send a sign, make me wise and womanly the way I told myself she had been. She had been the right kind of woman: chaste and maternal, natural and correct about the source of her own illness, a martyr when nobody believed her soon enough to save her life. But that’s not who she was, not totally. And that’s never who I’ll be. Still, I miss her. I don’t know her. Not the way some women grow up and learn to know their moms. Sometimes, around my period mostly, I cry for us both, what she endured, what I have to live without. The sad fact that I’ll never again be seen by her.
