About the book:
What happens when your experience of motherhood is nothing at all what you hoped for, but everything you always feared?
'The women in this family, we're different...'
Blythe Connor doesn't want history to repeat itself. Violet is her first child and she will give her daughter all the love she deserves. All the love that her own mother withheld.
But firstborns are never easy. And Violet is demanding and fretful. She never smiles.
Soon Blythe believes she can do no right - that something's very wrong. Either with her daughter, or herself.
Her husband, Fox, says she's imagining it. But Violet's different with him. And he can't understand what Blythe suffered as a child. No one can.
Blythe wants to be a good mother. But what if that's not enough for Violet? Or her marriage? What if she can't see the darkness coming? Mother and daughter. Angel or monster? We don't get to choose our inheritance - or who we are...
EXTRACT:
You slid your chair over and tapped my textbook with the end
of your pencil and I stared at the page, hesitant to look up.
‘Hello?’ I had answered you like a phone call. This made
you laugh. And so we sat there, giggling, two strangers in a school
library, studying for the same elective subject. There must have been
hundreds of students in the class – I had never seen you before. The
curls in your hair fell over your eyes and you twirled them with your
pencil. You had such a peculiar name. You walked me home later in
the afternoon and we were quiet with each other. You didn’t hide how
smitten you were, smiling right at me every so often; I looked away
each time. I had never experienced attention like that from anyone
before. You kissed my hand outside my dorm and this made us laugh
all over again.
Soon we were twenty-one and we were inseparable. We had less
than a year left until we graduated. We spent it sleeping together
in my raft of a dorm bed, and studying at opposite ends of the couch
with our legs intertwined. We’d go out to the bar with your friends,
but we always ended up home early, in bed, in the novelty of each
other’s warmth. I barely drank, and you’d had enough of the party
scene – you wanted only me. Nobody in my world seemed to mind
much. I had a small circle of friends who were more like acquaintances.
I was so focused on maintaining my grades for my scholarship that
I didn’t have the time or the interest for a typical college social life. I
suppose I hadn’t grown very close to anyone in those years, not until
I met you. You offered me something different. We slipped out of the
social orbit and were happily all each other needed.
The comfort I found in you was consuming – I had nothing when
I met you, and so you effortlessly became my everything. This didn’t
mean you weren’t worthy of it – you were. You were gentle and thoughtful
and supportive. You were the first person I’d told that I wanted to
be a writer, and you replied, ‘I can’t imagine you being anyone else.’
I reveled in the way girls looked at us, like they had something to be
jealous about. I smelled your head of waxy dark hair while you slept
at night and traced the line of your fuzzy jaw to wake you up in the
morning. You were an addiction.
For my birthday, you wrote down one hundred things you loved
about me. 14. I love that you snore a little bit right when you fall asleep.
27. I love the beautiful way you write. 39. I love tracing my name on
your back. 59. I love sharing a muffin with you on the way to class.
72. I love the mood you wake up in on Sundays. 80. I love watching you
finish a good book and then hold it to your chest at the end. 92. I love
what a good mother you’ll be one day.
‘Why do you think I’ll be a good mother?’ I put down the list and
felt for a moment like maybe you didn’t know me at all.
‘Why wouldn’t you be a good mother?’ You poked me playfully in
the belly. ‘You’re caring. And sweet. I can’t wait to have little babies
with you.’
There was nothing to do but force myself to smile.
I’d never met someone with a heart as eager as yours.
One day you’ll understand, Blythe. The women in this family...
we’re different.’
I can still see my mother’s tangerine lipstick on the cigarette filter.
The ash falling into the cup, swimming in the last sip of my orange
juice. The smell of my burnt toast.
You asked about my mother, Cecilia, only on a few occasions. I told
you only the facts: (1) she left when I was eleven years old, (2) I only
ever saw her twice after that, and (3) I had no idea where she was.
You knew I was holding back more, but you never pressed – you
were scared of what you might hear. I understood. We’re all entitled
to have certain expectations of each other and of ourselves. Motherhood
is no different. We all expect to have, and to marry, and to be,
good mothers.
1939–1958
Etta was born on the very same day World War II began. She had
eyes like the Atlantic Ocean and was red-faced and pudgy from
the beginning.
She fell in love with the first boy she ever met, the town doctor’s son.
His name was Louis, and he was polite and well spoken, not common
among the boys she knew, and he wasn’t the type to care that Etta hadn’t
been born with the luck of good looks. Louis walked Etta to school with
one hand behind his back, from their very first day of school to their last.
And Etta was charmed by things like that.
Her family owned hundreds of acres of cornfields. When Etta turned
eighteen and told her father she wanted to marry Louis, he insisted his
new son- in- law had to learn how to farm. He had no sons of his own,
and he wanted Louis to take over the family business. But Etta thought
her father just wanted to prove a point to the young man: farming was
hard and respectable work. It wasn’t for the weak. And it certainly wasn’t
for an intellectual. Etta had chosen someone who was nothing like her
father.
Louis had planned to be a doctor like his own father was, and had
a scholarship waiting for medical school. But he wanted Etta’s hand in
marriage more than he wanted a medical license. Despite Etta’s pleas
to take it easy on him, her father worked Louis to the bone. He was up
at four o’clock every morning and out into the dewy fields. Four in the
morning until dusk, and as Etta liked to remind people, he never complained
once. Louis sold the medical bag and textbooks that his own
father had passed down to him, and he put the money in a jar on their
kitchen counter. He told Etta it was the start of a college fund for their
future children. Etta thought this said a lot about the selfless kind of
man he was.
One fall day, before the sun rose, Louis was severed by the beater on
a silage wagon. He bled to death, alone in the cornfield. Etta’s father
found him and sent her to cover up the body with a tarp from the barn.
She carried Louis’s mangled leg back to the farmhouse and threw it at
her father’s head while he was filling a bucket of water meant to wash
away the blood on the wagon.
She hadn’t told her family yet about the child growing inside her. She
was a big woman, seventy pounds overweight, and hid the pregnancy
well. The baby girl, Cecilia, was born four months later on the kitchen
floor in the middle of a snowstorm. Etta stared at the jar of money on
the counter above her while she pushed the baby out.
Etta and Cecilia lived quietly at the farmhouse and rarely ventured
into town. When they did, it wasn’t hard to hear everyone’s whispers
about the woman who ‘suffered from the nerves.’ In those days, not much
more was said – not much more was suspected. Louis’s father gave Etta’s
mother a regular supply of sedatives to give to Etta as she saw fit. And
so Etta spent most days in the small brass bed in the room she grew up
in and her mother took care of Cecilia.
But Etta soon realized she would never meet another man lying
doped up like that in bed. She learned to function well enough and eventually
started to take care of Cecilia, pushing her around town in the
stroller while the poor girl screamed for her grandmother. Etta told people
she’d been plagued with a terrible chronic stomach pain, that she
couldn’t eat for months on end, and that’s how she’d got so thin. Nobody
believed this, but Etta didn’t care about their lazy gossip. She had just
met Henry.
Henry was new to town and they went to the same church. He managed
a staff of sixty people at a candy manufacturing plant. He was
sweet to Etta from the minute they met – he loved babies and Cecilia was
particularly cute, so she turned out not to be the problem everyone said
she’d be.
Before long, Henry bought them a Tudor- style house with mint- green
trim in the middle of town. Etta left the brass bed for good and gained
back all the weight she’d lost. She threw herself into making a home for
her family. There was a well- built porch with a swing, lace curtains
on every window, and chocolate chip cookies always in the oven. One
day their new living- room furniture was delivered to the wrong house,
and the neighbor let the delivery man set it all up in her basement even
though she hadn’t ordered it. When Etta caught wind of this, she ran
down the street after the truck, yelling profanity in her housecoat and
curlers. This gave everyone a good laugh, including, eventually, Etta.
She tried very hard to be the woman she was expected to be.
A good wife. A good mother.
Everything seemed like it would be just fine.
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by Ashely Audrain
What happens when your experience of motherhood is nothing at all what you hoped for, but everything you always feared?
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