The Push

You looked me in the eye for the first time in years. We sat there together in the heaviness of everything we would not say.

“I’m glad you have Gemma in your life. I brought you to meet Mrs. Ellington so you could see that I understand. I want you to feel loved by someone you trust. Someone you can turn to. And that person doesn’t have to be me, if you don’t want it to be.”

“I don’t want you learning to be like me. But I don’t know how to teach you to be anyone different.”

“You know, there’s a lot about ourselves that we can’t change—it’s just the way we’re born. But some parts of us are shaped by what we see. And how we’re treated by other people. How we’re made to feel.”

At one point we were in the car and a skit came on the radio, something about a cat in heat.

One night, his friend Lenny, who Seb thought hung the moon,

A mother’s heart breaks a million ways in her lifetime.

You were supposed to have been happy for the mother I had finally found within myself when Sam arrived in our lives.

“It’s a replica of a Mary Cassatt.

She told you she hated me. That she wished I would die so that she lived only with you. That she did not love me. These words would have speared the heart of any other mother.

You had said to her, “Violet, she’s your mom.”