly as possible and made no effort to quiet
my movements as I rose from tangled sheets, inadvertently
kicking off a dirty towel as I did. I couldn’t remember the last
time I’d changed our sheets and properly made our bed. There
was a distinct sour breast milk odor clinging to our room.
Tim stirred—finally—and mumbled, “You need anything?”
What I needed was to go somewhere remote and sleep for a
week straight. To shower more than twice a week. To look in
the mirror and actually recognize my reflection, to see me,
Jenn, rather than the swollen, grumpy, leaky ghost of who I
once was. To think about something other than this now
eleven-pound alien who had taken over our home and lives.
Better yet, for my husband to miraculously start lactating.
What I said instead of all these things, huffily, was “No. I
got her.”
I walked over to Clara’s nook. She slept in our bedroom—
our tiny apartment only had one bedroom—but we had her
partitioned off to maintain some semblance of separation.
Apparently, a little distance between the baby and the mom
was important for longer sleep stretches.
I’d read on a lactation
website that “babies can smell the milk” and she would never
stop crying if she knew I was near. “Jenn, get that baby out of
your room as quickly as possible,” my sister-in-law, too, had
advised me enthusiastically. “As soon as we moved Tyler to
his crib in his own room, he started sleeping through the night
immediately!” But she wasn’t exactly in the trenches with me:
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