First published by Brave Voices Magazine.

No one told the mothers that we would lay
awake at night with thoughts of smoking guns
in school hallways, deadbolts on classroom doors,
cloth masks with unicorn prints covering toddlers’ noses,
various variants of fear and doubt and agonizing
over whether anyone was trying to protect
the children, or simply classifying them
as dispensable, or resilient enough, or
just forgetting about them.

No one told the mothers that we would wear
masks pulled tight across tops of ears during labor
and delivery, N95s swaddling our gasps,
the deepest, hardest breaths of our motherhoods,
but that the perky young girl sitting next to me
at the hair salon would whine and whine about
wearing hers for an hour, while seated,
stationary, tended to, primped, and
privileged.

No one told the mothers that we would restrain
our bodies from kissing the children we birthed
on lips that we swooned over on ultrasounds,
that we would dream of the molecules in the air
that our offspring had inhaled in classrooms,
that we would wonder whether their teachers
were vaccinated, who cares about educated
or tenured or patient or articulate or
kind.

No one told the mothers that we would clutch
newborns to breasts as if they could be snatched
away, that we’d consider whether antibodies passed
through milk ducts, that we would tell grandparents
no, you can’t see the baby, not if you went for groceries,
that a runny nose would send us rushing into SUVs,
buckling and unbuckling car seats to line babes up
for nose swabs, and quarantining them from siblings
in their own homes.

No one told the mothers
that no one would care
about the mothers.