Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [70]
“It’s all very hard to explain,” she tries again, then corrects herself. “No, it’s not. That is my excuse, but it’s not hard to explain. I’ve been telling myself that it’s complicated so I don’t have to face up to the guilt of the situation, but it’s not complicated. I made a horrible decision. Period.” She manages a laugh. “My therapist would be so proud of me. Accepting responsibility.”
The waiter arrives with our pots of tea and minisandwiches. I reach for one and peel at the crust.
“What happened?” I say finally, forcing myself to ask but repressing it, too, so fearful of her answer. It’s because you didn’t pick up your goddamned room!
“I just . . . you know, this is going to sound awful, and it’s okay, you can hate me and judge me for it; I expect that.” She drops her eyes down to her hands. “But I just wasn’t ready for all of it—for motherhood and the obligations that it brought, and for my marriage and the complications that we had . . .”
I wipe two tears off my cheek. They are sprinkling down at random, so I look not so much as if I’m crying, rather that I have something lodged in my eye.
“None of this meant that I didn’t love you. Or Andy,” my mother says firmly. “I was just young . . . and I didn’t . . . I didn’t know how to cope. Your dad and I married at twenty, and when . . .”—she clears her throat—“when I left, I wasn’t even thirty, and I had it in my head that there was so much more life out there, just so much more to do than sit at home and be a mother . . .” Her voice drifts off, then she rights herself. “This is all coming out wrong. I’d prepared it all, but now, it’s not coming out the way I want.”
“I’m not sure what to say.”
“I know,” she responds. “I know. But, take this however you need to, but my love for you and your brother . . . it never wavered. I missed you every day of my life. I just didn’t know how to juggle both of those things: my love for you and my need to get out of what felt like chains.” She shrugs, though there’s nothing casual in the movement. “I was young. It’s not an excuse. But I didn’t know what else to do.”
The first time that I held Katie, after an anguished, brutal labor that was nothing like they described in the copious magazines that I’d read, after I pushed what I believed was an impossible push and I felt her head and then shoulder and then legs roll out of me, I was so beaten down that my body had nearly gone numb. Then they placed this alien, swollen, bloodied being on my chest and said, “Here you go, Mommy,” and rather than drown in a flood of love, I felt nothing. I didn’t say this to Henry, who was seeping tears of joy from behind his video camera; I didn’t, in fact, breathe mention of this to anyone. Not to Ainsley, who was wallowing in the dredges of postpartum depression and who might have understood, not to my new mommy friends whose lives seemed as shiny as their tricked-out thousand-dollar strollers.
But I held Katie underneath the harsh hospital lights and smiled and cooed, and she squirmed and wailed, and I looked down at her and waited for that rush of emotion to come. And yet it didn’t. I was relieved when the nurses came to gather her for her first bath.
We swaddled her up and took her home, and still, I waited. I pressed my nipple in her tiny, greedy mouth, and I rocked her to sleep and I sang to her when she woke. And still, I waited for the tidal wave that everyone describes as unconditional maternal love. From the first moment, Henry, the most logical, stoic being I’d ever encountered, was smitten, and yet, here I was, the picture of motherly perfection, with a void where my adoration should be.
Finally, when she was six weeks old, I heard her stir in her crib, so I dragged myself in to begin the routine: diaper, nurse, burp, sing, nap all over again. Katie was staring at her pink floral bumper guard and must have heard me enter. She startled and started to wail, and my insides curdled at the sound of it. But then,