Only one person did not try to change her mind. Her daughter said simply: It’s your choice.
When I heard this I had a sinking feeling. The two women had a fraught history. Enough bones of contention between us, my friend joked, to make a whole skeleton. She often joked about her relationship with her daughter, partly because humor had always been a strong feature of her personality and partly because it was her way of dealing with difficulty. I remember when her daughter was born: an unusually troubled pregnancy ending in a grueling labor with postpartum hemorrhaging severe enough to require a transfusion—I guess that’s what happens when you bring a monster into the world was how she’d joke about it later.
They lived two thousand miles apart, and although on speaking terms at the time of my friend’s diagnosis (unlike the many times I could recall when they were not), they had not had much contact in years.
I’ve never even met the man she lives with, my friend told me. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear only after the fact that they’d got married.
It’s your choice. It wasn’t for me to judge this response. No need to put the cruelest and most sinister connotation on it, either. But I knew how it might sound to my friend and how much pain it could cause her.
Unnatural is a word that keeps coming to mind when I think about this mother and daughter. For as long as I can remember, there seemed to be only misunderstanding between them. Instances of affection were rare enough when they shared the same roof. Once the daughter moved out, they vanished altogether.
When my friend began a sentence If I had known how it would be, I was certain that she’d go on: I would never have had a child. But I would have tried to have at least one more was what she actually said.
Once upon a time, faced with a child that mystified or repelled because of some trait—illness or disability, lack of affection, bad behavior—parents were only too willing to believe that their real child had been stolen and that the thieves (according to many folklores, most likely devils or fairies) had left a replacement that was really a troll or a devilkin or some other nonhuman thing. Imagine how many times the myth of the changeling has been justification for child abuse: corporal punishment, neglect, abandonment, infanticide even.
Any notion that my friend’s daughter might have been accidentally switched at birth was easily scotched: She had her mother’s fine blue eyes down to the gold rings around the pupils. The same heart-shaped face, the same bowed legs, voices that couldn’t be told apart. But I remember hearing my friend say it more than once: If we were living in the Dark Ages, I’d swear the kid was a changeling.
When pressed, an exasperated sigh. She just doesn’t feel like mine.
Which never failed to chill me.
And when she made the comment—if she’d known how things would turn out she’d have tried to have another child—that too chilled me. But I thought I understood. If she’d had another child, and if she succeeded in having a better relationship with it, wouldn’t that prove that it wasn’t all her fault how badly things had turned out with her daughter? I understood. Or, at least, I tried to.
She would also insist that everything would have been different—meaning better—if her daughter had been a son.
This is the saddest story I have ever heard, begins one of the twentieth century’s most famous novels. Often this comes to mind when I hear people talk about their messy lives, especially about their unhappy families.
There was a father, of course. Or rather the ghost of one. They’d been in the same crowd all through high school, and at the end, briefly, just before he was drafted into the army, a couple. When he returned from the war they had tried but failed to make a go of it. The daughter had been, my friend confessed, the result of break-up sex.
We knew it was over, she said. But we weren’t angry with each other, and I had no idea when I was going to have sex again. It was me who insisted on one last time.
The thought of marriage never entered her mind, she said. She was not in love with him, she had never been in love with him—besides nostalgia for high school they had no interests in common—and she had no desire to have this man in her life for years to come. When she told him she was pregnant, she also made it clear that she expected nothing from him. She had wealthy parents, who, as it happened, were more delighted than upset to learn of their daughter’s condition. They had always regretted not having been able to have more than one child themselves. Whatever the circumstances, the promise of a grandchild was cause for celebration.
And since my friend’s boyfriend had returned from the war feeling lost and unsure of just about everything except that he was not ready for fatherhood, he was all for a plan that subtracted him from the story. In any case, he longed to leave his hometown and start a new life elsewhere. He didn’t even wait for the baby to be born before taking off.
A decade of silence ended with news of his death. One day, he and his wife happened to be out driving in the country when they came upon a house whose second floor was in flames and from which, the wife later explained, her husband said he’d heard screaming. He had run into the house and up the stairs and then, overcome by the heat and smoke, suffered cardiac arrest. Firefighters arriving just minutes later were unable to revive him. As for the screams, the wife herself had heard nothing, she said, and it turned out that, at the time of the fire, no one was home.
I should never have told her that story, my friend said. I should’ve pretended all along that I had no idea who her father was.
In the mother’s eyes, the father, insignificant enough to begin with, had diminished with time to practically nothing. For the daughter, absence had only made him loom ever larger, and in death he became a colossus.
Strikingly handsome—see the high school yearbook. (You’d have expected him to be with someone a lot prettier was one of the sharper arrows in the daughter’s quiver.) A soldier: brave, romantic. A hero who’d sacrificed his life to save strangers from a burning house. A man like that doesn’t simply abandon his own child. And yet she had never met him. She had never even spoken with him.
And whose fault was that?
It broke her heart, said my friend, when she was cleaning out her daughter’s closet one day and found the letters she’d been secretly writing him.
And in which, it seemed, she had poured out all her resentment against mother and grandparents.
I know they didn’t give you a chance. I know what my mother is like and what she’s capable of doing to get her own way.
She hated being the child of a single mother—the only such among her friends when she was growing up. She could never shake her feelings of shame for her fatherlessness. Equally lasting was her hostility toward anyone her mother dated. Though she would never marry, my friend had affairs with several men while her daughter was growing up, and with every one of them the girl had behaved as rudely as possible. It would not be unfair to say that she helped drive some away.