At the book launch for Nina St. Pierre’s memoir, Love is a Burning Thing, I found myself crying, like, tears streaming down my face crying, hoping that everyone would keep their eyes on the stage where Nina was being interviewed by author Chloe Cooper Jones, and not notice the lady who couldn’t seem to stop crying.
I had had a weird wretched fight with my daughters that week that I couldn’t quite shake. They were pissed at me for not letting them wear crop tops - they are 6 and 9 - and they kind of ganged up on me, a first, and there was something in their weird pointless rage that exasperated me into some rarely visited beyond region, where I glimpsed that the whole calculus of my adult life, where I sacrifice on a daily basis, for them, where entire sections of my life are on hold, for them, guaranteed me absolutely nothing.
Sure, they were wonderful kids most of the time. But they could grow up to be turds. They could grow up and find me boring, casting my husband and my mother as the fun ones and me as the killjoy. They could grow up to spend fortunes on therapy complaining about me. They could just decide that I was awful, cherry picking memories to support that portrayal, not understanding all of the factors and forces and pressures that influenced my mothering of them and shaped the contours of our life. All of my effort, twenty plus years of it - well they could just turn their little noses up at it, and I’d have no recourse.
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