“Mom?” I say when I accept the FaceTime.
Her face isn’t in the frame. I don’t know what I’m looking at.
“Mom? You there?”
“Lindsay?” I hear several rustling noises, and then her face appears. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
“You called me.”
“No, your face. Have you been crying?”
I don’t know what it is about hearing your mother ask that question, but it turns me into a weeping child with a skinned knee, desperate for the comfort only a mom can provide. Between shallow breaths and sniffles, I tell her everything. Or rather, everything that doesn’t outright reveal that Nic is a zombie. She never interrupts. Just listens to me cry and waits until I’m finished talking.
I’m eager for her to take my side. To agree that men are useless and terrible, and they always leave. I expect her to validate my feelings.
Instead, she says, “Sweetie, I think you should give him a chance to explain.”
What the hell?
“Are you kidding me? What aboutthey all leave eventually?Remember?”
“Men always…leave?” She repeats the phrase slowly, as if it’s brand new to her. “What are you talking about?”
I scoff. “Remember when you and Dad got into that huge fight right before the divorce and you took me and Isla to that hotel room? You told memen all leave eventually.That’s what you said. And you were right.”
Her eyebrows knit together. “I said that?”
Is she serious? “How can you not remember?”
She rests her chin in her palm. “Probably because your father and I had thousands of fights back then, and I probably said a lot of silly things like that. There are too many to remember.” She chews on the inside of her lip. “Doesn’t mean any of it was true.”
“What do you mean? Men do always leave. They have for me.”
“No, they haven’t.” When I look at her blankly, she adds, “Your father never left. We got divorced, sure, but he never left.”
I’m struggling to process what she’s saying, likely because one of my core memories now has this weird blurry film over it, making me question whether it ever happened.
“We were never supposed to get married,” she says with a wistful grin. “We were best friends in college. I helped him cheat on his tests. Then we started dating, and I got pregnant. At the time, we did what we thought was right. We got married, and I dropped out of school to be home with you.”
None of this is new information, but I can tell she’s going somewhere with it. Somewhere different.
“I had no close friends to lean on, and my parents hated the fact that they fought so hard, went through so much to make sure I had a good education, and I threw it all away by getting pregnant. They wouldn’t have supported an abortion either, so there was no way to make them happy.”
“We were so thrilled when you came along.” She’s smiling bigger now, and I can’t help smiling too. “It felt like we were doing everything right. But then, I don’t know what happened. I became a different person. It was a struggle to get out of bed, to shower, and with you…I hated myself for it, but part of me didn’t want to hold you.”
She’s never shared much about her postpartum depression, but I knew it was there, because it never really left. From as farback as I can remember, I was the child who made her sad, and Isla fixed whatever I’d broken.
“I didn’t know the name for it at the time, and going to a therapist was seen as a moral failure, so I didn’t. I tried to manage it on my own, but it was ruthless. It destroyed me.” Her voice cracks a little, and I give her the same space she just gave me. “I tried to heal myself however I could, short of medication and therapy. So I kept trying new things, hoping one would stick. I remember thinking, maybe a chia pet is the secret to my loneliness, and maybe if I grow enough of them, I’ll be the mother I want to be.”
“A chia pet?” I chuckle. “Really?”
“They were a big deal back then.” She waves a dismissive hand. “Then I started looking into law school. My future looked bright, and even when I got pregnant with Isla, I knew I could still do this, just at a slower pace, you know? Graduate and take the bar exam on my own time. I felt much more prepared for Isla than I did for you, and I regret that every day.”
“It’s fine,” I tell her, but she’s quick to press me on it.
“No, it’s not. I can see how not fine it all was because now I’m in therapy and taking the proper medication, and I know that I wasn’t the mother you needed me to be. The mother you deserved.”
Here come the tears again.
