Beerenberg Farm

"No, I say: I will not be a good mother."

We’re visiting fields that are open to the public, not far outside of the city. A pay-to-pick scheme. Between dusting off berries and eating them, he says our kids would be cute. Or in other words, he wants children. As we move along the growing rows he’s rebutting all my arguments against becoming a mother as if I’m being coy.

No, I say: I will not be a good mother.

Doesn’t desire and natural tendency need to match up?

Strawberries are reddening, a couple are arguing, and the ravens are loitering around to see if there are any berries leftover.

Does it matter that I’m almost certain children might tear me in half? Babies are sweet, but some mothers shit themselves, some partners go off and fuck someone else because their wife has not had sex with them since they bought the baby home, three weeks ago. My body would be ravaged—torn straight through—and I’d still have to wonder if he’d leave me when I balloon up like a stretched creature to groan out a son or daughter to pass on the family name. Spine is moved, hips are moved. Tits crack, bleed and ooze mustard-hot pus. Death, too, has his hand in the birthing room.

We have greatly disappointed each other so we say nothing as we pull out from the farm. When we drive past the German candy shops and the town’s goodbye sign, I think about rolling down the window to bellow at the ravens on the side of the road. Here, have my strawberries! My biological purpose. These damn eggs. He turns on a popular podcast and three men fill the silence. When I look over I see he has no berries in his cardboard basket. Usually, I’d offer a strawberry, sun-red and round, but this time I don’t. Instead I eat ripe berry after ripe berry until there is nothing in my basket.

*This is a piece I wrote on sabbatical, and I’m happy to get to share it with you. More, of everything, still to come.