I wanted to be a mom so badly. It was my dream for so many years before it finally happened. And now I hate it.
It’s not like you probably think. I knew it was going to be hard. I knew I was going to have long nights without much sleep, and I was fully prepared to have to clean up gross bodily functions several times a day, and I was well aware of the havoc motherhood would wreak on my body and social calendar. I didn’t mind! That’s just part of the package and it’s supposed to be balanced out by the deep love you have for your little one.
I wasn’t supposed to be terrified of my child, though.
Hang on. Let me back up and give you the whole story. I’m the oldest mom in my daughter’s second grade class. They called it a geriatric pregnancy, which was a little embarrassing, but I didn’t take too much offense. Even over the age of 40, I was proud to finally be pregnant! With a baby that would actually stick around, anyway.
Not everybody finds their soulmate when they’re 22, you know. I was halfway through my 30s before I even got married, and we both wanted a family, but we struggled so hard just to get pregnant in the first place. It took a lot of prayers, and a couple rounds of fertility acupuncture, and a lot of unsexy sex at the right time of the month (so many months) just to get to that first + sign on the pee stick.
And then the miscarriages started. Four of them. The last one nearly killed me, and I badly scared my coworkers who watched me pass out cold in the office lobby as I was trying to get home in the throes of it. I lost so much blood. We almost didn’t try again. But all I wanted was to be a mom. We decided to give it one last attempt.
And that one stuck! I was so worried through the entire pregnancy, but I tried to stay cool and calm so the stress wouldn’t affect the baby. I did everything right, in fact. I ate so healthy and I did all the right exercises and I had a name all picked out but I didn’t tell anyone, not even my husband, until she was born. Until she was out in this world and alive and looking into our eyes and screaming bloody murder about the indignity of being born. You’re not supposed to tell the name, just in case. Just in case you have to flush that name down the toilet.
It was Sophie, by the way. We named her Sophie. I said that name to my husband just before I lost consciousness after the 33-hour ordeal of her birth. That nearly killed me too, and it was an even closer call than the last miscarriage. She just. Would. Not. Come. Out. When she finally landed screaming in the doctor’s hands, I was barely coherent. Barely alive. I said “Call her Sophie” to my husband, who looked worried and white as a ghost, before I slipped away to blissful oblivion.
I was okay, though. I mean, after a while. Anyone who thinks moms can waltz out of the delivery room, looking and feeling amazing, is just dumb. I lost a lot of blood, and I couldn’t go home from the hospital for almost a week. Then I stayed fat for longer than I wanted to, and I would cry at weird times with zero provocation, and my pretty blonde hair turned brown and lank. But it was all worth it, because we had our beautiful daughter!
I loved Sophie from the second I saw her. She was gorgeous, flawless. And she was a good baby, too. I wasn’t scared of her at first. What was to be scared of? She was a little helpless person, totally dependent on our love and care. And we showered her with it. She never had to wonder if she was loved, because we told her every day.
I adored her name so much. Sophie. I had been holding it in my heart since my first pregnancy. My first miscarriage. And I finally had my beautiful Sophie! I had a little blanket that I embroidered with her name while I was breastfeeding. I commissioned one of my friends to paint “Sophie” on the wall above her crib in a gorgeous kaleidoscope of colors. She had a personalized baby spoon, personalized bibs, a personalized silver rattle that I never actually let her use since it was too precious.
Things first started getting a little weird when she began talking. Not the first word, of course – it was “mama!” My heart just melted the first time she looked at me and clearly said that magic word. “Dada” wasn’t far behind. The third word? That childhood classic: “NO!”
I mean, I get it, all kids love to say “no” to things they don’t want. Bath time, mashed peas, a scratchy sweater. But Sophie… Sophie was saying “no” to her name.
Almost every time I would say my sweet Sophie’s name, she would yell back “NO!”
It got to where I almost didn’t want to say it anymore. But I loved that name so much, and I wanted her to love it too! So I would still sing her the sweet Sophie song I made up. And she would say “no.”
Then one day, she said more than no when she heard me say her name. I couldn’t tell exactly what she was saying – not like babies are the most articulate! – but it sounded like “No! Day!” And she kept saying that when I would call her Sophie. “No!! Day!!!” I tried calling her Day a couple times but that just made her madder. She would cry and cry.
I hate to admit it, but I kind of stopped calling her anything for a while. When I wanted to get her attention, I would say “Sweetie” or “My beautiful little girl” or whatever. Calling her Sophie would get her riled up, and so would calling her Day, so I just avoided it for the most part.
Her speech was getting clearer though, as it does for all babies as they start mastering the art of talking. And one day, when I slipped and called her Sophie – and she yelled “NO!” – I realized what else she was saying.
“Did you say Jenny?” I asked her. Her face lit up. “Denny!” she cried, bouncing up and down in her chair. “Do you want to be called Jenny?” I asked. “Yes! Denny!”
I mean, it’s not what I would have chosen to name my daughter. Jenny is not even remotely a Gen Alpha name. How many little second grade girls do you know named Jenny? Madison, yes. Olivia, Riley, Addison, yes. There are three Emmas in my daughter’s grade. But Jenny? That was the name all the girls had back in the ‘70s and ‘80s when I was a kid. And in 2017, when my Sophie was born, it was hopelessly passe.
I had no idea where it came from at that point. What would prompt a baby to insist on a name that was 30 years out of date? There weren’t any little girls in her day care named Jenny – none of her teachers were named that, either. None of her little toddler TV shows had a Jenny character, and none of her favorite books did either.
But it made her happy. So while I called my daughter Sophie in my own thoughts and heart, I called her Jenny to her face. And everything was nice for a while. A few years. I wasn’t scared of my child yet. Just a little baffled by her insistence on being called Jenny.
–––
Time went on, busy, like it always is when your household has two full-time workers and a toddler and an attempt at a social life. I got pregnant again – twice, once when Sophie was eighteen months old and once when she was three. I miscarried both times, very early on. And then we gave up. We would have liked to have another baby, but it was too hard on my body and on both of our psyches. My husband got a vasectomy and we agreed to be happy with our one beautiful, deeply loved little girl.
Things first started getting weird about a year before she started kindergarten.
One day, out of the blue, Sophie – Jenny – asked me, “Mama, remember when we went to the beach?”
“Last week?” I asked. We had driven a few hours to visit my in-laws at their secluded lake house in Wisconsin. The shoreline was tiny and a little mucky, but I guess technically you could call it a beach.
“Of course I do, silly! We had so much fun, and you’re getting so good at swimming!”
“NO!” she shouted. A five-year-old’s favorite word. “The big beach! With the jellyfishes!”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Where did we see jellyfish? They don’t live in Lake Winnebago, just in oceans.”
“Yeah! Yeah! The ocean beach!” she happily agreed. “The stinky jellyfishes were aaalllll over the beach and we had to go tippytoe!”
This stopped me cold. Sophie had never been to the ocean. Of course, we planned to take her there someday, but traveling with a small child is no picnic, and we weren’t ready to take her on a long flight from the middle of the country to the coast yet.
But I’ve been to the ocean. And I’ve had to tiptoe around stinky, gross, washed-up jellyfish on a beach in Florida.
Not with Sophie, though. That happened years before she was born.
“Are you making up a funny story, So – I mean, Jenny?” My heart was pounding, but I tried to speak calmly. “That would be so silly if we had to tiptoe around jellyfishes!”
“No! You remember! That bad man took your dollar and I kicked him in the leg! And you made me wear the crown!”
I gasped, reeling in my seat.
All of that really happened. On a spring break trip in the mid-‘90s with my college best friend. The beach was covered in dead jellyfish, so many we could barely walk. We had to tiptoe around them. A scammer swindled me out of $20 in a dumb con game on the boardwalk, and my best friend got so mad that she kicked him in the shin until he gave me my money back, and later I got one of those stupid paper crowns from Burger King and made her wear it for being my hero. She was always my hero. The best friend I ever had.
Until she died. She was just 33. It was ovarian cancer, and it was awful. She never got to meet my Sophie – died eight years before she was born.
I suppose you can guess what her name was, right?
“Jenny?” I breathed, almost afraid to hear the answer.
“Yes, mama?”
“Which Jenny are you?” I asked.
She gave me a quizzical look. “Mama, I’m just Jenny!” With that, she slid down from her chair and ran into the living room, calling, “Will you read me Rosie Revere Engineer?”
I took a moment to let my heart go back to normal, and then I followed my daughter into the living room and read her favorite book to her. What else could I do?
I told my husband what had happened later that night, after Sophie went to bed. I had been thinking about it all afternoon, and I was already pretty solidly convinced that Sophie was my best friend, reincarnated. I was even a little bit excited about it. Who wouldn’t want to have their long-lost best friend back? I mean, I knew she was my daughter. But maybe she was also something more.
My husband shocked me with how angry he got when I brought it up. There’s no such thing as reincarnation, he said. That’s a stupid superstition and I shouldn’t let myself get sucked into weird new-age crap. I asked how he could explain what Sophie said to me, and he insisted that she must have said something a lot vaguer than what I told him, and I just twisted it into what I wanted to hear. Yes, it was a little weird that she wanted me to call her Jenny, but it’s not like it was some kind of obscure name. There must be millions of Jennies in the world.
We argued bitterly about it, and he finally shut me down. He didn’t want to hear anything more about reincarnation, and he’d leave the room if I ever brought it up again. It was such a letdown – I really wanted to talk to him about it. He never knew Jenny – the real Jenny – before she got sick. He only met her once or twice, when she was close to dying, already a shadow of her former self. He couldn’t understand how special it was to feel like I had a little bit of her back.
But his point was made. I shut up and stopped talking about it and went to bed. In the guest room.
And I didn’t tell him the next time it happened. Or the next time, either.
–––
It became kind of a common thing between me and Jenny. I mean Sophie. She brought back so many memories from college and my 20s. She would say something like, “Mama, remember when we moved into our apartment and we gave the boys pizza?” And it would bring up vivid memories of the day we drove past our favorite frat house with a back seat full of pizza and beer to bribe a few jocks to help us move all our stuff from the dorm to our brand new, first-ever apartment.
Or she’d say, “Mama, remember Itchy Picker?” And I would break into gales of laughter remembering the American History professor we had who would try to sneakily pick his nose when he thought the students weren’t looking, then turn it into a nose scratch if he got caught. Jenny gave him that nickname. My Jenny, I mean. I mean, the real Jenny.
Don’t get me wrong, I still absolutely understood that my daughter was not my dead best friend. Even though she kind of was.
And we didn’t do the “Mama, remember” stuff all the time! It wasn’t every day, or even every week. There would be long stretches when Sophie – Jenny – was just a normal five-year-old and we did normal Mom-and-kid stuff together.
But Jenny – the real Jenny – was always a little bit there. I could tell. There was something about the way my daughter carried herself, the way she walked, the way she held her head, that was reminiscent of my best friend. I mean, she did look like I had looked at her age, mostly. She had my same blonde hair and green eyes. She had my husband’s nose but my high forehead. Her smile looked like mine.
But at the same time, I swear it, she kind of looked exactly like Jenny. The first Jenny.
Once I asked my husband if he thought she looked a little like Jenny. I forgot. I knew he didn’t want to hear about it, but I was gazing at her kindergarten school picture and there was something in the tilt of her head that looked just like my dear old friend. He gave me a weird look and said, “No, she looks like you. Wasn’t Jenny black?”
I mean, yes, she was black, but that doesn’t mean my white daughter can’t look basically exactly like her.
I wanted to spend more and more time with Jenny – I mean Sophie – and, honestly, less and less time with my husband. He had been working late nights at his job and I didn’t really care. It was easier to just have dinner for two and save some leftovers for him to eat when he got home. It gave Jenny and me a chance to talk about old times without him hearing and getting mad.
–––
One day, about a week after Jenny started first grade, we were having one of those just-the-girls dinners and Jenny asked, “Mama, remember that tall man with the nose?”
“What?” I asked. This didn’t immediately ring any bells for something I had seen with Jenny – with either Jenny. “When was this?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He was funny, though, don’t you remember? He had a long, long nose and his fingers were like carrots.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. “Are you just being silly, honey? It’s okay to make up funny stories! In fact, it’s really fun! But don’t say ‘remember when’ about stuff that didn’t really happen. Instead, you can say, ‘let’s make up a story about a funny man with a big nose!’”
“No, no! Remember it, Mama! He had carrot fingers and he could fly!”
I seriously had no idea what she was talking about. I wracked my brain to think of what this memory could be, but I had nothing. I changed the subject, and thankfully, Jenny dropped it, because I didn’t know what else to say about it.
That weekend, I took Jenny downtown to see the Labor Day parade. We had been going since she was a baby. Well, usually it was the three of us that went, but that year, my husband mumbled some excuse about wanting to organize the garage, and whatever, I didn’t really care. I was starting to think he didn’t even like Jenny all that much. His loss. She was the most amazing woman. I mean, little girl. Whatever.
We set up our chairs in a great spot near the middle of the parade route. I had my wine tumbler and a matching tumbler for Jenny with lemonade – no wine for the first-grader, ha, ha! But that didn’t mean she couldn’t match her mama/best friend!
We were pointing at all the beautiful floats and laughing at a goofy juggler when we saw him. A clown, teetering tall on high stilts, with huge and incongruous angel wings affixed to his clown suit. He was a bizarre mishmash of design concepts. Instead of a red ball nose like the classic clown, he had a long, long prosthetic nose. And his gloves must have made his hands completely unusable – the big, floppy fingers looked just like fat carrots, complete with their leafy green tops stretching out from the fingertips.
The world around me swam as I struggled not to faint. But Jenny was absolutely delighted to see the clown. “Look, mama!” she cried happily. “It’s the tall man! He’s so funny!”
I don’t know what I said. Probably “Oh, so silly” or something else lame that you would say to a five-year-old when most of your focus is on trying to figure out what the fuck.
How could she have remembered something that hadn’t happened yet? And, oh by the way, what did this have to do with Jenny? My Jenny, I mean. I mean, the first Jenny.
This was not the only time it happened.
Often, Jenny’s “Mama, remember” questions were still about real things that we had done together back in college, or in those post-college days when we had our first real jobs and lived in a Chicago apartment together. But increasingly, Jenny would ask me “Mama, remember” about something I had no memory of. Until it happened a few days later.
“Mama, remember when Kissy came over and ate the bread and slept in my bed and bark bark barked at the squirrel?” Kissy was the next door neighbor’s dog. She had never been in our house. Until she was, three days later, when Joyce next door had to make an emergency overnight trip and asked us to dog-sit. We did, and of course, Kissy stole a dinner roll from the table. And slept in Jenny’s bed all night. And would not shut up barking at squirrels.
“Mama, remember the big big boat? I didn’t feel so good!” She didn’t know it yet, but I had booked tickets for us to go on the pirate cruise on the Tall Ship Windy that weekend on the lake. I didn’t realize she’d get seasick – we had never been on anything bigger than a rowboat before – but she ended up puking over the side of the ship.
“Mama, remember my kiki? He was so so soft! With his little purple nose!” The next day, my husband brought home a little plush stuffed kitten for Sophie, something he saw in a store window and impulsively bought. She named it Kiki, like a cute version of kitty-kitty. Want to guess what color its nose was?
“Mama, remember when you were driving and you stopped the car soooo hard? I bumped my head and it hurt! You were so scared!” This freaked me out, and since I could not remember anything like it, in college or in my 20s or in the past six years, I started worrying badly about what kind of car incident I might have in store.
A week later, I was driving home after picking Jenny up from school, and I started to accelerate after a red light when I realized there was a semi barreling toward the intersection from our left. I stomped on the brakes, harder than I’d ever had to before, and I heard Jenny scream in anger and surprise and pain from the back seat. The semi driver never stopped, never even slowed down, and he came within a few feet of t-boning our car at 60 miles an hour. We would surely have been dead. As it was, Jenny did hit her head on the back of the front seat – just like she remembered – and I had a bruise on my chest from slamming into the seatbelt. And, oh yeah, I was freakin’ terrified. Like Jenny said.
I kind of didn’t want to hear the next thing she’d “remember.”
Except that the next time she did say “Mama, remember,” it was so nice. It was a memory of one of my favorite days of my whole life, and talking about it with her made me love her so, so much.
“Mama, remember when we went on the mountain? It was night and there were so many stars and the moon was pink. That little wolf walked right by us and we could almost touch it.”
My heart flooded with a deep, almost painful nostalgia. “I do remember,” I whispered. It was a night in California. Jenny had moved out there for a job. She was there for three years before she got sick and came back to the Midwest to be near the people she loved. But before the cancer, I flew out to visit her a couple times, and once, we drove up Mount Baldy and spent an afternoon at a little picnic area.
It was just one of those perfect days. We watched a guy on a bike ride up the road past us and laughed about how we could never in a million years ride a bike up a mountain. Right after he disappeared around the bend, a coyote trotted down the way he had come, right past us. So close we could almost touch it. On the way back down the mountain after dark, I was a little stoned and Jenny had the moon roof open and I tipped my head back and watched the stars and Nick Drake’s achingly beautiful “Pink Moon” played on her stereo and it’s one of those moments I can still feel viscerally in my soul. I can still touch it. I loved it so much and I loved Jenny so much. I love her so much. Both of them.
That was the last nice memory Jenny gave me.
But I’ve had six close calls since then. Like the one with the semi.
There was the time I slipped with the knife while making dinner. “Mama, remember when you were cutting the chicken and oopsie! Ooh, you were so bloody.” Two days after she said it, I fumbled the knife so it didn’t just cut my finger, it also sliced through my forearm on the way to the floor and I had to call 911 before I bled out on the kitchen linoleum.
Then there was the one where I fell down the stairs while carrying an armload of sheets from the bedrooms to the laundry. “Mama, remember when you slipped? You took a great fall! Just like Humpty Dumpty!” I sure did take a great fall. All the way down a full flight of stairs. My back was jacked up for weeks and I’m well aware it could have resulted in a broken neck. Did I really slip? Or did I feel a push before I took my great fall? I couldn’t tell you for absolute sure, and I blacked out for a while, so if Jenny had been at the top of the stairs with me when I fell, she had plenty of time to vacate before I woke up.
There was “Mama, remember the blam blam blam?” Yeah, I had no idea what that was about either until the following week, when I was picking up milk on my way home from work and a freaking robber shot up the convenience store. The cashier was killed, and two other shoppers had to go to the emergency room with gunshot wounds. I got lucky – just a graze on my temple from a bullet that would have killed me if I had been standing a few inches to the right.
“Mama, remember when the car quit working and you couldn’t make it start? That big old train almost got you!”
“Mama, remember that icky big snake? He almost bit you!” I didn’t even know there were rattlesnakes in northern Illinois, let alone in my goddamn garage.
“Mama, remember when the big metal box fell out of the window? It was sooo high up! It went splat right behind you!”
Jenny remembered all of them before they happened. I’m not saying she DID them – not sure how she could have, other than the time she maybe pushed me down the stairs. But she at least predicted them, and maybe she – what? Willed them into near-existence? Thought really hard about having an air conditioner fall on my head from an eighth story apartment window?
It clipped my toe, you know. I was walking downtown, practically running because I was late to work, and I had just passed through the spot where it fell. It caught the very tip of my shoe, the one that was behind me as I speed-walked. I stumbled, caught myself on the pavement with my hands, sat there gaping at the machine and rubbing my scraped palms while passersby rushed over to make sure I was okay. Jenny was already at school at the time – I checked later and the teacher confirmed she was there all day – and also she’s SIX, she’s practically a baby, she can’t drive downtown and go up into some stranger’s apartment and push an air conditioner out the window. Obviously she couldn’t have made it happen, but you know what? Maybe she made it happen anyway.
–––
I called my husband this afternoon and asked him to pick Jenny up. I mean, Sophie. I said Sophie when I called him, because he always got so weirded out about the Jenny thing. He never called her that. He called her Sophie all along, and she never seemed to care. She never yelled “No! Jenny!” at him, even when she was a baby. Just at me.
He said he could keep her for the weekend. It was supposed to be my weekend, but we’re still getting the schedule ironed out and he was willing to be flexible when I said I had a work emergency.
He moved out last month. He’s been crashing in his cousin’s basement, which honestly isn’t the world’s best environment for a child, but it’s okay.
I’m not so sure she’s a child, anyway.
She said “Mama, remember” again this morning.
“Mama, remember when you held your heart really hard and then you fell over? Wow, it was just all of a sudden! Then you were dead, dead, dead. I was so sad, remember?”
I saw something sly in her eyes when she said it. Like she was looking forward to my reaction. My horror.
Jenny never would have done that. Jenny was the nicest person in the world. She loved me. I thought Jenny loved me, too. I mean Sophie.
There’s no Jenny. Not anymore, not since 14 years ago when she died in agony, bald and ravaged by cancer and down to just 82 pounds.
I don’t know exactly what my baby is, but she’s not my dead best friend. I guess she never was. And I guess maybe she never was human, either.
And I can’t leave the house. Sophie’s out there. Waiting to watch me die.