Tea keeps me going when the baby’s screaming and her brother’s waking up every goddamn morning at four a.m. and the health visitor says some children are larks and some are owls and I want to ask her why I have one of each and yes I know that the owl hoots all night because of colic but anyone can tell you that colic is not a hoot, not at all, not at one a.m. or two a.m. or three a.m. and did I mention the lark gets up at four a.m.? So I drink tea. But when my little lark flits into the kitchen and reaches high high up to the counter and tugs and tugs at the corner of the newspaper, he doesn’t know I put my tea on the paper, far far out of reach like the health visitor said so I could rock and rock and rock the colic. So it’s tea that makes my lark scream, hot tea, made in the mug because who has time for a teapot, black tea with no cooling milk, so it’s tea that burns, tea that sluices his skin clean off while he stands and screams and I run and cry and grab him and the phone and then I scream Tea! Tea! when they ask what’s the nature of my emergency. And later, in the hospital when he’s sedated and wrapped in bandages and after the questions from the social worker satisfy her that it’s an accident and me that I’m incompetent, and my baby owl is quiet and nursing, it’s tea that I want and yes I will drink it while my owl feeds because tea keeps me going and did you ever notice how tea is so close to tears? I never knew that until now.
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First published in We Run Through the Dark Together (Inside the Bell Jar, March 2018).
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