“So now I’m a bad mother.”
I came home to spend some time with Kate and I’m wrecking it. Sometimes it’s hard to think, because of the headache, and it causes me to make blunders. I’ve hurt her feelings. It shows on her face. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. You’re going to be a wonderful mother.”
She goes quiet for a moment. I wonder if she’s thinking about our dead twins right now. “Maybe you should take fatherhood leave and stay home with the baby yourself. You have all of the same so-called rights as me. And I don’t think you like your job anyway.”
She’s said this before, and she’s right, I’m less than enamored with my job at the moment. The truth is that I would like to stay home with our child, but my migraines have gotten so bad that I’m afraid I’m not capable of being her full-time caregiver. I don’t want Kate to know this. It would only worry her. I change the subject. “I’m looking forward to meeting your brother and sister tonight.”
This is a half-truth. I don’t want to be saddled with them for weeks. I’d like to meet them, but under different circumstances. Maybe for dinner and a chat, and then we go our separate ways. But Kate needs this. She and her siblings had it rough growing up. It made them closer than most brothers and sisters, and they’ve been apart for too long.
What began for Kate as a normal middle-class upbringing in Aspen, Colorado, came to a halt in 1993, when she was thirteen, when her mother, Diane, was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time, her brother, John, was seven. Her sister, Mary, was eight. Her father, Randy, was unable to cope. Faced with the death of his wife, he went into a depression that left him increasingly incapable of functioning as a husband and father. As Kate’s mother grew sicker from chemo and radiation treatments, Kate was forced to become de facto head of the household and to grow up almost overnight.
Kate cared for her mother while she watched her die slow. She spoon-fed her, changed her sheets, cleaned up her vomit-and at the same time cared for her two younger siblings. When Diane finally died, her death broke Randy and he became an alcoholic. He managed to hold down his job, but was blitzed every minute he wasn’t working. He paid the rent and basic bills, then spent most of the remainder of his paycheck in bars. He gave the pittance left over to Kate, to clothe and feed herself, John and Mary.
Randy was a mechanic, maintained the lifts at a ski resort, and he got Kate free skiing lessons and lift passes. She has never said it, but I think seeing her mother’s helplessness while she battled cancer turned Kate into a control freak. She excelled at everything, got perfect grades at school. She let go of her pent-up anger and frustration on the slopes and became a fantastic downhill skier.
By age fifteen, Kate was winning all of the junior events she entered. She began competing as an adult at age sixteen. She kept winning. She made up her mind that she would compete in the Olympics. When she was seventeen, she was in a race and going nearly a hundred miles an hour. She took a fall, broke her hip, and spent her eighteenth birthday in traction. End of dream. She still walks with a limp because of it.