Chapter 23 Lurielle #2
Kael rolled over at four months. Kora was content to glare at the ceiling fan as if it owed her money.
Her son babbled happily, banging his spoon, delighted in making noise for the sake of making noise.
Her daughter startled at sharp sounds, erupting into furious tears, glaring at all present once she was settled.
Kora did not self-soothe or adhere to schedules.
Sleep training was a bluff, one that she was happy to call them on.
As she stared at the ceiling one night, listening to her daughter rage in Khash’s arms, Lurielle admitted to the universe that she had merely been the beneficiary of temperament, lucky to have had an easy baby, and that she hadn’t crushed anything at all.
The weeks continued to pass. Her tiny, furious girl’s crying fits lessened, but her obstinacy only increased.
By five months, she refused her fruit purees and mashed vegetables.
It was poison on the spoon, and Lurielle could not trick her.
Kael had opened his mouth obligingly, like a trusting little bird.
Kora, not to be confused with her brother on any day of the week, clamped her mouth shut, as if her tiny jaws came equipped with a lock, refusing to be bullied.
She would only eat if she could hold her food in her hand, squeezing avocado slices to pulp and smearing them on her face like war paint as she stared Lurielle down.
“She’s strong-willed, Bluebell. We’ve got ourselves a future CEO here.”
“That or a dictator,” she mumbled as Kora gummed down her dinner with an air of insolence.
Lurielle grinned in spite of herself at her little warrior.
She knew what the world said about strong-willed women, no matter the species.
It wouldn’t be long before “strong-willed” was reframed as “difficult”. We’re not going to let that happen.
Even through the daily trials that were her daughter’s personality, there was something she needed to recognize, Despina urged her. It was hard. They were different babies; Kael had been easy, and this was really fucking hard.
“And even though it’s hard, Lurielle, she’s still doing great. You said it yourself. You haven’t had an ‘I don’t want to be like my mom’ spiral since the day you brought her home. Why is that?”
“Because I don’t have time for that!” she blurted, her face heating. “I’ll never have time to catalog ‘the ways she’s disappointing me.’ I’m too afraid of her! I could never get away with treating her the way my mom treated me, because she’d probably pull a little switchblade out of her diaper.”
Despina raised her hands in defeat, laughing. “Well, you know what? We’re still going to count that as a win.”
Counting it as a win became her new strategy.
You’re raising a strong-willed girl. And the world is going to want to knock her down a peg.
It’s your job to make sure she’s high enough that they can’t reach her.
Despina was right. This was still a win.
Her mother had been her first bully. Lurielle was different.
She’d be her daughter’s biggest hypeman.
She stopped looking down at her tiny daughter’s face, wishing that she saw the same perfect trust that she witnessed from her son.
Kora didn’t trust anyone. And Lurielle would be her co-conspirator, she decided.
Strangely enough, once she stopped trying to wrestle her strong-willed little girl into the submission of a predictable routine, things grew easier.
When Kora screamed, Lurielle no longer hurried to quiet her. Instead, she crouched like a frog, impressed that she was still able to do so at all, and looked her little tyrant square in the face. “What’s up?”
At first, Kora was befuddled, her little brows lowering, as if she were trying to determine if Lurielle were setting a trap.
When neither the car seat nor crib were immediately imposed, she would make another pterodactyl-like shriek, and Lurielle would shake her head.
“You’re very loud,” the same as she’d once told her joyous little boy, earning a volcanic explosion of mischievous-sounding laughter, as if Kora already knew that, thanks. No shit, that’s the point.
The first time she pulled herself up to stand, she did not immediately look to Lurielle for approval, the way Kael had.
She simply stood up and made gravity her bitch.
Lurielle clapped anyway from across the room, and when Kora met her eye with a gummy, conspiratorial smile, it felt like being inducted into a secret club.
Once she began to talk, her declarations took on a sharper clarity.
Yellow cup, not green. Mama, not Dada. Now, not later.
Lurielle wondered if she’d ever possessed the same steel as her daughter, before she’d been chipped down to a nub.
Kora’s first birthday was the same small party at home with the whole clan on the screen as they’d had for Kael, watching and laughing as Kora demolished her little cake.
There was no wonder on her face when Khash blew out her candle, extinguishing the tiny flame before she could reach for it.
She glared at him as if he’d robbed her, letting loose another pterodactyl screech in response, smearing frosting in his hair as his sisters laughed uproariously.
Kael loved his sister with a mixture of devotion and bewilderment.
“Mama, she doesn’t follow the rules.” He was building towers, his favorite evening activity, the mark of a future architect, according to his father.
Khash would get down on the ground with him, and they’d spend half the evening constructing towering little towns of blocks.
Kora was their kaiju, stomping in with a singular aim — destruction.
“I think she’s only trying to play with you, bub. If you’re the builder, what’s her job? Remember, the rules are only fair if they’re for everyone.”
Kael thought about it. He shifted to building fewer towers, taller, more fun to knock over. When Kora wreaked her havoc, they both shrieked in laughter and did it again.
Maybe there was no such thing as an easy baby and a hard baby, she thought.
Maybe there was only a difference in communication.
Kael had taught her the basics of motherhood, a foreign language at the time.
Kora was teaching her submission. Once she stopped fighting her daughter’s determination, her hard baby didn’t seem that hard to figure out at all.
“My fierce little warrior,” Khash cooed at her. “No one ever gets to dim your light, wildflower.”
Lurielle stepped out the back door that night, missing the rest of the ‘your great-grandaddy’ platitude, staring up at the moon with tears running down her face.
There was more than the potential for damage and harm in these fraught mother-daughter relationships. There was something dangerous and electric about having a daughter.
Her son was a pure ray of sunshine, but Kora was an entire storm system unto herself.
And no one gets to dim her. The world would try.
She already knew that. Classrooms valued compliance; the workplace valued communication tempered with exclamation marks.
There was little room for women who took up more space than they were allotted.
As a female elf in engineering, she knew that better than most. Lurielle already knew she was competitive to a fault, and didn’t mind talking right over her male peers when they interrupted her.
This is why you had her. Because you’re the best person for this job.
Her job wasn’t to prepare her daughter for the ways the world would try to make her small.
That was what her mother had done, making Lurielle small first, before the world even had its chance.
Her job wasn’t to corral her strong-willed little girl’s spirit — it was to help it grow.
Help her learn to carve space for herself before someone inevitably tried to take it, teach her to be brave enough to claim it entirely.
Help her become something formidable, a force to be reckoned with, a storm too big to be trapped in the teacup of polite Elvish society.
Fucking crush it together. Keep that furious little fire burning bright. And no one gets to dim her.