"Look what I made!" she Facetimes me.
Her camera lens jerks back and forth over a silver rack
— a stampede of fairy cakes wobble over the ridged terrain—
in that way that sends me back to a grey morning
on a gut-swirling whale watch off Plymouth thirteen years ago
when she was six weeks old and I was six weeks adrift
and I had smiled at my mom's camera and said, "Look what I made!"
as I held that tender babe, freshly made,
and the one who's now bragging about her own baking.
"It goes so fast," they told you, so many times, so many unwelcome times.
When they pat your weary leg, grinning like predatory cats.
When they shook their head and said "Sleep when baby sleeps!"
—As helpful as saying, "just Calm down" to someone on the brink —
And you're all sunken black eyes and waning adrenaline
and the last shower feels uncountably long ago
and you count the seconds that accumulate
like boulders on your chest
in the hours you are left alone
with a life force of your making but not in your control.
And now here you are at your office in the high tower
dressed in fancy outside clothes, not milk-smeared nursing tanks,
with dangly earrings jangling in your ears
that you can wear now without fear of losing a lobe.
You stare out at a sprawling city that ends in woods
that further on trails into broad mountains.
Clouds, swollen and dusky like ripe plums,
pregnant with a coming deluge,
they tumble in vortexes towards you
and a vertigo washes over you
as your eye muscles fall loose, blurring the horizon.
"You can have one," she continues, snapping me back here, to this time.
I steel my stomach, sturdy my gaze, return to my phone screen,
where the swirling motions of a sugared teen
continue to jostle and jump her second-hand POV.
I follow her concentric rounds of frosting,
hand-piped along the top of each Funfetti-style cakelet.
A kid ogling the cages in the humane society,
I verbally point at the one in the corner: "Is that one available?"
She pauses, I can feel her calculating her level of generosity.
"Yes, you can have the big one on the right, but just one, that's enough."
One, indeed, is enough and everything.
And the swirls and the seeking of sealegs, that never abates.
The boat of motherhood never lands, it just keeps tossing
on different waves, cresting milestones, hurtling through salty crosswinds,
in search of a calm that will never come,
but in the chaos, there are moments of light,
a circle rainbow, a proof of something bigger.
In this moment, that proof is in the pudding:
my one and only batch is a Blue Ribbon winner.
