When You Were Mine

“Yes, I suppose I could have.” My mother drops her hand from her eyes and for the first time she looks almost angry. “If I’d been thinking sensibly. If I hadn’t been so worn down. If you hadn’t been so angry, and had seemed as if you wanted to stay with me. But I didn’t, and you weren’t, and Ron had this lovely house and open arms and I needed that.” Her voice trembles.

“I don’t even know how you met him,” I remark, and she gives me a watery, wobbly smile.

“At the hospital, actually. He was visiting his grandmother. I gave him change for the coffee machine, and we got to talking…” She shrugs. “He was so nice, Beth, and I needed that. I still need it.”

“Don’t we all?” I say a bit sourly, and she nods, as if expecting this.

“I know I let you down. I told myself it was for only a few months, that soon you’d be in college, and you wouldn’t be so angry with me, and you could spend holidays with us here. I had a vision of how good it would be—you could have stayed with us during your breaks—but then you met Marco and you didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with me…”

“You never really tried.”

“No, not hard enough. I know.” My mother bows her head, as if accepting my judgment, and yet suddenly I find I don’t have it in me to condemn her anymore. I almost wish I did, but I don’t.

My throat aches and I have to look away, caught between sympathy and an anger I am still trying to hold onto, even as I yearn to let it go. I know she means what she says, but surely you can’t wipe away nine years of hard history with a couple of heartfelt sentences. And yet perhaps that would be easier… for both of us. “And in all the time since then?” I finally ask.

“What do you mean?”

“You hardly ever call. Barely visit.”

“You haven’t wanted me to.” She sounds surprised, even disbelieving. “When I came after Dylan was born, you basically told me to go home. The same thing happened after Marco left. You said me being there made Dylan anxious.”

“It did, but—”

“I invited you for Christmas when Dylan was a baby, and at the end of the visit you said it didn’t work and you wouldn’t be back. Yes, I could call more, Beth. I know that. I could ask you to visit more. I should. But I feel like I put myself out there again and again only to be rebuffed every time, and after a while I stopped wanting to do it. You’re a grown woman now, and you have been for a while. If you didn’t want a relationship with me, I wasn’t going to push it.”

I don’t reply, because I can’t. My throat is tight and my head is spinning and I can’t quite reconcile her version of the last nine years with mine, even as part of me can. Yes, I told her to leave. Yes, I said it didn’t work. Because she seemed so unenthused to be there, because life was hard enough, and yes, because I was still angry. But I needed her to be my mom, to push through my crap and love me anyway. Isn’t that what moms do?

Or, I wonder bleakly, is it sometimes better for a mother to walk away? Better for her, and maybe even better for the child? I know I can’t blame my mother for every hard or bad thing that happened to me. Maybe it was actually better that things happened the way they did. Who knows how life would have turned out for either of us otherwise?

“I’m sorry I didn’t have the resources to help you more,” she says quietly, a throb in her voice. “The emotional and the financial ones. I really am.”

I nod, accepting, unable to reply, because the emotions are skating far too close to the surface, and on this point I know exactly how she feels.

30

ALLY

It’s Christmas Eve. Outside, snow has started to fall, blanketing the street in softness, as the streetlights begin to blink on, creating warm pools of light. It is a scene worthy of a photograph, a snapshot for my memory.

Even though the house is decorated with evergreen and holly, with candles and red velvet ribbon and a big, jolly wreath on the door, the tree laden with ornaments and presents, a smell of shortbread in the air, I can’t feel festive. My heart is like a stone within me, and I press one hand on the cool glass of the living-room window, as if the shock of it will somehow jolt me out of this leaden feeling.

It’s been eight days since Josh was suspended, kicked off both varsity teams, his name whispered throughout the school and up and down our street, my phone lighting up with texts and voicemails I choose to ignore. Apparently the mother of a girl in his class found drugs in her bedroom; the girl ratted out Josh as a way to exonerate herself, and it worked because no parent wants to believe the worst of their child.

The hardest part of it, perhaps, is the fact that Josh had stopped dealing. He insisted he had, anyway, and he’d told us the girl must have been keeping the drugs for a couple of weeks, at least. He was so angry, so hurt, that I felt a powerless sympathy for him; it’s not as if I could tell the principal it was okay, because my son wasn’t dealing drugs now. We were lucky they decided not to expel him, because of his “stellar academic and athletic record.” Suspension for the rest of the term was light in comparison, even if it didn’t feel that way in the moment.

I did feel I had to tell Monica about his suspension, although Nick insisted I wasn’t required to legally; she wasn’t pleased, of course, but she said that since Dylan was most likely only going to be with us for a few more weeks it was “not a significant enough issue to warrant his removal.”

“There are no drugs in the house,” I told her, hating that I had to say it. “I’ve made absolutely sure of that, and Josh isn’t involved in any of that any longer.”

Monica didn’t reply; whether she didn’t believe me or didn’t care, I wasn’t sure.

It’s been nine days since Emma said she wasn’t returning to Harvard and officially withdrew from the university; she filled out an application for a job at Subway, mostly, I think, just to annoy me. That one heartfelt hug aside, my daughter has continued to ignore or be angry with me. I don’t know which is worse.

It’s been almost as long since the whole idea of who I was as a mother, as a person, imploded on me. I still haven’t found the strength to reconstruct my identity. I don’t know how to begin. For the last eight days I’ve been going through the motions of this busy time of year—writing Christmas cards, wrapping presents, existing in a fog, trying to figure out where any of us go from here even as I struggle to think at all.

Yesterday morning, Beth picked up Dylan, and as much as I’d been determined to look forward to it just being the four of us again—hoping somehow this might help to heal us—I hated to see him go. He clung to me, and I struggled not to cling to him. Somehow, in the midst of all this wreckage, Dylan, in his uncomplicated need for affection and his easy giving of it, has become the glue that holds us together.

Now it is Christmas Eve, and I haven’t seen my children all day. They’re both skulking in their rooms, and I wonder if they will for the whole vacation. Perhaps the presents under the tree that I bought in an online frenzy will remain unopened; the turkey taking up half the fridge won’t be cooked. I feel suspended between the past and the future, and the present isn’t a place I want to be.