All of this is already too overwhelming for me to handle without her skirting around her true feelings. I’m feeling smaller and smaller beneath the reality of Lottie’s death and this huge new responsibility by the second. I need her to be honest with me, to guide me in this.
“I don’t talk about New York all the time because I’m enamored by the city and crawling out of my skin to sit in an office building all day. I do kind of romanticize that, sure. The independence of moving and proving that I can make something of myself, but—” The words get lodged in my throat. I don’t actually know how to admit this to her. “I don’t—I just—I want to do that for you.” I gesture my open hands toward her. “You gave me everything my entire life. You were always working so that I could have everything, and I am so grateful forthat. But, now I want to be able to give you that. To give you rest. To see you finally relax and…” I shrug, trying to emphasize how okay I would be with the idea of “… maybe you could even date someone. I don’t know. Whatever you want to do with your independence I would be fine with. I just want you to feel freed up enough to do things because you want to. Not because you have to for me.”
I’m out of air now that it’s out. If I thought I had a vulnerability hangover this morning, I can’t imagine what I’ll feel like tomorrow.
My mom doesn’t say anything for a beat. I’m about to start talking again to fix what I’ve done when she says, “Oh, Blair.” She shakes her head. “You’ve always been the sweetest girl.”
I nod furiously, anticipation and the intensity of my emotions swelling inside me like the tide.
“But you don’t have to do that for me.”
“What?” I ask, stunned. “Why? You don’t have to feel guilty about it if that’s what it is. I want to do that for you, Mom. It would be my joy. And I’m not just saying that.” I gesture wildly with my hands, pleading, urging her to understand. To give me something in return.
“Oh honey,” she scoff-laughs, in a motherly “that’s so cute and naive” way. “I don’t need you to take care of me, baby.”
My eyebrows furrow.
“Do you think Lottie made me work at the cash register all those years?”
“Yes?” I say, honestly. “I mean, not like, forced you, but like gave you a job, yeah.”
“No!” she exclaims, scaring me slightly. “I begged Lottie to let me do that. She would’ve just let me live in her house with you. She probably would’ve paid for everything for both of us! She love, love, loooooved you so much. Oh my goodness.You have no idea how much she loved you. You were like the daughter she always wanted, truly.”
Tears sting my eyes. Not again, I think. I keep my lips pressed tight, urging my tear ducts to dry up. I tense every cell in my body, willing myself to listen to her words without crumbling.
“But I was excited to work.” She sighs and rolls her eyes in an expression of relief. “Oh my goodness, I was so excited to work. To make something of myself like you said. I relied on your father for everything. I let myself get so—” She shakes her head and moves on. This is the most I’ve ever heard her open up, but she’ll probably never tell me what she endured under my father’s hands in detail. “I didn’t want to go from relying on your father to relying on Lottie.”
“So, did we only live with Lottie because… you wanted to?” I ask.
She smiles softly, seeming to ponder her answer before speaking. “In Vietnam, living with your grandparents is very common. We probably would have done that, but since they had already passed away, and I couldn’t provide you with a father figure, I thought living with Lottie would be a close second. Don’t get me wrong, if she hadn’t let us live with her, it would have been much harder.” She blows out air, eyes wide. “Much, much harder. But you know we always make things work. And above all, I just wanted you to grow up in a house full of love.”
I smile back, a small, broken thing.
“Wow,” I don’t manage to say more as I try to process everything she’s revealed. To learn that it was love fueling her actions instead of stress had my world tilting on its unreliable axis. “You definitely gave me that. And so much more.”
Her eyes soften with affection as she studies me. “Youknow, con.” She inhales. “Something I learned after leaving your father is that creativity is not just in how a painter paints or how I sew my own clothes, or writing stories like I know you like to do.”
Blood races to my cheeks. How do mothers always know more than they let on?
She continues, “I learned that creativity was also in how I could construct a beautiful world for you. Especially because the one I thought we’d have came crashing down. Of course, you don’t picture your daughter growing up without a father. But I also never could have foreseen my relationship with Lottie. I had so many aunts growing up, her and I were never that close. But then look how that turned out. She became our rock.” Her voice warbles, but she blinks and somehow it steadies out again. “Working at the convenience store was not easy but I loved doing it. That money was mine because I earned it. And what I earned all went to you. That’s how I wanted it to be. You are mine, baby. If I did it for you, I was doing it for myself.”
Her words land like a miniature, life-altering earthquake in my body. I can feel pieces of land I once believed to be concrete shifting. It was disorienting to learn that the way I perceived certain childhood events didn’t portray them with complete accuracy. Or at least, they weren’t the full picture. It was like at Lottie’s funeral when her friends told stories that didn’t sound anything like her.
The adults in my life were more three dimensional than I’d been capable of seeing. To me, Lottie was my calm, comforting second mother. She wasn’t a rambunctious teenager who once drank and dated a litany of boys. But the two didn’t contradict each other. Had I perceived my mom as this powerless being who needed my help, when in reality she had been living her dream this whole time? It was so similar to my owndream, and the very reason I stormed out on Declan, offering to support me. It wasn’t about the support; it was about the gratification of doing it yourself.
“I know my childhood wasn’t conventional, but because of you, it really felt like a fairy tale of an upbringing. I loved every second of it.”
“Ohhhh, Sweetpea,” my mom coos, head dipping as she smiles with warmth in her eyes.
“I mean that. You’re a creative genius in my eyes.”
“Well, I’m glad you think so because you’re just like me.” She winks, defusing the intensity of the conversation in a second and moving on. “Now, you’ve got to see this. Come here.” She walks through the bedroom and back into the living room, pointing at something on the wall.
I follow her to see a small, wooden bookshelf, only a few books wide. It’s attached to a desk, sitting right next to the TV. I recognize so many of the books as the ones I read as a child. Perhaps she had bought the same ones I read to stock the shelves. My eyes catch on Divergent. One of my favorite YA dystopian series in sixth grade. I take it off the shelf and flip through the pages. I see the beginnings of pen scratchings and I smack the page to keep my place, half in disbelief as I bring the book closer to my face.
D + B = < 3
The tiny letters are scrawled in black ink at the top of the page. I slam the book closed. This was my copy of Divergent. I remember sharing my love for this series with Declan, teasing him about his similarities to Theo James when the movie adaptation came out. I frantically put it back in its rightful place on the shelf.
