This essay was originally published by The Audacity on October 30, 2024. You can listen to the audio version on the Bad Mothers podcast.
Jess was three, standing alone over the toilet, her too-big nightgown puddling at her feet. I can see her small hands pressed to her mouth, her face pink and wet with tears. She always vomited when she cried too hard, and she was hysterical because my father had just dropped us off at home with our mom. My parents had recently divorced, and Jess still didn’t understand why Dad no longer lived with us. My other sisters and I whispered to her from the doorway to calm down. We were all too afraid to hold her, because offering any consolation would be equivalent to missing our father, to choosing his side.
This is one of my most shameful memories. My biggest regret. I was 11. I was the oldest, and I let Jess cry alone because I was afraid of upsetting my mother. It took me another decade to learn that, many times, the things we dread most are not as bad as we imagine.
Mom called me, out of the blue, in 2013. It had been about three years since we’d spoken and eight since we had any meaningful relationship. During that conversation, she told me about the two greatest regrets of her life, neither of which were her abandonment of me and my sisters.
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The 1996 Summer Olympics and the Magnificent Seven transfixed us. My sisters and I spent all day on the lawn in front of our apartment building in our bathing suits, judging each other’s balance beam and floor routine performances. We had a small stereo and little awareness of passing traffic. In the evenings, we cheered on Kerri Strug and Dominique Dawes.
I view that summer on a wooden lawn-edging-turned-balance-beam as a metaphor for the balance we’d found in our relationship with Mom. We’d moved further away from Dad and things felt calmer, for a while. We only saw him once a month, for the weekend. Often, I skipped those monthly visits to earn some goodwill at home. My sisters and I had learned to steel ourselves when we said goodbye to Dad, to never appear too excited about his visits.
