Mother Mouth

Photo selected by the Forge is by Dan Burton on Unsplash

This essay was originally published in The Forge Literary Magazine in June 2026: https://forgelitmag.com/2026/06/15/mother-mouth/

Being a mother is like being a frog in an ever-warming pot, which is to say you do not notice you are warm, warm, warm, hot until sharpness leaps from your lips and bites and you do not have the words after to say that there was a burning you did not see growing. There are many hands on the dial of this heating pot, including yours. One hand is the way America asks a mother to do everything, be everything, and another hand is Instagram and its 90-second reels of perfection, of sourdough and workout routines and how to get your baby to sleep. But your baby won’t sleep and working out is not (fully) managing your anxiety and your sourdough is pulling at you with its feed me stillness on the kitchen counter. Some days you do not feed the sourdough out of spite, out of the small power of saying no to another need. Because there is already a dog to be fed and he is not walked the way you used to walk him, not like you did before kids, when you both found joy on a pine-soft trail in the spring wind and mud, sniffing at lupine, watching the clouds race. The way the dog lays now in one sunspot on the couch weighs on you, but he seems happy there, seems to understand that you cannot give like you used to by the way he leans into a butter-yellow pillow, curling his paws under his chest in a sort of knowing. My midwife, who was not a mom, asked me in a robin-bright voice at my six-week follow up if I loved being a mother. I said yes, but it was a half-truth on my lips. I wish I would have told her that postpartum was the most crushing thing I’d ever experienced, but that wasn’t her question. I won’t even bring up breastfeeding except to say that I can’t think of anything else that has such a draining and such a pull. A closeness that made me want to push harder away. A small mouth that was beautiful and needy, that needed such a sensitive part of my body, that I loved but felt it was a giving-up love, a love that left me gritting my teeth as my baby sucked milk from my body. What kind of love was that? Was that what it meant to be a mother? I could have picked up a bottle, but the Internet was praising the antibodies in breastmilk, and it was Covid, and there was a national shortage in baby formula. I learned the definition of motherhood alongside pandemic, a dovetail of extremes. My mother wouldn’t breastfeed, was already burdened by her large breasts, or too tired of giving too much. I wanted to be a different mother, wanted to be okay with it all, but that bit like my son’s first teeth on my nipple. You have to feed a baby when they are well and truly hungry, so they will roll their tongue to suckle, the tongue a natural shield for the mother from the teeth. A baby nips when they are not hungry for milk but hungry for contact, hungry for comfort, and those hungers are bottomless. Drawing a line between those hungers and yourself creates a friction. Contributes to the warming. It is like drawing in spring mud, the way your finger can run through in a way that looks like it will last only to have the imprint fill, fill, fill, water re-pooling in an eternal spring. The last thing I have to tell you about is my daughter’s guppy fish. She named it lightning on account of its yellow-fan fin, and this was a fish I bought because I had been solo-mothering for too many boiling weeks, because my husband had been shattered in a cycling accident and school was starting. In an attempt to get ahead of the drop-off meltdowns, I told my son and daughter that I would buy them a fish, each, if their first day of school drop offs were good. Good, like they could already push emotions deep, deep, deep. Like I wanted them to. Like we shouldn’t acknowledge that parting was terrifying, even a small parting. A child’s sense of self does not part from their mother until they develop a certain awareness. That was another kind of drowning for me, the attachment. The fish came from the Petco behind my son’s school and a few weeks later it developed fin rot; a real true thing that I Googled when my son pointed out that something had happened to lightning’s fins, upon peering through aquarium glass to see a fish tail shredding like a half-beat piñata. You could do a midnight replacement, my friend texted me, meaning, I guess, for me to return to Petco in the dark of night and buy a twin guppy with a twin-yellow fin and place it in the water before my daughter woke. But I wanted her to see the rot. I didn’t know if fins could regrow and didn’t have the time to look it up. One day the fish began to bob up and down from the fake anemone, vertical like a fish shouldn’t be, spasming up from the cotton-candy pink and blue and sinking back down in a way you know isn’t right for an animal. I was decisive then; I scooped it with a net and flushed it down the toilet and did not think about how it might still bob and sink in whatever piece of pipe it stalled in after the toilet water stopped spinning. That’s a lie; I did think about that, and it felt like compression. Another small guilt to carry. I pointed to the empty fish tank with my daughter, because I wanted to tell her that sometimes—often—hard things happen and we have to swallow them. She said what any young girl would: “Oh.” She is tough for being three and has already had to have stitches on one finger on account of a coconut and a brother and a misplaced hammer. My husband was out of town when that happened, traveling for work because work takes precedence, precedence not accounting for the lesser not-there-ness, which simmers and means I take my daughter alone to the urgent care center and hold her as they administer the numbing shot, a long needle that I know will burn like bee venom in her tender flesh. I wait for her to panic and buck—my own heart and muscles tense for it—but this is the worst part: she sits still and takes it.