I’m busy with my mother.
Nadia and Simon and I have twenty years to make up, and we are not wasting them. Sunday dinners. Terrible phone calls where my mother asks what we ate and whether we’re sleeping enough, two decades late and exactly on time. She comes to the front row now — at a design showcase of mine last month she cheered louder than anyone, and I thought of Kenneth, and I let myself miss the good parts of him without forgiving the rest.
The stone I carried my whole life — that our mother didn’t want us — is simply gone. Not eased. Gone. Because it was never true. It was a thing a woman invented and sold back to me twice a year while she spent our father’s money.
My mother wanted us so much she kept a room with two beds for twenty years.
She wanted us so much she wrote into total silence, year after year, with no evidence anyone would ever read a word.
