Ode to Joy

One afternoon while my daughter is sleeping, I sit my mother down and ask her to tell me the chronology of her life. I am curious about her choices – her relationship with her mother, her grandmother, and aunts, these women who've become almost mythical creatures in the way I've heard about the legends of their lives, even though they've barely intersected in real time with my own.

I am curious about the way her mother presses on her story in the same way I am trying to puzzle out how she is pressing on mine, in the same way I am not ready to face I will press upon my daughter's own.

What comes out of the afternoon?

Motivation, a fierce sense of ambition stemming mostly from rejection, fear, misunderstanding, a longing to be understood.

My mother's mother always said, I was a duck who had swans.

In this, my mother sees a forever disconnect, two separate species unlikely to share a nest let alone a lifetime.

She is still angry at her mother over some things – missing her doctoral graduation, offering no help while she struggled with a newborn – a list we have as daughters that we learn to bite back into our throats when we have our own. Yet, she will no more forgive her mother than her mother, long since passed, will cease to regret.

At the end of the afternoon, at the last possible second we can steal in conversation, already my daughter is shifting, crinkling the sheets in her crib, I beg my mother to remember in almost the same instant that I realize it, her mother named her Joy, and at least while she stirred inside the body they once shared, must have, indeed, felt it.