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By Root 1099 0

that she didn’t want to spend her entire life watching college football at Patrick and Ann Marie’s every Saturday while the kids played outside and the women made pasta salad and talked about laundry detergent—by then, it was too late. She was married with two children. Discovering that you craved independence when you were a young mother was about as convenient and feasible as shooting a man in cold blood and then deciding you didn’t feel like being a murderer after all. So she drank far too much and fought with her husband, and fought with Alice, and was generally an absolute mess. Once, she had stumbled drunk into Chris’s first-grade classroom for a parent-teacher conference, scaring his teacher half to death. Most days, she had started drinking at lunchtime. She carried on like this until the spring she took her kids to Maine and really hit rock bottom. She knew now that sometimes a person needed to sink that low to be able to get up again, and she didn’t regret it. She had changed after all that, and somehow become a woman she actually liked.

She got through the rest of her children’s years at home by telling herself that once they were off at college she’d be free, and that had proven more or less true. In the meantime, she had focused on staying sober; she planted an organic garden in the backyard. She learned that yoga and long walks could help her relieve stress better than chardonnay, and that there was real value to knowing about herbs and vegetables and ways to heal oneself that didn’t come in tiny plastic vials. Her father lent her the money to go to night school and get her master’s degree, after which she worked as a guidance counselor in a private high school full of self-loathing overprivileged girls with eating disorders. She went on lots of dates, which Ann Marie and Alice thought made her the whore of Babylon. A mother shouldn’t be sexual, God forbid. She should have her vagina sealed over with plaster and declare herself closed for business, no matter if she was thirty-nine years old and only beginning to realize who she was.

No one had told Kathleen about the dark parts of motherhood. You gave birth and people brought over the sweetest little shoes and pale pink swaddling blankets. But then you were alone, your body trying to heal itself while your mind went numb. There was a mix of joy and the purest love, coupled with real boredom and occasional rage. It got easier as the kids got older, but it never got easy.

“After I had you, I understood for the first time why people shake their babies to death,” she had told Maggie on one of her long trips to New York.

“Thanks a lot,” Maggie had said.

“Oh no, that’s not what I meant,” Kathleen said. “It wasn’t you—you were the best baby I ever saw. It’s motherhood in general that makes a woman nuts. All those hormones rushing around inside you. You can’t sleep. You can’t reason with this little beast. Before I had kids, I thought those people who shook babies were monsters, with some sort of inorganic urge. Then I realized that the violent urge is totally natural. It’s the stopping yourself part that’s inorganic, that takes real work.”

She wanted her daughter to know this, to have all the information up front. If she herself could have had that, so much of life might have been easier.

Kathleen’s mother had never understood the value of sharing one’s pain. Not for her own good, or for anyone else’s. If Alice hadn’t covered up her drinking, but had talked about it instead—the way it consumed her, the fact that it had caused her to drive them straight into a tree when they were kids—perhaps Kathleen never would have gotten into the same mess years later.

Kathleen and Maggie had a completely open relationship; she had made sure of that. They were best friends. It had just about killed her when Maggie went off to college in Ohio, and she was an adult then, a mother. And it was still torturous now, each time she went to New York for a visit and then had to say good-bye. Kathleen told her daughter everything and Maggie in turn could confide in her. Kathleen took