The side of Mom’s mouth quirked up.
“But we’re talking the ‘80s 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 chuckled, 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 always 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 happy 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 had 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.
She gathered our mugs and walked to the kitchen sink. I followed.
“I don’t know where we go from here,” I admitted.