Oh geez. I looked into my mom’s eyes, which were so much like my own. In them I saw something that she didn’t usually show—vulnerability.
I capitalized on the moment by grabbing her hand. “Mom. It’s been a hard year. I’m doing my best to start over and make up for the trouble?—”
“You don’t need to make up for any trouble,” she said quietly, squeezing my hand. “I don’t know why you keep saying that.” She turned back into the fridge and pulled out a black banana, far past its prime, and pitched it into the trash.
I held my breath. There were reasons I kept apologizing, reasons I’d been afraid to bring up with my mom. And her sweeping everything away probably wasn’t going to help us get to the bottom of them.
My mother surveyed me with her gaze, so familiar to me. Often critical, but sometimes wise. I wished that we could arrive at some kind of equilibrium. Finally, she spoke, “I would think that simply calming down after everything instead of starting a completely different adventure would be wiser.”
Oh, my mother. She looked so great with a tan. Why on earth would she move back here to Wisconsin, to a place that had a four-month growing season?
That was the problem with us. We didn’t scrape the bottom of the ugly emotion bowl. If I was a conflict-avoider, I’d learned from the best.
I tried to lay it out as truthfully as possible. “I can’t explain this situation in any other way except that I know that this is right for me. I’m the one who is right for this baby. I want to be the one to love her and raise her and give her the best life ever.”
I drew in a deep breath. “I want you to be a part of that, Mom. But you have to let me show you that this is right for me. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you right away. It’s been a whirlwind of a few days. It’s an unusual situation, and there are no guarantees. A lot of people are waiting for babies. It may not even happen.”
“Okay. All right. I believe you.” She threw up her hands and hugged me tightly. When she was done, her eyes were watery.“I can see you’re determined, and when you’re determined, you can do anything you set your mind to.”
She dug into the fridge once again, swiped at her eyes, and extracted my six-pack of hard seltzers, the final thing left, and examined them carefully. “Hmm. Are these any good? Because I’m taking them home.”
She put them on the counter next to her purse. “We certainly don’t want any liquor in your fridge for the visit tomorrow.” She gathered the seltzers and her purse. “I’m going to do a quick store run. I think it will look better if you have some real food in there.”
“Okay, thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She made a move toward the door and then stopped. “Also—I want to be involved with your life. I want to help. Let me, okay? I love you.”
“I’m going to name her Rosalie,” I said.
That stopped her in her tracks. The silence lasted so long I thought my mom didn’t hear me.
“Oh, Ani,” she finally said, breaking down crying. “Your grandma would be so honored.”
Then I was crying and nodding, and we were hugging. I had a sudden impulse to grab back my seltzers, but I refrained and focused on giving this conversation one final shot. “Mom, I love you too. I can face this challenge. And—I’d like your help.”
We stood there like that, together for a while. It wasn’t bad. Actually, it was kind of nice.
“Hmm,” she said a little later as she carried my seltzers out the door. “Seems like you might be facing two challenges. The baby and a very handsome and wildly concerned ER doctor.”
Adam
“I literally must be desperate for food if I agreed to change out of my sweats and pull this feat together in three hours that I’m not even sure is possible,” my sister Anita said.
I squeezed her shoulder as I pulled up in front of Ani’s house. “I can’t tell you how much this means to me. If anyone can do this, you can.”
“You’ve been telling me that my entire pregnancy.”
I had been telling her that. Among other things, like recommending that she tell her baby daddy, who was a doctor serving abroad in the army, that she was pregnant. But she’d flat-out refused, even though she had just six more weeks to go. She’d surely regret keeping that secret from him. But she was from a long line of stubborn Lowensteins, and there was no changing her mind.
“And you’ve done it, haven’t you?” I said as I turned off my truck. “Your business is exploding.”
Anita heaved a sigh. “Yada yada. We eat first, and then I work, all right?”
“Totally,” I said with a grin, then ran around to help her out of the car.
I offered her a hand up. She reached forward, grabbed the carryout bag, and handed it to me. Then she took a big breath and heaved herself up, refusing my hand. “This woman must mean a lot to you if you’re going through all this trouble to help her.”
If she could be stubborn, so could I. “She’s a neighbor and a colleague.”
