Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 90708 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 454(@200wpm)___ 363(@250wpm)___ 302(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90708 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 454(@200wpm)___ 363(@250wpm)___ 302(@300wpm)
“Try,” I said. I wanted to hear this. I deserved to hear this. “All I’ve gotten so far is some messed-up analogy about monkey bars.”
She smiled and shifted her fringe out of her eyes. The fringe was new. It suited her.
“I always loved Bethany, but over that first year of her life, it felt like the walls were closing in. It felt like my life wasn’t my own and that my choices had been taken away from me.” She looked sad but she didn’t look beaten or tired, and it occurred to me that before she’d left, that was how she’d looked—as if the color had drained from her face and someone had switched her into slow motion. The woman who sat before me was much more like the woman I’d married compared to the one who’d left.
“All I could see was a future being an unpaid servant to this squirming human, and I knew you wanted more than one child,” she said. “I felt as if my entire future was laid out for me. I didn’t like it.”
I kept my expression neutral. I wasn’t sure if Penelope was telling me she’d been depressed, and if that’s what she was saying, I didn’t want to be insensitive. “You didn’t say anything at the time.”
“I don’t think I could have articulated it at the time. I just had this sense of panic, needing to run, needing to escape. I didn’t see that I wasn’t coping. I just felt this urge to leave. It didn’t help that I was clearly terrible at caring for Bethany.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I was so impatient with her. Remember when I screamed at her for crying? Like that was going to help.” She shook her head while she worried the edge of the menu with her nail. “When you were around, you were so patient with her, so calming. You only had to pick her up and she settled. It emphasized the way I didn’t feel any of those things. I was the opposite of calm. The opposite of patient. I just felt like a failure. Like she’d be better off with you and without me. I could get out of the way and let the two of you be.”
As much as I’d like Penelope to have turned into a monster, she was still the same woman I’d married. The woman who set her standards way too high and beat herself up far too much when she didn’t meet them. “I should have paid more attention. I had no idea you felt any of this.”
She reached over and grabbed my hand. “This is not your fault,” she said. “We were trying to navigate not killing a tiny human. That is quite the distraction.”
I smiled, remembering how we used to hover over her cot to check she was breathing, how we baby-proofed our entire house before Penelope had given birth, even though Bethany wouldn’t crawl for months. We’d been so cautious and careful about everything. Everything except our own relationship. That had been left to wither and die.
“After I left, over the following few months, I sort of emerged from a fog only to be enveloped in shame and guilt for leaving,” she continued. “I wanted to come back a thousand times. But what would I say? How would I explain myself?” she said. “I’d left my child. It’s the ultimate crime for a mother.” She pulled her hand from mine and took a sip of the water that had appeared on our table without our noticing. I waited as she swallowed and took a deep breath, trying to push away the obvious upset. “I loved you both, yet I abandoned you.” She shook her head. “I have to live with myself for doing that.”
She glanced down at the menu, clearly not trying to decide on her order. “Every time I thought about it, I ran further away in the hope that my shame would be left behind, but of course it followed me around and just got bigger. I figured out that the only way it wouldn’t just continue to grow and eventually eat me alive, was to turn around and face what I’d done.”
“You’re back to face the shame of leaving?” I asked. Was she asking me for absolution? She couldn’t know me very well if she was.
She shook her head. “No, I had a lot of therapy to handle the shame. I’m back because I don’t want to compound the mistakes I’ve made by staying away. I did a terrible thing to you both, but I don’t want that to be the end. I don’t want to walk away and never return. I want to move forward. Be Bethany’s mother. And map out a new relationship with you.”
I shook my head. Autumn would want me to agree and that would be that. But she didn’t understand the scar Penelope’s leaving had created.