She’s quiet for a moment, considering. Then she says, “I think I mentioned when we met that I’m a personal trainer. I have half a physical education degree. I left when money ran out and meant to go back, but I haven’t yet.”
“A common story among techs at the hospital is that they started medical school and ran out of money, so they went in for a medical trade instead. It’s admirable, still chipping away at what you want.”
She smiles. “I grew up between Boston and a little town in North Carolina with my sister Rosemary, who is infinitely more organized than I am. She runs security for a laboratory there, which should tell you everything about the difference between us.” A pause, with hesitation. “My father left when I was four and died a few years later. My mother…”
She stops. Dead stops.
“Is she well?”
A quick nod. “My mother is alive, and we aren’t close.” She says that last part without drama, in the same tone she uses for everything else, and it is somehow more affecting for the flatness of it.
I know this tone. I’ve used versions of it myself, in the years after Aoifa, when people asked how I was managing and I said fine in a way that did not invite further inquiry. The flat tone is notindifference. It’s the voice of someone who has made their peace with a thing they didn’t choose and has decided that making noise about it serves no one.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly.
“That’s just life, I guess. Not everyone should be a mom.” She looks at the babies in their cribs through the open bedroom door. “I think about it more now. What kind of mother I want to be. Whether the things she didn’t give me are things I’ll know how to give.”
“What things do you most want to give them?” I ask.
“The sense that I wanted them. Not just that I love them, because I think love can be complicated and conditional and people still say it. But that they were wanted. That me being their mother is something I choose, every day, not something I’m enduring.”
“Even though they were an accidental situation?”
“I won’t lie to them about that—they deserve the truth about how they came into the world. But…” She pauses. “My mother endured me. I always knew that. I don’t want them to ever know that feeling.”
“Then, they were a surprise. Not an accident.”
She smiles a little at that. “Yeah. A surprise. That sounds a lot nicer than an accident.”
“What else didn’t your mother give you?”
She considers this seriously, which I appreciate. “Warmth. Consistency. The sense that I was her first priority rather than her greatest inconvenience.”
“No child should be made to feel that way.” Even while saying the words, I wonder whether Connor ever felt that way, and the thought wounds me.
“The last thing she ever expected was to be a single mother, and she spent the rest of my childhood making sure I knew that.”
I sit with that for a moment. There is so much I could say, and most of it would be inadequate, so instead I say the thing I actually believe. “You’ll never let them feel that way.”
“You don’t know me well enough to say that.”
“You’re passionate and determined, and you’re looking at those three children right now the way I have seen very few parents look at a child. Like they are the most important thing that has ever happened to you, and you would burn the world down before you’d let anything touch them.”
She is very still for a moment. “That’s how it feels.”
“I know.” I look at my tea. “I felt the same way when mine were born.”
We sit in the warmth of her cottage for another hour, talking about things that don’t matter and things that do, and somewhere in the middle of it, the babies all sleep at once. We both go very quiet and still, as though any sudden movement might break it.
Our voices slide to a quieter register in hopes of not waking them. Our question-and-answer session ends up in a silly place. She asks, appalled, “Eightiespop?”
“Don’t turn your nose up at it—you like modern pop.”
She laughs, then worries and pauses for a moment. When no baby fusses, she continues, “Because it’s good.”
“As is the pop of the eighties.”
“Okay, sure.” She rolls her eyes. “But you have to admit—the best movie genre is definitely rom-coms.”
