Maine

She missed yoga. You couldn’t throw a rock in Brooklyn without hitting three yoga studios, but her kind of yoga had nothing to do with svelte twenty-six-year-olds in trendy workout gear. Her kind of yoga included Arlo and her in the backyard, wearing sweatpants, gazing at the mountains in the distance, rather than looking out at a sea of taxicabs through a dirty window.

Kathleen had never liked the way Ann Marie treated kids, no matter how maternal everyone thought she was. She’d bake cookies with them after school and take them ice-skating and make clothes for their dolls, putting other mothers to shame in that way. (Some women were created to make other women feel like shit about themselves. Ann Marie was one of them.) But she also controlled every move her children made—she told them what to wear, which classes to take, who they should and should not date. She wouldn’t let them have so much as a goldfish in the house even though they begged for a puppy, because she couldn’t stand the mess associated with pets. Fiona, her youngest, had wanted to play the tuba in the high school band; Ann Marie insisted that the piccolo was more appropriate.
Who could say what Ann Marie’s children might have become if they’d been allowed to just be?

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 would never understand why logic couldn’t conquer something as simple and commonplace as love.

Maggie knew all too well that Kathleen saw motherhood as the end of independence, growth, fulfillment. And yes, yes, we were at war, and terrorists might kill us all, and it seemed like a dreadful world to bring a child into. But when had the world been any better, really? When was it ever a safe time to create a life?

wasn’t biological, she insisted. It was situational. A sensible woman could catch a man in only so many lies before she started to hunt for clues of betrayal. Snoop and ye shall find, he’d say dismissively. Well, actually, yes, she’d think. In your case, yes.

Maggie was twenty-two when he passed away, and even now, ten years later, the thought of it was jarring. She recalled a line from a poem she had memorized in college: No thing that ever flew, not the lark, not you, can die as others do.

“I know you want to be married and settled, but give it up. You can’t make chicken soup from chicken shit.”