When You Were Mine

“Hey, Mom.” I take a deep breath and will myself on. “Can we talk? I mean… really talk?”

28

ALLY

The week of Emma’s exams slides by with no one saying a word about them. Besides the one abbreviated conversation on top of Avon Mountain, we haven’t spoken to Emma about it, which feels wrong, but Nick said there were worse things than missing a semester of college, and I know that. Of course I know that. We’ve experienced several worse things in the last few weeks alone.

And yet… Harvard. Emma’s future. Everything she’s worked for all these years. Everything we’ve worked for. Is it wrong to feel that way? The trouble with owning my children’s successes, I realize, is I have to own their failures, as well.

As it turns out, I don’t have to talk to Emma about her exams, because she comes to me first. It’s the Wednesday after we went to cut down the Christmas tree, an outing I think went reasonably well, although Beth seemed to hurry off at the end, refusing to stay to eat with us while we decorated the tree. Still, I choose to call it a success.

Now I am in my office, trying to get several boutiques’ books done before the Christmas holidays, and Emma comes to stand in my doorway, her hair loose about her face, an oversized sweater dwarfing her petite frame. She looks both wan and gorgeous, and I turn to her with the approximation of a smile.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” she returns quietly. The cuffs of her sweater hide her hands and she fidgets a bit as she watches me.

“What’s up?” I ask as lightly as I can. “Do you want to talk?” She hasn’t wanted to talk in the three weeks since Thanksgiving, but I keep trying.

“Actually, yeah,” she says, not looking at me. “If you don’t mind…?”

“Of course I don’t mind.” I close my laptop immediately, my heart starting to hammer. “Do you want to go in the family room?” I ask. “It’s more comfortable there.”

Emma shrugs, and then drifts out of my study, and I follow her to the family room, trying to act natural, as if this isn’t a big deal. I’m thrilled she’s talking to me, but I’m also scared. Terrified, in fact.

“So.” I perch on the edge of the sofa, just as I once did with Josh, and Emma is standing in the same place as Josh, next to the steps into the kitchen, as if she doesn’t want to commit to the conversation. I wait, eyebrows raised, a faint smile on my face, trying to look engaging and interested and sympathetic all at once. Lord, but it can be hard to be a mother.

“So.” Emma comes further into the room and curls up on the opposite side of the sofa, all sweater and tumbled hair. “I’m not going back to Harvard.”

I blink, keeping the smile on my face, trying to process her simply stated words. “Not for exams,” I say, and Emma’s face tightens. I realize I’ve said the wrong thing, but I can’t take it back. “Not for exams, of course not,” I say, and that is even more wrong. I am scrabbling for more words, better ones, but then Emma shakes her head.

“Not ever.” She sounds firm but also sad, yet not for herself. For me. And somehow that stings, because this is about her life, not mine. I know that, at least.

“But why… Emma…”

“I hated it, Mom. I hated every minute of it.” She speaks matter-of-factly, without rancor, and somehow that makes it worse.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I knew you didn’t want to hear it. You’d have been disappointed in me, and you would have told me to keep trying, and weather it out for my freshman year at least, and all the rest.”

“I wouldn’t have,” I say, feebly, because I know I would have. Of course I would have. Every parent I know would have done the same. You don’t let your child just quit. It was a parenting rule we’d followed from the beginning, whether it was Little League, ballet lessons, chess club, whatever. They had to give it a good try, and if they still wanted to quit after three sessions or lessons, they could, but they had to tell the teacher or coach themselves, after the class, not before.

Yet how can I apply that maxim for childhood to this?

“Why did you hate it?” I ask Emma, and she hunches her shoulders.

“The pressure. The posing. The smugness of everyone—professors and students. The feeling that it never ends. I thought AP Physics was bad enough—Introduction to Law was a thousand times worse.”

“But you didn’t breathe a word,” I say, even as I acknowledge to myself that she didn’t say anything good, either. She basically stopped talking to me, and I told myself it was because she was having such a fabulous time. I felt hurt, which was far better than what I feel now, which is guilt. Endless, crippling mother-guilt.

“I told you, I couldn’t. I knew you didn’t want to hear it, and I couldn’t stand for you to tell me to just give it a semester or whatever.” She rolls her eyes, as if that advice is too ridiculous for words, and I think, is it?

“If I’d known you were having such a hard time…”

“I didn’t want to disappoint you.” Emma’s voice has lowered, and I hear a tinge of despair that only adds to my guilt. “You and Dad were so thrilled when I got into Harvard. I think you were more excited than I was.”

“Of course we were thrilled. For you.”