Sideshow Mama Performance Script

Video 1

Postpartum Mama!

They gave me the needle while the contractions came like a tide.

I sat still. I have never been so still.

Five more hours of a quiet I did not trust.

One live wire of pain on the left side. That was how I knew.

She went still in the canal. Her heart a flag, dropping.

[pause 10 seconds]

I said yes to everything.

She came through and did not cry.

A man held her upside down and inserted tubes and shook her gently while someone else drew my body closed with thread.

My heart had left my chest. Then: a cry.

Thin as new light.

[pause 10 seconds]

No one tells you what comes after the miracle.

The stones where your breasts were, the cushion you carry from room to room,

the compress,

warm then cold,

the dark,

and the feeding,

and the silence.

I had nearly lost her. I pressed my hand to that and said nothing.

The receipt had her name on it.

Video 2

Crip Mama! (Tie My Son’s Shoes)

They taught me once, at the Shriners Hospital in Dallas.

A woman with patient hands and a plastic arm that did not belong to me yet.

Loop and pull.

The bunny ears. The rabbit hole. I practiced until the thing clicked into my body like a stone into water and sank.

[pause 10 seconds]

Now he is seven and the cleats are wrong and he will not sit still.

His whole body is already somewhere I cannot follow, already grass and running and gone.

I kneel. This is what I do. I kneel and I begin.

One hand.

The lace makes its loop.

The ears cross and tuck into a small dark hole and pull through into something that holds.

[pause 10 seconds]

He does not see the fluorescent room.

He does not see the plastic arm,

the way I cried in the car after because I had learned a thing that should have been simple and was not.

He sees only his mother's hand.

Now you.

[pause 5 seconds]

His small fingers go in. Mine wait at the edge of him like a held breath.

The bunny goes into the hole. Everything goes into the hole.

And comes out holding.

Video 3

Feeding Mama!

[OR The Spoon and the Pump]

1- Person 1

The spoon will not be quiet.
It lies on the tray like a small tongue that wants her mouth.

5 seconds

Nine months old and half of what the charts expected,
A paper doll on the clinic scale, a number that kept failing.

5 seconds

Her stomach was a slow room. Food waited there and would not leave.
I nursed and nursed and offered every soft thing I could make,
And she stayed small, as if the world were too much to swallow.

2- Person 2

Too much. I had too much. The milk would not stop coming.
It filled the bottles, ounce over ounce,
While I sat plugged to the wall like a lamp no one reads by.
The flanges pulled and let go, a small machine weather.

5 seconds

I was a dairy at three in the morning, the hum and the tubing.

Hum hum hum.

5 seconds

My son slept in another room, in the crook of someone else's arm,
And the motor said what I could not: more, more, more.

3- Person 1

More. More.
They gave me two doors. A tube threaded into her,
Or me.

I chose me.

I took off my job like a coat
And hung it somewhere I have not been back to.

5 seconds

They taught me the grammar of her mouth:
Bite in. Press down. Touch the cheek. Reward.
Twenty minutes, five times a day, the clock is a nurse who never sits.

4- Person 2

They came with their clean hands, the lactation women,
The pediatrician with his cool stethoscope,
Each of them fitting his mouth to me like a key

5 seconds

He turned his face away
The way a stone turns from water.

5 seconds

So I gave my body
To the plastic, to the valves and the small membranes that flutter like gills.

5- Person 1

I became her feeder. That was my whole name.
I carried the food processor like a reliquary,
The cans of Nutren Jr, the spoon wrapped in a clean cloth.

5 seconds

Find a quiet room. Be calm.

She can feel it if you aren't.

5 seconds

My calm was a thing I put on each morning,
In the park the other mothers scattered Cheerios like confetti
While I watched from another country, one with a smaller sky.

6- Person 2

Pump. Supply. Station.
Visitors drifted through the early days, a tide of casseroles.

5 seconds

They held him. They were warm.

I was the wall socket

5 seconds

And still the milk kept rising, a white I did not ask for,
Enough for him and for two more mouths I never met,
Strangers' babies fattening on my nights,
Small moons I lit from a distance.

7- Person 1

(spoken to the other reader)

I would have given anything for your too-much.
We were both plumbing. We were both all hands.
The line on the chart

pause

The therapist promised: one day she will go to prom
And wear Spanx like every other girl. And she did.

8- Person 2

(spoken to the other reader)

Your spoon was red; my tubing was clear as a vein with nothing in it.
I wanted, once, to be emptied and allowed to rest,
But the motor kept breathing, eleven months of it,
Until I unplugged it and the room went quiet,
And the quiet was not empty. Something had passed
Through me and stayed.

9- Person 1

Her body is ordinary now,
She does not remember the spoon.

I do. I keep it in a drawer
Like a tooth, like a relic of a small war no one else saw.

It all arrives at the same table in the end.
Not sorrow. The weight of having been enough.
I fed her. That is the whole of it.

10- Person 2

A table. Yes. Mine was set in the dark, three times a night.
My son grew loud and tall on bottles I filled alone,
And somewhere two children I will never meet are grown,
Carrying a little of my nights in their bones.

(pause)

Fed is the whole of it. It came through us.