The Virgin Mary
The Virgin Mary
By Ekona Del Rey Monroe
Chapter One: Before
I was the woman who kept the lists.
Three columns on the refrigerator: Feed. Sleep. Clean. The nanny had been gone for eleven days when the lists began to multiply.
I wrote them in the dark with the phone light so the baby would not wake.
I wrote them on the back of receipts while the middle one screamed in the car seat.
I wrote them on my own skin once, in ballpoint, when there was no paper left and the oldest kept asking why Mamaβs hands were shaking.
The body was still healing.
That is the first thing they never tell you clearly enough. The uterus does not simply shrink; it contracts in waves that feel like labor starting over, only quieter, meaner, and without the reward of a new life at the end.
Lochia for six weeks, then longer. Night sweats that soaked the sheets so thoroughly I changed them at 3 a.m. and again at 5. Hair in the shower drain in thick wet ropes.
The perineum still bruised. Milk coming in hard and hot whether the baby wanted it or not.
I had been meticulous before.
That was the word people used. Meticulous. High-functioning. The kind of mother who color-coded the pump parts and timed the feeds to the minute.
When the scaffolding disappeared. no nanny, no extra hands, only the rigid schedule that had once felt like control, I tried to hold it harder.
I woke before the children.
I measured the exact ounces.
I timed the naps down to the second.
I believed that if the routine stayed perfect, the feeling would stay outside.
It did not.
The oldest left one sock somewhere every morning, always the left one, as if the house itself were collecting them.
The middle child asked the same question four or five times in a row, Is the moon still up? even after I answered.
The baby made a particular soft clicking sound when he first woke, like a small animal testing the air.
There was a crayon drawing of three stick figures under a blue scribble of sky still taped to the refrigerator door, beside the lists.
A tiny shoe lived under the couch for weeks; I kept meaning to pick it up and never did.
My husband used to warm bottles at 2 a.m. with the kitchen light off, only the blue glow of the stove clock on his face.
Once he fell asleep sitting upright beside the crib, chin on his chest, one hand still resting on the rail.
He mispronounced the babyβs nickname for months and never corrected himself. He was the one who started putting the grocery list on the refrigerator in the first place.
One evening, before the nanny left, he looked at my hands while I was folding onesies and said, almost casually, βYouβre shaking.β
I told him it was the caffeine.
He nodded and did not ask again.
The house kept its ordinary sounds, The refrigerator hummed. The laundry room ticked as the dryer cooled.
Childrenβs fingerprints stayed on the low window in the living room long after I wiped them. A half-finished cup of coffee sat on the counter for two days because I kept forgetting it existed.
Morning still came. The garbage still needed to be taken out. Someone still had to pay the electric bill.
They told me the baby blues were common.
Crying for no reason.
The sudden fear that I would drop the baby.
The shame that I did not feel the rush of love they promised in the pamphlets.
I told the pediatrician. I told the obstetrician. I said the words: I am not myself. I cannot sleep even when they sleep. I hear things sometimes when the house is quiet.
They gave me the same gentle smile and a pamphlet and a prescription that made my hands tremble more.
They said many mothers feel this way.
They did not dwell on the rarer numbers: that a small number of women will cross into something that is not blues, not depression, but a clean break from the world the rest of us still inhabit.
The doctors spoke of hormones and sleep deprivation and the abrupt chemical shift after birth. In court later they would say the same things more carefully.
At the time I only knew that my body was trying to recover while the edges of the day kept slipping.
I kept the lists anyway.
There was a night the schedule failed completely. The baby would not settle.
The middle one woke screaming about the moon.
The oldest stood in the hallway holding a single sock and asking, very quietly, why I was crying.
I stood in front of the refrigerator and stared at the columns without writing anything.
For a long minute the lists looked like someone elseβs handwriting.
Then I picked up the pen again.
-
Chapter Two: The Grip
The voice did not arrive as a stranger.
It arrived as the most reasonable part of me.
It spoke in the same tone I used when I explained the schedule to the children.
Calm. Certain. Protective. It said the house was no longer safe. It said the routines had failed. It said that what waited for them if I continued was worse than anything I could do in a single decisive night.
It said they would be better, cleaner, quieter, and protected. if I followed the instructions all the way through.
I listened the way a mother listens to a doctor who finally understands.
The two arguments lived inside me at the same time. One said: this is illness, a psychiatric emergency, the mind unhooked from reality.
The other said: you are choosing. You are overwhelmed by the loss of control and you are solving it the only way left.
Both voices were mine.
Both felt true. That is the particular cruelty.
There is no clean moment when the healthy self steps aside and the sick self takes the wheel.
They occupy the same body.
They share the same hands.
Once, briefly, I almost knew. Standing in the nursery while the voice explained what had to happen, I felt a thin, cold recognition: This is not right. This is not me. It lasted the length of a held breath.
Then the voice folded the thought away and told me that doubt itself was the danger.
I smoothed the blue blanket over the crib rail.
I checked a small forehead for fever that was not there.
Ordinary gestures. Maternal gestures.
The hands kept moving.
I sent my husband out for the things that would take the longest. Milk. The specific brand of diapers that were always out.
Something from the pharmacy. He hesitated in the doorway the way he used to hesitate when the baby first came home, as if waiting for one more instruction.
I almost told him then.
The words rose and dissolved.
I watched the door close and felt the house settle into a new kind of silence. The children were already in their pajamas. The lists were still on the refrigerator.
The voice was louder than their breathing.
I will not describe what happened in the rooms. The horror was not in the motions.
The horror was in the absolute certainty that accompanied them, the sense that I was finally doing the protective thing, the correct thing, the only thing left that made sense.
And then, almost in the same breath, the certainty cracked. The regret arrived not as a thought but as a physical collapse, a recognition so total it felt like the floor disappearing.
I went to the window because the voice had one last instruction.
-
Chapter Three: After
They pulled me back.
The hospital lights were too bright.
The restraints were soft but absolute.
The questions came in shifts: Do you know where you are?
Do you know what you did?
Do you understand that the children are gone?
I answered from somewhere very far inside the body that was still leaking milk and still contracting and still trying to heal from a birth that now felt like the beginning of a different sentence.
At night other womenβs voices carried down the corridor, soft crying, a laugh that belonged to no one, someone praying in a language I did not know.
Milk still let down at the old hours, soaking the front of the thin gown.
The medicated mind felt thinner, as if someone had turned the volume down on the world and left only a faint hum.
The body kept expecting the sounds that no longer came: the clicking of the baby waking, the middle childβs repeated question, the oldestβs bare feet on the hallway floor.
The absence had a weight of its own.
There was a small statue of a woman in blue in the hospital chapel.
Someone had left a plastic bracelet on the ledge beneath it, the kind they put on newborns.
A nurse folded a blanket with the same efficient corners I used to make. In the hallway a cartoon played with the sound off; a bright animal danced across the screen.
The smell of industrial soap could not quite erase an older scent that lived in my memory, baby shampoo, the particular one that came in the yellow bottle.
Suddenly I remembered the ridiculous way the middle child used to say the word βmoon,β stretching it into two soft syllables as if it were a secret. The memory arrived without permission and left the same way.
The trial was a long corridor of competing languages.
Strangers stood up and argued over which version of me was real.
One of them said a sentence I have not been able to forget: The illness can explain the break in reality; it does not erase the hours that followed.
The rest of the testimony blurred into the same two stories told in different words, planning and protection, choice and command, the meticulous woman and the broken one.
Both were describing the same set of hours.
Both were, in their way, correct.
That is the part no verdict can settle.
Outside the courthouse the women came in pink. They held signs that said BELIEVE and SHE NEEDED HELP.
Some of them had lived through the blues and the depression and had come back.
Some of them looked at me and saw the version of the story that could have been theirs. I understood the impulse.
I also understood the other faces in the gallery, the ones that could not look at me at all.
Someone in the hallway called me a good mother once, years earlier, when the lists were still working.
The words floated back without comfort.
I am writing this from the place they keep people like me. The body continues its slow repairs. The mind is quieter now, medicated into a thinner version of itself. The refrigerator in my old kitchen is still humming, I suppose. The lists are gone.
The single sock, the tiny shoe, the crayon drawing under its blue sky, someone else must have taken them down.
I do not ask for forgiveness. I do not ask to be understood as purely victim or purely monster.
I ask only that the next woman who says the words, I am not myself, be heard as an emergency instead of a phase.
Most women who cross into that darkness do not do what I did.
The illness is real.
The catastrophe is not inevitable.
That distinction does not spare me. It only makes the distance clearer.
The voice is mostly gone.
What remains is the knowledge that the body can heal while the mind is already somewhere else, and that the distance between those two things is where the worst things become possible.
That is the story.
Not the acts.
The distance.
The End.
