Mom jabbed her finger at me. “You watch it. I’m still your mother. I don’t care how old you are.”
“Why did you stay with him, huh? I mean, was there ever a time you actually liked Dad?” I threw the tea towel on the counter. “‘Cause all I saw was you nagging and correcting and belittling. And it’s like you took joy in it.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Mom whispered.
“How about Nicki’s big news surprise night, huh? You couldn’t wait to show up Dad. You couldn’t wait to share the news that
you
were the one Brad asked to marry Nicki. You were the one who gave your blessing. You made him look like a fucking fool!”
“Where is this coming from? That was over a year ago!”
“So what?! So what, Mom?! And you never answered my question. Was there ever a time in your pitiful marriage that you actually liked my father?”
Mom ripped off her apron
. “I don’t have to answer that! You don’t get to ask me questions like that! You have no idea—
NO IDEA
—the love I had for your father!”
“Really? Because as far as I’m concerned, I’m the only one who truly loved him! I’m the only
one who accepted him for who he was: messed up and sloppy and fucking human! We shared the secrets. We shared the jokes. We shared the love because you couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. You were too busy hating his guts!”
My reflexes were no match
for the swiftness of my mother’s hand. She whipped it out and smacked me so hard that I stumbled backward. And then she did it again. And again.
“Never talk to me like that again!” she roared.
I shut my eyes tightly, willing the tears to recede. They squeezed between my eyelids instead, and I hated myself that she elicited the reaction. I never wanted to shed tears for my mother ever again. I hated her.
“I hate you,” I whispered, rubbing my tender jaw.
Mom gasped, and then it caught in her throat. I knew the tears would come next.
“You hated us,” I went on.
And that’s what I wanted to say all along. It wasn’t just about my father. It was about me, too. Ever since my formal diagnosis. Ever since the first trip to therapy where Mom shifted relentlessly in the passenger seat of our old SUV—embarrassed and irritated that she had another one to deal with. Ever since she held Nicki in her arms for the first time in the hospital, and I knew she didn’t care about me anymore.
Those moments branded my heart, and I just now recognized it. I could cope with my mother when Dad was around. He was the peacemaker. I could crack jokes with him and hide my pain under sarcasm and self-deprecation. But now there was no one to joke with. There was no hiding my fury, my anger at a mother who couldn’t accept me for being like Dad.
“I never hated you,” my mother wept. “How could you say that?”
“I was dreaming it all?” I asked. “I dreamed it when you sent me away from the hospital without letting me hold my sister? I dreamed it when you yelled at me on the sidewalk for counting my steps? I dreamed it when I overheard you ask the doctor if there wasn’t just some pills you could give me
so that you could get on with it? Or how long that therapy session would take because you had things to do?” I paused. “I dreamed all that?”
“You were seven,” Mom breathed.
“I remember, Mom. People can remember stuff from when they were seven.”
Mom turned her face and sobbed. I wanted to walk away, but I also wanted to hear her answers—her excuses for why she was such a terrible mother.
She blotted her face with the backs of her hands and walked to the coffee maker. I watched in confusion as she poured the water, scooped the coffee grounds, pulled the sugar from the cupboard. I watched her stare at the pot as it percolated, and I realized I was getting no answers until a cup of coffee was made. I grew impatient.
“I think I’ll just go home,” I said.
“No,” she replied. “Stay.” She pulled two mugs from the cabinet.
“I don’t drink coffee,” I said.
“Tonight you will,” she replied.
I watched her pour the cups, dress the coffee, and take them to the kitchen table. I followed
reluctantly. I didn’t like the turn of events and raged inside that she took control of the conversation with a coffee pot. I liked it better a few minutes ago when I controlled it—when I had her flustered and on edge and angry.
I slipped into a chair and waited.
Mom sipped her steaming brew, then placed the mug on the table.
“I discovered his tics about eight months into our relationship,” she began. “At first I thought he was just habitually late to everything.” She paused and smirked. “We were always late to the movies. Always.”
I tapped my fingers on the tabletop. She noticed and said nothing.
“I learned a few months later about the neighborhood loops. You know what I’m talking about?”
I nodded. I could see Dad even now, circling the neighborhood at exactly fifteen miles per hour.
“I . . . I was going to break it off,” Mom continued. “I didn’t know much about the condition, but what I witnessed with him was enough to aggravate the shit out of me. And I was afraid of more. I thought perhaps I’d just skimmed the surface of his tics. Of course, I learned years later that I had. There were a slew of them, and it was hard to cope. They didn’t know back then the things they know now. It was frustrating when there were so few answers.”
“So why didn’t you?” I asked. “Why didn’t you leave him?”
A sad smile played on my mother’s lips. “I found out I was pregnant with you,” she said softly.
Now it was my turn to gasp.
“What?” I breathed.
“I was pregnant with you,” she repeated.
I checked the math in my head. It didn’t compute. Didn’t mak
e sense. I was born in July of ‘82.
“You were married a year before I was born.
March of ‘81,” I said.
Mom shook her head. “Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, ‘not exactly?’ What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“We . .
. your father and I married in March of ‘82. We just decided to tell you ‘81 because, you know.” She took another sip of her coffee. “The stigma.”
“The stigma?”
“My parents,” she said quietly, “my parents were furious. Good ol’ Southern Baptists and all.” She sighed and looked at my mug. “You haven’t had any.”
I lifted the cup to my lips automatically and drank. I tasted nothing. My sole focus was on this new revelation—the revelation that my perfect mother who needed a perfect second daughter in place of her imperfect one screwed her boyfrien
d and got pregnant, had a shotgun wedding, then
lied
about it for thirty years! I’d no idea I was smiling brightly until Mom pointed it out.
“I just . . . I can’t even . . . you of all people . . .”
The side of Mom’s mouth quirked up.
“But we’re talking the ‘8
0s here! Wasn’t everyone getting pregnant outside of wedlock? I mean, who cares?”
“No, not everyone was getting pregnant outside of wedlock
. The ‘80s were more of a throwback to conservative thinking anyway, but that’s not the point. Didn’t you just hear what I said? You knew your grandparents a little, Bailey. Raging conservative Baptists.”
I laughed. On the day of my father’s funeral, I laughed. Mom chuck
led, too.
“You totally screwed up.”
“Cute pun,” she said, and we laughed some more.
“So let me get this straight: you were all set to dump Dad, and then you discovered you were pregnant. Your parents went ballistic and forced you to marry him. And what? You lived a miserable life ever since?”
“You have it almost right,” Mom replied.
I raised my eyebrows.
“I didn’t live a miserable life,” she said softly.
I took another sip of coffee. “Are you lying to me?”
“No, Bailey.”
“Then why did you a
lways seem frustrated and angry? With Dad? With me?”
She sighed and leaned back in her chair.
“When I learned you’d inherited OCD, I felt powerless. I was angry with God because I couldn’t understand why he would do that to a child. You couldn’t understand at the time how serious your condition was because you were a child. You just thought you were really organized.” She laughed. “And your teachers loved you because you always had your shit together. They didn’t see what I saw, though. The tears at home if one thing didn’t go as planned. Your inability to be flexible. Your anxiety about school projects. God, I’ll never forget science fair one year.”
“What about it?”
“That goddamn trifold board. Bailey, I thought you were going to have a coronary because the borders I glued on weren’t exactly straight.”
“I didn’t glue them on?”
Mom shook her head. “I made you go to bed. It was too late. So I stayed up and glued them on, and in the morning when you looked at your board, you lost it.”
“I don’t remember that,” I said thoughtfully. “How old was I?”
“Ten, and I’m glad you can’t remember it because I’d never heard such language come out of a ten-year-old girl’s mouth. I thought to yank you out of school that very day.”
“Gosh
, Mom, I’m sorry.”
“Well, as much as the surfing scared the shit out of me, it seemed to help,” Mom replied. “You started letting things go.”
I finished my cup. Mom noticed.
“Another?” she asked.
I nodded. When she returned to the table with two fresh cups, she returned to a previous topic of conversation.
“You said I was miserable, but I wasn’t. I was worried. I spent most of my life worried because I didn’t want you to suffer the way your dad did. I was h
appy for the therapy and all those new discoveries about how to manage OCD because I believed they would be able to free you in ways your father never got the chance to experience. I mean, think about it: he only started really getting better when he was much older. He never had therapy as a child. He was trapped in his urges for a good portion of his life.”
“So I mistook worry for anger?”
“Sometimes,” Mom replied. “I still got angry because, again, I felt powerless. Look at my behavior when your boyfriend came over.”
“He was meeting you for the first time, Mom.
”
Mom shook her head. “God, I’m still embarrassed about that. But, I didn’t lie. I told the truth about all the times I wanted to leave your father.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Because he needed me,” she replied. “And I needed him. As weird as this sounds, his OCD bound us for life. There was no getting away from each other. He had become my reality. I think I would have been miserable had I left him and married someone without the condition.
I think I just wouldn’t have known how to function with a person who didn’t suffer from it.”
“Hmm,” I said. “That’s interesting.”
“I guess. And weird. But then love has a way of helping you cope and manage and forgive.”
“What about Nicki?” I asked suddenly. “I thought you ha
d Nicki because I was your mess-up.”
Mom froze, the coffee mug pressed to her lips. And then she set it gently on the table.
“You were never a mess-up, Bailey,” she said. “I had Nicki because I thought she could help you. She wasn’t for me. She was for you.”
Another shocking revelation. Why was I just now hearing all of this?
“Really?” I breathed.
“Yes, really. I thought if you had a sister to take care of, it might help you take the focus off yourself.
” She passed a hand over her mouth, trying to hide the grin. “I didn’t know it wouldn’t work out as planned.”
I burst out laughing.
“I love that child, but God knows . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“But you two are thick as thieves,” I pointed out.
“And why do you think that’s the case, Bailey?”
I shrugged.
“It’s because I thought you didn’t like me. You were your father’s child from the start. You spent all your time with him. I begged you to bake Christmas cookies with me. You wanted to go help him cut down a tree instead.”
“I did?”
Mom nodded. “I’m not proud of it, but somewhere along the way, I gave up. And I gave you solely to him. And embraced your sister.”
The tears slid down her cheeks, mirroring my own. We sat silent for a time, sipping our coffee, absorbing each other’s words. It’s as though we were discovering each other for the first time—two people who shared a life together for eighteen years and knew nothing about the other. Wasted time. Time that we could never get back. Our only option was to move forward, and Mom voiced the question.
“So where do we go from here?” she asked.
I rubbed my cheek. It no longer stung, but it ached.
“I shouldn’t have hit you,” she observed.
“Yes
, you should have,” I replied.