“Oh, Dylan…” I can’t summon a smile for him, never mind the reassurance that I am okay, or that he is. We all are. So I just roll back over so I’m not facing him, and after a few minutes, I feel rather than hear him leave.
I must fall into a doze, because it is mid-morning when I wake again, and my throat constricts to speechless tightness when I see what Dylan had left on the pillow next to mine—his precious bunny. The only way he knows to help me feel better.
That night, I head over to Julie’s for a wine and cheese evening with a bunch of neighbors—a good old gossip, except there is absolutely nothing less I would like to do. The only reason I decided to go was so they couldn’t gossip about me.
Halfway through the evening, Julie corners me in the kitchen, topping up my glass of Pinot Noir and giving me a concerned smile. “Is everything all right, Ally? You seem distracted, and as one of your best friends, I think I can be honest and say you look exhausted.”
“There’s a lot going on,” I half-mumble as I sink my nose into my glass. I’m too tired to dissemble more than that, or put on some airy attitude that everything is actually okay when it feels like nothing is.
“Is it your foster child?” she asks, and I try not to sound annoyed as I answer.
“Actually Dylan is the one thing that seems to be going okay. He’s doing really well, coming out of his shell a bit.” If humming in the bedroom and screaming less can be called that, which I think it can.
“Then what? It’s not Nick, is it?”
I think of how, after our conversation with Josh last night, we lay in bed with our arms around each other, unable either to speak or sleep.
“No, Nick’s fine. It’s just… teenagers.” I try for a wry smile, but it wobbles. “They can be hard.”
“O
h, tell me about it,” Julie says as she puts her arm around my shoulders. “Their attitude is incredible. Unutterable. Who’s giving you grief now? Josh or Emma?”
Both. This afternoon, just three days before she was due to come home for Thanksgiving, Emma called to say she wasn’t. I gaped like a fish on the phone as she told me, quite matter-of-factly, that she was going to spend Thanksgiving with a friend.
“A friend? What friend?”
“Someone from here. You obviously don’t know them, Mom.”
I couldn’t help but notice the gender-ambiguous pronoun. Was this romantic? Should I be worried? I was. “Still, I’d like to know who you’re spending the holiday with,” I said rather stiffly. “Especially as you were meant to spend it with us.” Her first time home since going to college. Even in my dazed, grief-stricken state, I’d still managed to buy a twenty-pound free-range turkey. Only that morning I’d gone to the pumpkin patch in Avon with Dylan and we’d picked several beauties.
Emma gave a drawn-out sigh, as if I was being too tiresome for words. “Her name is Sasha, okay? I’m going home with her to Rhode Island.”
“Did we meet her at the parents’ weekend—”
“I don’t think so.”
“But…” I couldn’t keep the hurt from my voice as I said as reasonably as I could, “sweetheart, we were expecting you home. It’s Thanksgiving…”
“Mom, I’m eighteen.” As if that meant that she had no more ties to us, no more reason to care about us all. I tried to absorb the sting of her words, her tone, without letting it show.
“It’s only that it’s important to us, Emma, to be together as a family.”
“I’ll be home for Christmas.” This was said with the same sort of slight sneer Josh had had last night, and as I finished the call, promising to call her on Thanksgiving Day at least, I wondered when—and more importantly, why—my children had developed this complete disdain of our family life, of their parents, and particularly of me.
I’ve done everything right. It was a smug, pointless refrain, yet I couldn’t keep myself from thinking it, just as I had with Josh. I read the parenting books, I breastfed for a year, I set boundaries and gave them healthy snacks and lots of hugs, I created baby books for both kids, I helped with homework, I gave positive reinforcement, I made sure to schedule quality time. I took Emma to New York when she was thirteen for a big birthday trip—we watched Wicked and had tea at the Plaza. Just last summer, we had a spa weekend in the Hamptons, before she went to Harvard, facials and manicures and girly time together.
And now this?
Parents aren’t supposed to want payback, a return on their investment, yet that was what I felt. I deserved better. We both did. But more than that—so much more than that—it felt as if the overwhelming love that had motivated everything I’d done, every single bit, was being summarily rejected. Of course, I couldn’t explain any of that to Julie. I didn’t even like admitting it to myself.
“Emma decided not to come home for Thanksgiving,” I say briefly, and her face collapses with sympathy.
“What? Oh no…” Julie gives my shoulders a squeeze. “Full of college attitude and airs. I remember when Brad was the same. Came home from his first semester at Middlebury and acted as if he knew it all, and we knew nothing.”
“Yes, but he came home.” I try to smile, but I can’t quite manage it.
“Sometimes I wished he hadn’t! He made it seem as if he was in prison the whole time, he was so unpleasant, and we found a half-drunk bottle of Johnnie Walker in his bedroom, and he refused to apologize for it.” She shudders theatrically at the memory, and I can’t help but be surprised.