Page 148 of Woman on the Verge

Dear Rose,

This is your daughter, Nicole. My father died and I found the journal you kept all those years ago ...

I don’t know what to write after this.

Would you like to talk on the phone sometime?

Do you want to meet over Zoom?

Where in California are you? Should we do lunch?

Do I even want contact with her? She has never wanted contact with me all these years. Am I after something else? If I’m honest, perhaps I just want her to know I know.You couldn’t hide forever!Perhaps I’m hoping that will torment her. Perhaps I long for an apology. Perhaps I long for her remorse, if just to prove to myself that staying in the trenches of motherhood, despite all temptation to go AWOL, is worth it. Perhaps I long for this more than I long for an actual relationship. Perhaps when Crystal said, “There is healing to be had there,” she wasn’t implying healing via reaching out to my mother, but healing via reaching within myself.

It’s a busy workday. I stop only to make myself a sandwich and enjoy the silence of my home. It was uncomfortable at first, the silence. After all, what mother ever gets quiet time alone in her own home? I’m ashamed of my needs at times, embarrassed by my privilege.

Before I know it, it’s four o’clock, and I hear Kyle open the front door, the girls calling, “Mommy!” Kyle says, “Give her a few minutes to wrap up work, okay?” but they do not listen. Their feet are loud and fast on the wood floor, and then they are standing before me. I feel the ambivalence in my body—the joy of seeing their little faces, the annoyance at an earlier-than-expected end to my workday. I am learning to carry both. There is room for both.

Grace is holding out a picture she drew at school—two stick figures that have only heads, a line for their bodies, and feet. No arms. She says one is me and one is her. Liv is shouting over her that she did not have an accident all day. I transform my face into one displaying enthusiastic joy and watch their faces do the same in response. We are, the three of us, wide eyed and ecstatic.

“Mommy done?” Liv asks, looking at my open laptop.

“Almost,” I say as I stand and pick her up. She wraps her legs around my middle.

“I want to koala too,” Grace says. We have recently madekoalainto a verb.

I put down Liv and lift Grace. She is heavier, and my back aches, but I know someday soon they will be too big for me to hold, and I’ll feel an ache of a different kind. I have to wonder how much of suffering is rooted in shortsightedness. These moments with them are fleeting, so fleeting.

“Girls! Let Mom finish!” Kyle shouts, looking out for my sanity in ways he never did before. “Come here!”

I put Grace down, and she says, “Mom, I can do a pirouette!”

She shows me, and Liv copies her, and they turn in circles toward the door as Kyle yells for them again.

“Okay, tiny dancers, go with Daddy. I’ll be right out.”

They obey. It is only when they are gone that I realize I’ve been holding my breath. I am still working on relaxing into the ambivalence.

I exhale as I sit and turn back to my laptop, stare at the draft of my email to Rose Fournier. I move my cursor over the words, highlight them.

I inhale.

I hit Delete.

The girls erupt into laughter, and I rise from my chair, compelled to discover the origin of such glee.

I close my laptop.

I do not need to write to my mother. Not today, anyway.

Today, I do not have answers or resolutions, but I do not require any. Today, I am sure of nothing except that I have everything I need.