There’s no automatic setting for babies so she selects the button for chicken because it’s close enough. Both are skin and bone and once alive. I never used to watch her do this. I didn’t want to encourage her. I didn’t want to make smoothies using the frozen blueberries that were once bunched up against the baby’s skin like a nightgown either. You need to relax, she says with the same attitude as when I asked her to wash her hands before cooking dinner. A little bit of germs never hurt anyone, she’d always say. There’s such a thing as being too clean. When it comes to my mother, it’s easier to give in. It’s easier to nod along.
The microwave never defrosts the baby evenly. It’s like microwaving a cheese and bean burrito from the freezer section of the grocery store. Only the outside softens. This time, my mother tries wrapping it in a wet cloth. She’s gentle with the baby because it’s more glass than flesh. I want her to be that tender with me, the baby that came after this one and kept growing and growing. I even thought about crawling into the freezer too once just to see if she would notice.
Now she runs the baby under hot water. Steam spills out of the tap and into the air. We both know this won’t work either. In the end, my mother settles on body heat, rocks the baby around the kitchen. Looping and looping, retracing old steps, never going anywhere. Why can’t you let this go? I ask. And she slices the air with the back of her palm. I should have seen it coming. I stumble backwards from the weight of her. Touch my cheek that’s still warm with the glow of her palm on my skin. She steadies me. Our own kind of rocking. It’s the closest thing we have to a ritual.
