me time

The camera pans over a neighborhood with tastefully painted brick homes, then focuses on a wide-eyed white woman bouncing a squalling baby. Woman Madelyn, baby Maverick. “Shh shh, baby, shh shh,” she coos. She swings a splotched backpack around to her front, scrambling for gold. She finds it and plops the binky in Maverick’s mouth. Two toddler girls, MacKenzie and McKinleigh, roam in the background, their double braids quickly unraveling, scuffing their knees on the concrete. The binky tumbles out of Maverick’s mouth and he wails.

Meanwhile Jessica, the correspondent with FOX News facilitating the interview, is in the middle of asking a question. She can feel her perfectly blown out hair drooping. She almost doesn't want a mirror as proof of the creasing concealer under her eyes, but knows she needs to fix it before their next segment. The producers are in her ear saying,

“You gotta ask again, she got none of that.”

“Fuck this, man.”

“Someone shut that baby up!”

 

The reporter sighs internally, the forced smile on her face growing a touch wider. This is exactly why she almost refused the interview. How can she work like this? But she needs to show that she has what it takes to be in the running for the open anchor position.

 

“Three under three! With two girls? Wow, I’m sorry! I guess I understand why you kept trying for that boy.”

 

The reporter chuckles knowingly into the camera lens, and Madelyn echoes the laugh absentmindedly. Maverick has a chunk of her hair wrapped into his hammy fist, so Madelyn’s head is slightly careening to her left. 

 

“You’ve got your hands full! So tell me, what was it like when you realized that Matthew was missing?”

 

Madelyn stops trying to pry Maverick’s hands out of her hair. “Well, he usually took a long time in the bathroom…doing God knows what…then baby Maverick had a super smelly diaper, which Matthew usually disappears for anyway, and I had to make dinner, and then pack lunches for school the next day…Anyway, I must have forgot all about him.”

 

The reporter laughs a twinkling laugh, a little too loud. “Well sometimes it’s just easier when the men are out of the way, huh?”

 

TV watchers all across America tuned in to the news replays. It was a slow media cycle. Plus, no one, as far as they knew, had died on the toilet since Elvis. It was nasty and sensational and tragic, and they couldn’t tear their eyes away from their screens.

 

A few cities away, a couple cuddles on the couch watching their iPhone 17s. The girlfriend tunes into a Facebook Live of the interview. She is overwhelmed with disgust and another emotion she can’t identify. She scoffs and thrusts the phone toward her boyfriend Kyle, saying, “I would never let myself go like that. I mean, she can’t even bother with dry shampoo? Come on.” She barks out a mocking laugh. Kyle slides his hand off her shoulder, tweaks her breast. “You’re so hot, babe. You’ll never be like that.” He adjusts his pants and replays a TikTok, making sure his phone is positioned behind her back. 

 

Elsewhere, Serenity is meeting her childhood friend Ashleigh at a sports bar, where all twenty-five oversized TVs broadcast Madelyn’s interview. Serenity feels drawn to the screen in the same way people are drawn to a particularly gruesome car accident on the highway.

 

Serenity is spiraling. “I shouldn’t even be here, I shouldn’t even be watching this,” she thinks, but actually mutters aloud to the television screen. She plucks up the laminated menu and holds it between two fingers. Surely none of this food is grain free, free range, or even local. Why did she agree to meet Ashleigh at a place that serves poison? Serenity smooths her linen shirt and unsticks her butt cheeks from the plastic-lined chair. Her nerves are making her sweat profusely. She’s trying to ignore her growing doubt in the power of her aluminum-free deodorant. She makes a solemn mental note to wash these clothes immediately once she gets home. She can strip right in the mud room and avoid tracking in these toxins to her precious babies. 

 

Her friend Ashleigh has not yet noticed the television, the menu, or Serenity’s panicked muttering. Ashleigh’s phone is blowing up. Suddenly, her up-line stopped sending her “yaaas girl” gifs and were now sending “you better werk, girl” gifs. She hadn’t met her goals for sales or new recruits this month. She could feel her slot on the annual top seller’s cruise slipping away. She’s gotta sell more leggings before they mold right in their cardboard boxes. She’s gotta build her down-line if she has any hope of becoming a rich lady-boss. She looks at Serenity, who is holding the menu like it’s covered in shit. Damn. Homegirl looks sweaty.

 

Both Ashleigh and Serenity happen to glance up at the television right as Madelyn victoriously unearths Maverick’s binky.

 

Serenity’s heart is in her throat. Surely this mother is not going to put this chunk of BPA-laced plastic in her baby’s mouth?!

 

“So…sad. Such a shame,” Ashleigh says, shaking her head. Serenity isn’t sure if she is talking about the binky or what, but can’t help but notice an excited gleam in her friend’s eye. Ashleigh had had an epiphany. The best girl bosses are mothers, especially mothers newly down an income! 

 

“Mama, my feet are so cold!” Across town, Grandma Sue baby-talks her box television screen, which sits atop a large, but tasteful, round of doily. “I just don’t understand mothers these days. That baby must be freezing,” Sue says aloud to no one in particular. In fact, no one would be there until her in-home physical therapist Marjorie arrived at 3:00pm. Sue’s daughter-in-law, Jennifer, is the same way with her darling grandbabies. She has to constantly remind her to put socks on them. Sometimes she even has to call to remind her! Sue resolves to talk to the heavily pregnant Marjorie about the proper way to dress a child, just in case she is clueless like Jennifer. Bless their hearts.

 

Back to the interview. Madelyn thinks back to the moments before: Matthew had left his office where he was playing FIFA and was rummaging through the pantry, and she asked him to play Candyland with MacKenzie and McKinleigh before dinner, and Matthew had groaned and started walking back to his office. But when she didn’t relent, he yelled, “Fine! Ugh! Just let me take a shit in peace!” And then he stormed out of the room, making his way toward the bathroom, where she knew she shouldn’t expect to see him emerge for at least thirty minutes. She continued stirring the marinara while bouncing Maverick, then wrangled the girls to the dinner table. The girls refused their spaghetti, a meal they liked the previous week but not that day, so she returned to the kitchen to warm up chicken nuggets, trying to ignore Maverick wailing in his high chair. Once she was done scrubbing the tomato stains from the carpet and put the leftovers away, she decided to take Matthew a plate of spaghetti, light sauce, extra parmesan, no veggies, just the way he liked it. Surely he was hungry. He wasn’t in his office, so she left the plate next to his computer and assumed that he had gone out to his workshop or needed some “me-time.” She understood needing some of that. 

 

She continued with their nighttime routine, changed the kids into their jammies, read Sam I Am to the twins, and nursed Maverick to sleep. It wasn’t until 10:30pm, once Maverick finally went down in his crib, that she noticed the untouched plate of noodles backlit by Matthew’s computer screen.

 

Right before calling the ambulance, shaking from the sight of Matthew crumpled with his pants around his ankles in the bathroom, she wondered if, at least for the next eighteen years, if she would also be able to take a shit in peace.