Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

daughters—daughters you nursed, daughters you bathed, daughters whose sleeping teenage hair you now kiss at twilight when you creep into their bedroom just to share the same oxygen at a time when they aren’t conscious—are physiologically averse, at seventeen, to touching their mothers. “So he told you,” Alma says, and Julia takes

Daugters

To acknowledge any of this would be to ruin everything, so Julia sits, sometimes, in complete stillness, trilling, like a rock absorbing sunlight: the marvelous fact that, for an hour, her daughter is her friend.

focuses on the pleasure of the moment instead of all that is to come for her daughter, all of the moments beyond her control; she focuses on the fact that, for this moment, her girl is close enough to smell, to feel:

because sadness got more confusing as you got older, accreted and layered and camouflaged itself until the source was buried beyond discovery.

terrified for her daughter, terrified in all the usual ways one must be terrified when raising a young woman, all the ways the world will try to make her vulnerable, try to stymie her and slight her, to take away what’s hers.

Something that has always astounded her, particularly since her children were born, is how truly, consistently bad the universe is at time management; instead of meting out crises at manageable intervals it seems to deposit them in erratically spaced piles, like the salt trucks in the winter, each pile containing a rainbow of miscellaneous emergencies.

If I ever— If it ever felt like I wasn’t—what you needed me to be, honey, I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry if I didn’t always—know the right things, or understand what I was—”