He gazes at me large-eyed as I flip through the album pages of the tinged-with-age black-and-white photographs. I hoist him over my shoulder, pat his back gently for a burp and continue to peruse images of myself—baby me cradled in my father’s arms as I now cradle my son, three-year-old me uncomfortably groomed and garbed for a birthday party, five-year-old me squatting amidst stacks of shiny, wrapped packages on Christmas morning, and six-year-old me, holding my mother’s hand as she pulls me one direction, and I tug away from her, determined to go another. That, I realize, nursing my baby and holding him close, is how my mother and I were together—resisting each other, loving and resisting.

***

I fear telling her I am pregnant with my second child. As I sit at her kitchen table on a heavy Saturday morning, six weeks along and morning sick, I cannot bring myself to speak. She slouches in her usual chair, elbows on the table, coffee in hand as she smokes cigarette after cigarette, her eyes squinting through the smoke. She rubs the sweat from her brow, her gray head bowed. I stare at her hand on her forehead—small, thin-fingered, brown—so perfect, so gentle, so soothing in comparison to the rest of her. That cool hand caressed me, calmed me, patted me when I was small.

“James,” I say, apprehending my active two-year-old. “Tell Mama Seale what you’re going to have.”

He looks at me questioningly. Not understanding, he continues to push his train across the kitchen floor.

“Tell her,” I plead. “Tell her, please.”

He swivels toward her, his eyebrows moving together. Suddenly, with a dazzling smile, he turns to me, back to her and announces, “A baby! I’m going to have a baby!”

“You mean,” my mother says gruffly, “your mother is going to have a baby.”

She isn’t surprised or shocked. I have been braced for an argument, for criticism and interrogation. Instead, she is sympathetic. She finds crackers for me in the bottom drawer, pulls lemons for tea to soothe my nausea, and speaks to me of security and the lack of it and how she never had much of it.

Yet I can’t bear to spend too long with her. Our visits, in comparison to past visits when my father was alive, are relatively infrequent. We drive the one hundred miles to her house once a month or every six weeks and spend two nights. The first evening we talk, share, admire  James, catch up on details of friends and extended family, and she tries not to chain smoke. The next morning breakfast drags on and on, filled with interminable cups of coffee and dense cigarette smoke, our conversation muffled by the relentless drone of the television. By early afternoon, I am desperate to leave, and she is ready for us to go. But we still have another evening, night, and breakfast to endure. Her trivial disparagement of me begins. “Your hair is dry. Your skin is mottled. Why can’t your husband finish his dissertation? Your apartment is crummy. Your car is ancient. Your son walked late.” As the weekend wears on, her attacks grow so venomous that by Sunday morning, we escape her rather than depart from her.

It is easier to visit her only rarely, to not submit myself or my husband or my child to her displeasure. Yet, I realize her displeasure is not so much with us as with herself.

***

I know she will die soon. Her heart and lungs struggle. She has already outlived the time the doctor gave her, even though she refused and refuses to follow medical instructions. For more than a year, I have grieved and even felt relief for a death that has not yet occurred.

In the summer, round and hot and uncomfortable, I take my son and spend a week—not with her—but  with my husband’s mother instead. I know she is hurt. But I can’t go to her. I can’t be battered by her, bullied by her. I am pregnant and vulnerable and sad about her, and I am terrified of being alone with her. So, I stay away. Yet, I telephone her often. Our conversations are warm and loving, in contrast to our in-person exchanges. At the end of the summer, I call her after we’ve been traveling for a week. When she answers, I realize it won’t be long. I tell myself, “I’m pregnant. It can’t happen while I’m pregnant.” I think primarily of myself. She explains how ill and frightened she has been, but also, how she didn’t contact her doctor or my brother or try to get in touch with me. She didn’t want to be a nuisance. She will visit the doctor, she promises, the next day.

Twenty-four hours later, I receive a message.  “Come. Mother’s in the hospital. Her heart stopped. She may not make it through the night.”

I go dry-eyed and find her, worn, exhausted and strangely sweet—helpless, alone, dependent.

The week passes. I sit by her bedside while she dozes, watch her in sleep and delirium—resent her, pity her, love her, fight her pull on me. “Take care of me. Come home with me. Forget your husband, your child, the child inside you. Come home with me. Take care of me. Love me. Forgive me. Love me.”

She doesn’t utter these words, but I hear them.

She grows worse. Her heart stops again. I am there, waiting in the corridor outside her hospital room as they work on her, watching from the corridor as her feet spring off the bed with each defibrillation, feeling the baby push and flip. She survives. “What happened?” she asks. “What happened to me?”

I stand at the foot of her bed, massaging her feet—her old, calloused, corn-ridden feet. “Thank you so much for rubbing my feet,” she says, smiling toward me.

Still, she grows worse, drifting in and out of consciousness. “Get me OUT of here!” she demands. She is sedated, strapped to the railings of her hospital bed. But she is strong, and as always, resistant. I resist as well. “I can’t take care of you, Mother.”

And the baby jumps and flutters within me.

The weeks pass. She travels from one hospital to another and finally to a nursing home near my brother and his family. We visit her each weekend, wherever she is. “I needed you here this week,” she complains. “I needed you here to help me walk.”

“But Mother, I’m seven months pregnant. I can’t support your weight.”

“You’re not THAT pregnant, are you? Find a bigger house, with a room for me. I’ll pay for it. I’ll pay for everything.”

And I resist. No, Mother, I say without words. No.

In the nursing home, she throws food at the nurses. She insults her roommate. She grumbles and grimaces. She begs for another option, her eyes glinting, her hands—the hands I so love—trembling.

My belly bulges. The baby kicks and rolls and bounces within me, never resting.

“I’m not afraid to pass,” she assures me as we embrace, and I weep. “Don’t be afraid for me. It was so beautiful when my heart stopped. I died then.” And her long, cool fingers  stroke my face, wipe my tears.

She is kicked out of the nursing home. No one can handle her. My brother receives a call: “Come get her.” He takes her to her house in her tiny Texas town and leaves her there alone. She insists it’s what she wants. She falls asleep in her own bed, the television her company, but awakes in the middle of the night, ill and disoriented. She knows she’s in trouble, so she calls for an ambulance, crawls to the front door, unlocks it, and collapses.

She is again in the little hospital near her home, then she is transferred to a nursing home in her own community.

We visit her there. She lies wasted, her eyes following me reproachfully. “How many weeks now?” she asks.

“About two weeks, Mama.” Her body smells. She can barely sit up.

“I hate the name you’ve chosen for your daughter! Hate it.”

I can’t bear to sit with her. I can’t talk to her. I clutch my stomach and watch my feet swell. “I’ll see you next week. Take care, Mother,” and I kiss her.

“How can I take care in a place like this?” She glares at me as I turn once to look at her before leaving the room.

I call her every day, but she is often too weak to converse. One morning she finds the strength to tell me, “I had a dream. You finally had your baby. It was a girl, and the ugliest baby I’ve ever seen.” The last time we visit she explains it all to me. “When your baby girl arrives, I will go.” She is waiting for her granddaughter to take her place.

***

My brother calls at five o’clock p.m. on Tuesday. “She’s in the hospital with pneumonia, in a coma. One lung has collapsed. The doctor says come.”

My baby is due in four days. I don’t go to her. My pregnancy is too risky. Besides, my brother is there.

The night. I sleep. I know she’s leaving, and I feel no regret at not being with her. I am dry-eyed, relieved, resentful. “Why now, Mother? Why can’t you wait until after the baby comes? You are trying to take me too. You are trying to take me and my baby with you.” Resisting, resisting.

Six o’clock Wednesday morning—the last ring I will dread in regard to my mother. “She died a little after midnight,” my brother tells me. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

I lie on the bed in my husband’s arms. It is November and cool in Texas. The morning light is gray, comforting. I am grateful I have tears. I compose myself. There’s a baby shower for me today. I attend.

Funeral preparations. I have nothing to do with them. I teach. I function. My husband takes off work. He drives me around, prepares meals for me, wallpapers the bedroom. We don’t tell James.

On Friday morning we rise early. En route to the funeral, we explain to James his beloved grandmother has died. He is puzzled but understands we are driving to her house. He looks forward to seeing her.

I move through the funeral, beginning with a hurried walk to the front of the church where she lies in an open casket. The church is not full, but I remember it was packed when my father died. My stomach protrudes. James clings to me. People eye us sympathetically as my husband hovers protectively near.

The funeral, the cemetery, the lunch afterwards. I get through it. Then the packing up of her china, her silver, and numerous odds and ends my brother has chosen for me. Her house is filled with people, many of whom I haven’t seen since my father died four years previously. My brother has diligently sorted through her clothes and personal items, given most of them away.

The next day—my due date—I take James to the park. I am immensely relieved. I walk the four blocks home holding him on my belly, his arms circling my neck, his legs wrapping about me.

The day after that—one day overdue—I cannot get out of bed. I am acutely depressed. Darkness pads within me, beside me, above me. James begs for my attention, but I can give him nothing.

Monday morning. Two o’clock. Pitch dark, and it is my husband’s birthday. I am in labor. We call our neighbor to stay with James. I somehow dress, and we make the endless drive to the hospital. Eight hours later he arrives, my little boy. I resist. I resisted. We have a boy, not a girl as she predicted, as I believed. A boy, and we name him Charles, “after your father, Mother. To please you, Mother.”

I am in the hospital for almost a week, my baby so close to me. There are few visitors, no flowers. There is quiet. There is a void, and there is Charlie—so mild and easy. He comforts me.

The time in my hospital room is a long sigh, a balm—the baby nursing, nuzzling.

I remember Mother told me of the day I was born. She was in the maternity ward and ill, hemorrhaging from a difficult labor with me. She heard footsteps in the hall and immediately recognized them. “My mama,” she said to herself. “My mama!” And she’d never been so delighted to see anyone in her life. She only wanted her mama, who never approved of her. She named me after her.

I rest quietly. My resistance ebbs. I long, long for footsteps in the hall, for a cool hand on my forehead, for a face gentle with love. I lay the baby on my chest and listen, waiting.