Remi lay on the floor and kicked her fleshy legs out in front of her. “Umm, not exactly.”
How this pattern was established, a mother’s attempt to preserve a daughter’s ego, protect her innocence, only to have the daughter snap back with a crushing blow to her own, was a mystery. Was this how mean girls were made? Or was it just childhood innocence? Whatever it was, Betsy fell for it every time, fighting the urge to retreat to the closet to change her shirt. “Let’s go say bye-bye to Daddy, OK?” Ending sentences with an approval-seeking “OK?” was another habit Betsy found almost impossible to break. Betsy was learning what it meant to be a parent, that even if you want something, desperately, for your child, you can’t will it into being. They can’t be coerced or molded, only occasionally persuaded—and protected, of course, but Betsy’s focus on guarding her daughter from the evils of the world was as hot and precise as a laser. Children are born who they are. The challenge for Betsy was to learn how to get out of Remi’s way.
It had been three days since Gavin busted her lurking on the stoop. Out on the street, tiny backpack and lunch in hand, they tromped down the sidewalk, Betsy and her girl—in ladybug galoshes on one of those perfect, blue-sky September mornings—ready to face the world. Just choosing a route for the morning walk to the Montessori school in their neighborhood had been a challenge for Betsy. They’d tried a few paths, sampling them for distance, horn noise, exhaust from idling cars, and the number of street crossings, and Betsy had decided on a slightly longer, less direct path that she timed at seventeen minutes.
She was determined to walk her daughter to school. For starters, if she subtracted the walk to school from their time together, she was spending only three waking hours with her child every day. She also didn’t want to give the other mothers at school another reason to criticize her. She had to go.
The division of parental duties was an illusion, Betsy was convinced, which existed so working fathers and mothers could feel like they were pulling equal weight in the contemporary American family. Trading off the rituals of meal preparation, bath time, and dish duty was fine. But the other hidden tasks, including decoding the subtle signals at school, tipped heavily to the maternal side. Gavin had offered to do drop-off, but he was so oblivious to his surroundings, the dynamics between the kids and the school director, the dreaded Elodie, that she knew he’d return with no pertinent information and decided to take on the task herself until she was satisfied that she’d gathered sufficient intel. During her early years in town, Betsy had fought (and lost, mostly) her own social battles before she gave up on the idea of meeting new people. Then she had a baby, and it all started again. When would she be free of the tyranny of the alpha female? The pattern that began in grade school repeated itself again and again, in high school, college, at work, and now in the well-lit hallways of her daughter’s preschool, decorated with construction paper cutouts.