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I’m startled by that, not by her thinking of me as a job, so much as by the implication that I am in a position to do the firing. “I thought you were going to go back to some kind of PR job.”
“I was, wasn’t I?” She guffaws. “I said I’d do it when you started middle school. When you started high school. When you got your driver’s license.” She rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Don’t you think if I’d wanted to go back, I’d have done it by now?”
“So why haven’t you?”
“It wasn’t what I wanted.”
“What do you want?”
“For things to be how they were.”
For some reason, this makes me angry. Because it’s both true—she wants to keep me fossilized—and such a lie. “Even when things were ‘how they were,’ it was never enough. I was never enough.”
Mom looks up, her eyes tired and surprised at the same time. “Of course you were,” she says. “You are.”
“You know what bothers me? How you and Dad always say you quit while you were ahead. There’s no such thing as quitting while you’re ahead. You quit while you were behind. That’s why you quit!”
Mom frowns, exasperated; it’s her dealing-with-a-crazy-teenager look, one I’ve gotten to know well this past year, my last year of actually being a teenager. Oddly enough, it wasn’t something she had to zing me with much before. Which I now realize was maybe part of the problem.
“You wanted more kids,” I continue. “And you had to settle for just me. And you’ve spent my whole life trying make me be enough.”
That gets her attention. “What are you talking about? You are enough.”
“No, I’m not. How can I be? I’m the one shot, the heir and the spare, so you have to make damn sure your one investment pays off because there’s no backup.”
“That’s ridiculous. You’re not an investment.”
“You treat me like one. You’ve poured all your expectations into me. It’s like I have to carry the load of hopes and dreams for all the kids you didn’t get to have.”
She shakes her head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says in a quiet voice.
“Really? Medical school at thirteen. Come. On! What thirteen-year-old wants to go to medical school?”
For a moment, Mom looks likes she’s been punched in the gut. Then she places her hand on her stomach, as if covering the place of impact. “This thirteen-year-old.”
“What?” I’m totally confused now. But then I remember how in high school, Dad always sent me to Mom when I needed help with chem or bio, even though he was the doctor. And I can hear Mom reciting the pre-med requisites by heart when the college catalog came. And I think about the job she once had, doing public relations, but for a drug company. Then I remember what Grandma said to her at the disastrous Seder: That was always your dream.
“You?” I ask. “You wanted to be a doctor.”
She nods. “I was studying for the MCATs when I met your father. He was just in his first year of medical school and somehow found the time to tutor in his spare time. I took the tests, applied to ten schools, and didn’t get into one. Your father said it was because I didn’t have any lab experience. So I went to work at Glaxo, and I thought I’d apply again, but then your father and I got married, and I wound up moving over to PR, and then a few years went by, and we decided to start a family, and I didn’t want your father and me to both be in the midst of school and residencies with a small baby and then we had all the fertility issues. When we gave up on having another child, I quit working—because we could afford to live on your father’s income. I thought about applying again, but then I discovered I liked spending time with you. I didn’t want to be away from you.”
My head is spinning. “You always said you and Dad were set up.”
“We were. By the campus tutoring center. I never told you everything because I didn’t want you to feel like I’d given up on account of you.”
“You didn’t want me to know you’d quit when you were behind,” I clarify. Because isn’t that exactly what she did do?
Mom reaches out to grab my wrists. “No! Allyson, you’re wrong about quitting while you’re ahead. It means being grateful. Stopping when you realize what you have is enough.”
I don’t entirely believe her. “If that’s true, maybe you should quit while you’re ahead now—before things between us get really messed up.”
“Are you asking me to quit being your mother?”
At first I think the question is rhetorical, but then I see her looking at me, her eyes wide and fearful, and a little bit of my heart breaks to think she’d ever truly think that.
“No,” I say quietly. There’s a moment of silence as I steel myself to say the next thing. Mom stiffens, like she’s maybe steeling herself too. “But I am asking you to be a different kind of mother.”
