Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Six
Sally
Every afternoon as Sally waited in the school pickup line, she played Bonnie Raitt softly in the background to calm her nerves.
What mood would her daughter be in today?
She hated this feeling of dread; she shouldn’t be feeling this way every day her daughter returned home.
Today will be different. Today she’ll be in a better mood and we’ll do something nice together, have a mother-daughter conversation that Kit can store within her core memories , Sally told herself.
But those days rarely came. Instead, she studied Kit’s body language and facial expressions carefully as she broke out of the middle school doors to properly arm herself against whatever wrath Kit needed to expel.
“Mom, we need to talk about periods,” Kit declared as she slumped into the car one Tuesday afternoon.
Was it happening? Had it begun? She had talked to Kit a little about sex, but somehow she felt out of place doing it. Was it because they weren’t bound by blood? Or did every mother feel this way?
“Has yours started, honey? You know I don’t ask because I know you’ll tell me if it does.” Sally didn’t know this at all.
Kit rolled her eyes. Another new habit.
“No, I haven’t. But Sabrina just told me hers had started. And a bunch of the other girls in my class, they all got theirs like last year.”
Sally always worried about Kit’s development, physically and emotionally.
She had taken her to Macy’s for her first training bra.
But she had noticed that her friends’ daughters all needed one several years before Kit.
She talked to her doctor. Everything was genetic when it came to development.
And what did Sally know about Kit’s genes?
Nothing more than a few lines written on a document Terry had locked away.
Her thoughts started to spiral. Why had she not started to menstruate?
Would it affect her fertility later down the line?
Was it a signal of some other underlying issue with her reproductive organs that Sally needed to look into?
“Well, I think everyone just starts in their own time. No need to worry about it. I’m not,” she lied.
“It’s kind of weird, everyone else having theirs, and not being able to talk about it. Like, what does it feel like? When you have it? Some of my friends say it hurts.” Sally tried to look at Kit’s expression as she asked the questions, but her daughter spoke into the window of the passenger seat.
“Some people experience cramps, that’s right.”
“When did you get yours?”
“Around your age, I’d say.”
Neither of them spoke, and the air grew heavy. What did it matter when Sally got hers? It had no bearing on Kit. She wanted urgently to get in front of the computer and type in question after question to further expand her fear.
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Kit forgot about the conversation the moment she returned home and locked herself up in her bedroom.
Meanwhile, Sally went to her desk and surprised herself.
She wrote an email to the adoption agency to request more information on the health of Kit’s biological parents.
It was a gut reaction as her mind swirled around the most dire, desperate scenarios.
She never looked at the best case; it was always the worst. This way she could be fully prepared emotionally to face whatever problems might come.
Only the problems never came. Instead, she just had a wealth of knowledge of what might happen.
And a deep ocean of fatigue that swept over her.
She needed to know what Kit’s genetic fate was.
It was imperative as her mother that she know who her biological mother was and how it might change the course of Kit’s life.
She couldn’t talk to anyone about her decision, including Terry.
Though once she had sent the email she realized that the agency could reply to him too.
It was a small risk, but one she rationalized taking.
For the following three days, Sally observed Kit carefully.
Every movement, and whenever she could get close enough, she would try to look at her with a clinical eye.
That weekend Sally knew Kit’s bowel movements, when her energy spiked in the morning and fell into a sleepy afternoon lull.
She observed with forensic detail Kit’s concentration ebb and flow as she tried to sit down and do her homework.
She studied the small mounds that had emerged on Kit’s chest. Were they symmetrical?
Were they developing at the expected rate?
She googled “relation between breast development and fertility in teens.” And then looked back again at Kit’s silhouette, tilting her head to study her body shape further.
Kit had learned to walk in a way that swung her hips from side to side.
“What are you doing, Mom? You’re giving me that weird look again,” Kit snapped.
Sally was jolted out of her internalized analysis and sat upright.
“Oh sorry, honey, I was miles away.”
“Miles away where?” Kit asked. She crossed her arms over her body, her eyes hard and cold.
Sometimes, Sally could see a different woman in her daughter.
The woman who she was becoming. Her whole face was changing.
She was still Kit, but a small feature, something in her expression, was different.
Was it the way her eyes moved, the way her brows knitted?
Or was it the way her lips pursed a certain way? This was a woman Sally didn’t know.
“Just thinking about things. Are you feeling all right? You’re not coming down with anything? It’s so cold out and everyone seems to be getting strep right now.”
“Yup, I’m fine,” Kit said and turned on the heel of her fluffy slipper and stomped up the stairs.
Sally missed the younger Kit. She went from being a child who would never stop talking—who talked so much in fact that Sally’s brain would hurt after spending an intense hour with her on Sunday when they went for their weekly playground and hot cocoa—to being almost completely silent overnight.
Kit would talk in a breathless monologue about every interaction that had happened that week.
She commanded Sally to ask me more questions, Mommy!
Until they ended up arguing over how the nuance of conversation came down to a reciprocal discussion: one person asked a question, the other person would inquire after the other. That was good manners.
When Kit was little, she would cover Sally’s face with kisses and squeeze her mother so hard as she hugged her.
It was the kind of smothering physical contact that Sally wanted to get away from, and when she had that thought she felt an intense guilt sweep through her.
But nobody prepared her for the fact that one day the tap of claustrophobic affection would just dry up.
One day Kit woke up and no longer wanted to snuggle, or give herself over to her mother for free examination, whether it was a hand on the brow for a fever or to look at a scratch on her knee.
She no longer wanted her mother in her bathroom so they could talk while she bathed and showered.
She no longer wanted her mother to stay in her bed with her as she fell asleep in her arms. Instead, Kit became what seemed to be independent and aloof overnight.
She was guarded about her body, and Sally always suspected it was because somewhere in the back of Kit’s mind she always remembered that at the beginning, they were strangers.
She wanted to know what the other girls were doing at home, but she never asked her other mom friends.
She never talked about the adoption to anyone, not even Terry.
One thing Sally had learned about other mothers was that they loved to say, “Oh, you know how it is,” as they shared their parenting struggles.
But Sally didn’t know. She didn’t know because she didn’t even know what it was like to have a baby growing inside her.
Now, the pain of this emptiness had subsided almost completely; instead, there was an anxiety that nothing was holding her child to her.
There was no invisible thread like the remnants of the umbilical cord that would keep her connected through adolescence and adulthood.
For Sally and Kit, everything was newly formed: their bond, connection, and need for each other.
It was painstakingly rooted in the paperwork that allowed them to be a family.
Only through these sheets of addendums and clauses could they be held together, like a paper ring chain that could snap if pulled too hard.
There was no blood, DNA samples, or facial traits that attached Kit to her.
Each stage of motherhood so far was like this for Sally.
She walked around the buried land mines, holding her breath for fear of taking a wrong step.
Life flowed on and demanded reactions from her, demanded discomfort, discipline, and boundaries.
Like all her normal, biological parental peers, she had to guide Kit.
But there was no luxury of imagining Kit as herself with more opportunities.
Sally was not entitled to the phrase She’s just like I was at that age , because Kit was probably just like someone else, a complete stranger.
She could only imagine what life might have been like for Kit if she hadn’t been adopted by them.
This was something Sally had never thought of.
Her heart ached too much to think of what might have become of this baby, left with nobody to fend for her.
It was an unspeakable image, the same theoretical devastation she felt when she imagined Kit falling from the playground climbing frame or tumbling down the stairs of her home.
This made her know her maternal love was real, the fear part, anyway.
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