The Push: Mother. Daughter. Angel. Monster?

Going forward, most chapters are written as letters from Blythe that address Fox in the second person. Here, Blythe recounts how she and Fox met in college and quickly fell in love. As their relationship progresses and they move in together in an unnamed North American city, Blythe reveals snippets of her troubled family history. Her mother, Cecilia, left the family when Blythe was 11 years old, and her current whereabouts are unknown. Blythe is careful not to reveal too much, as she fears doing so will scare Fox off: “We all expect to have, and to marry, and to be, good mothers” (7).

This is the first of multiple interludes in which a third-person narrator relates the history of the matriarchs in Blythe’s family. Her grandmother, Etta, is born in 1939 and grows up on a large family farm. At 18, she marries Louis, the son of the town doctor. Louis is studying medicine but—at the insistence of Etta’s father—abandons his medical studies to work on the family farm.

Shortly after Etta becomes pregnant with Cecilia, Louis dies in a gruesome farming accident. Enraged that her father insisted that Louis become a farmer, Etta throws her dead husband’s severed leg at her father’s head.

After months of taking sedatives and staying in bed—both before and after Cecilia’s birth—Etta meets and marries Henry, the manager at a candy factory. The narrator says, “[Etta] tried very hard to be the woman she was expected to be. A good wife. A good mother. Everything seemed like it would be fine” (10).

Unlike Blythe, Fox has a healthy relationship with his parents. Although Blythe and her father Seb are technically on good terms, they rarely speak.

As Blythe struggles to become a published writer, enduring repeated rejection letters, Fox enjoys enormous success as an architect.

On Blythe’s 25th birthday, Fox asks her to marry him.

Blythe fondly remembers her wedding day, writing, “We could have counted our problems on the petals of the daisy in my bouquet, but it wouldn’t be long before we were lost in a field of them” (15).

In the years before Violet is born, married life is idyllic. Blythe writes, “We thought we knew each other. And we thought we knew ourselves” (18).

When Blythe is 27, she and Fox start trying to have a child. Looking back, she is surprised at how confident she was that she would be a great mother: “I wanted to be anyone other than the mother I came from. And so I wanted a baby, too” (20).

Growing up, Blythe lives three doors down from the Ellingtons in a town a couple hours outside a large city. Mrs. Ellington shows Blythe great kindness, frequently inviting her over for dinner. Even though Seb makes decent money, he and Blythe usually eat instant oatmeal for dinner, particularly on the many nights Cecilia spends away in the city. Eventually, Cecilia prohibits Blythe from eating at the Ellingtons, in part because the Ellingtons are Black, Blythe suspects.

Blythe becomes pregnant. She recalls thinking, “I’m going to be a mother. This is who I am now. I was consumed” (26).

Fox’s mother sends Blythe a box of her son’s old baby things. Watching Fox unpack them and breathe in their scent deeply, Blythe “half listened but my mind was elsewhere, searching my past for the same kind of familiar tokens, blankies and stuffies and favorite books, but I couldn’t find any” (28). She worries about whether she will be a good mother.

Blythe recalls the day she gives birth to Violet. At the hospital, as a nurse roughly checks her dilation, Blythe says out loud, “I don’t want this to happen” (31). She rejects an epidural because she “wanted to feel how bad it could get. Punish me, I said to her. Rip me apart” (31).

As she enters the final, excruciatingly painful stage of labor, Blythe wishes for a death, either her own or her baby’s. Yet when it is over, she feels “electric.”

Blythe describes the baby’s eyes as ”slimy and dark” (32). That night, she stares at Violet in her arms, feeling an emotion that is less like love and more like “astonishment”: “A part of me knew we would never exist like that again” (33). She attributes whatever feeling she has for the baby to a rush of oxytocin.

When Cecilia is five years old, Etta forces her daughter’s hair under the bath faucet. As Cecilia struggles, Etta holds her head under the water, nearly drowning her. The physical and emotional trauma is so severe that Cecilia soils herself. She is too afraid to tell Henry what happened, and Etta refuses to help clean her up.

For the first five days home, Violet cries for hours on end. Fox thinks Violet can sense how anxious Blythe is, while Blythe believes her baby hates her. She recalls, “I felt like the only mother in the world who wouldn’t survive it [...]. The only mother who looked down at her daughter and thought, Please. Go away” (38). During Violet’s early infancy, Blythe endures weeks without sleep and “the pain of newborn gums cutting like razor blades on her nipples” (38).

Three weeks after Violet’s birth, Fox’s mother, Helen, hires a night nurse to watch and change the baby at night so that Blythe can sleep. Every three hours, the nurse wakes up Blythe to feed Violet. After a month, however, Helen gently but firmly insists that Blythe must do it on her own. Blythe misses the night nurse so badly that sometimes she goes into the nursery just to smell the remnants of the woman’s hairspray.

Refreshed from the month with the night nurse, Blythe and Violet fall into a manageable—though still difficult—routine. However, Blythe feels a perverse joy when she engages in actions pertaining to Violet that she knows society would frown on, “like leaving a wet diaper on too long or skipping her overdue bath” (43). Even in public Blythe demonstrates such behaviors. For example, at a coffee shop one day, she drops Violet’s bottle, and it rolls across the floor, but Blythe doesn’t wipe off the nipple of the bottle, recalling, “I felt a rush of power when I made clandestine decisions like this, decisions other mothers would not make because they weren’t supposed to” (42).

Violet smiles at Fox before ever smiling at Blythe, which Blythe interprets as a betrayal. Fox says Blythe is imagining things and simply needs to relax. Meanwhile, Blythe fantasizes about grabbing her passport, taking out cash from the ATM, and escaping her life as a mother.

At eight years old, Blythe listens to Cecilia and Seb fight about a man with whom she’s presumably having an affair. When Seb says Blythe needs Cecilia because she is her mother, Cecilia replies, “She’d be better off if I wasn’t” (47).

One day as a child, Cecilia cannot find her beloved doll. Etta yells from the basement that the doll is down there in a small pickle cellar the size of a dog kennel. At Etta’s command, Cecilia crawls into the cellar, only to have Etta close the door behind her and lock her inside. She is only let out hours later when Henry comes home.

Parental cliches like “Time goes by so quickly” (51) and “It’s the best job in the world, isn’t it? Motherhood?” (51) fail to resonate with Blythe. Instead, she feels like a hundred years have passed since giving birth to Violet just six months ago.