“Get your dirty hands off my baby!” The words stopped my mother as she reached toward my daughter’s blanket. She whispered an apology and left without defending herself. Those cracked hands came from years of scrubbing bathrooms, work I had treated as something shameful rather than exhausting labor deserving respect. Exhaustion after childbirth helped explain my frayed emotions, but it could not excuse the resentment I had carried long before entering that hospital room.
When she stopped contacting me, I called it stubbornness. Eventually, unease sent me to her house with the spare key she had entrusted to me. Inside, almost everything was missing, including the photographs and crocheted decorations that had made it hers. A week later, she called. I still imagined she might apologize. I did not yet know what her silence meant—or how much I had failed to understand about the woman on the other end.