I never did come home to her, but I came around to her. It took ten years, two babies, and a tumor.
The first step was meeting a Yalie from Arkansas who had not traveled, did not do party tricks, and had never touched a lacrosse stick. We got married anyway, and though my mother was very happy with how the day turned out, the negotiations were tedious.
For example: “Now, have you thought about what kind of flowers you’d like on the tables?” my mom had asked the week after Edward proposed, using the officious and slightly obsequious tone of a wedding planner.
“I like gerbera daisies.” My parents’ wedding was a formal Catholic affair in early November. I memorized the album, each page its own black-and-white eight-by-ten. I can describe every shot, my mom’s collarbones, my dad’s buzz cut, the bridesmaids’ velvet dresses, the groomsmen’s wool morning suits.
“Gerbera daisies?”
“Gerbera daisies.”
After a long pause, my mom said, “I was thinking roses.”
“If you have it all figured out, why did you ask me what I wanted?”
“Because I thought you’d say roses and then I could agree and you’d think I’d given you exactly what you wanted.”
We did the same dance with the venues. Church or hillside. Country club or Moose Lodge. In the end, it went exactly as both of us probably had known it would. St. Thomas of Villanova, Merion Golf Club.
After Edward and I came home from the honeymoon, I made a new list to work through. Some of the old favorites—lose weight, read the morning paper, run a 10K—mixed with some new and exciting items, like get pregnant, which happened fast because I am stupid lucky.
I went from wondering endlessly about mothers to becoming one over a slow and almost relaxing seventeen hours involving a delicious opiate called Fentanyl. Mothering Georgia has forced on me many decisions, and by many, of course I mean millions. The first big one was baptism. The issue had come up before, loosely during the pregnancy and intermittently since she was born. I’d been baptized, as had Edward. But did we believe enough to pass it on?
Though my mother loved invoking the adage When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me, she did indeed assume that Georgia would be baptized, as did Greenie. The alternative was unthinkable, a break in a chain that stretched back hundreds of years. Edward was inclined to defer to Pascal’s Wager, the idea circulated by the French philosopher that if you believe in heaven and you’re right, fantastic! All that virtuous living paid off. If you believe and you’re wrong, well, hey, at least you spared yourself years of pride and sloth, not to mention killing, stealing, and bearing false witness.
My wager went: Do it and your mother can die happy. Don’t do it and break her heart forever.
Many months later, when Georgia was practically walking, affairs were in order. We flew to Philadelphia to baptize her in the church where we were married.
The service was lovely and brief. Georgia wore a delicate lace and linen dress that Edward’s parents sent from Little Rock. GT and Edward’s sister, Phoebe, pledged to be good and wise godparents, and through it all I cried, surprising myself and Edward, who kept checking my expression to make sure I was crying happy tears. My mother, on the other hand, nodded at me as if she had seen this moment coming for thirty-four years.
I wasn’t choked up thinking that Jesus knew my baby and that the Holy Spirit would guide her. It wasn’t the marble altar or the brass crucifix hanging behind it that got me. I cried looking at my mom and realizing how much I had come to love her and how that love had brought us here to this chapel, where a hundred parishioners were promising to keep an eye out for her granddaughter, who would grow up in California and say the Lord’s Prayer only when she was visiting her Jammy.
Pulling at the hem of my emotion was the creeping sense that it might well take until 2036 for this child in my arms to feel a fraction of what I already felt for her.