to look engaging and interested and sympathetic all at once. Lord, but it can be hard to be a mother.
“So.” Emma comes further into the room and curls up on the opposite side of the sofa, all sweater and tumbled hair. “I’m not going back to Harvard.”
I blink, keeping the smile on my face, trying to process her simply stated words. “Not for exams,” I say, and Emma’s face tightens. I realize I’ve said the wrong thing, but I can’t take it back. “Not for exams, of course not,” I say, and that is even more wrong. I am scrabbling for more words, better ones, but then Emma shakes her head.
“Not ever.” She sounds firm but also sad, yet not for herself. For me. And somehow that stings, because this is about her life, not mine. I know that, at least.
“But why… Emma…”
“I hated it, Mom. I hated every minute of it.” She speaks matter-of-factly, without rancor, and somehow that makes it worse.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I knew you didn’t want to hear it. You’d have been disappointed in me, and you would have told me to keep trying, and weather it out for my freshman year at least, and all the rest.”
“I wouldn’t have,” I say, feebly, because I know I would have. Of course I would have. Every parent I know would have done the same. You don’t let your child just quit. It was a parenting rule we’d followed from the beginning, whether it was Little League, ballet lessons, chess club, whatever. They had to give it a good try, and if they still wanted to quit after three sessions or lessons, they could, but they had to tell the teacher or coach themselves, after the class, not before.
Yet how can I apply that maxim for childhood to this?
“Why did you hate it?” I ask Emma, and she hunches her shoulders.
“The pressure. The posing. The smugness of everyone—professors and students. The feeling that it never ends. I thought AP Physics was bad enough—Introduction to Law was a thousand times worse.”
“But you didn’t breathe a word,” I say, even as I acknowledge to myself that she didn’t say anything good, either. She basically stopped talking to me, and I told myself it was because she was having such a fabulous time. I felt hurt, which was far better than what I feel now, which is guilt. Endless, crippling mother-guilt.
“I told you, I couldn’t. I knew you didn’t want to hear it, and I couldn’t stand for you to tell me to just give it a semester or whatever.” She rolls her eyes, as if that advice is too ridiculous for words, and I think, is it?
“If I’d known you were having such a hard time…”
“I didn’t want to disappoint you.” Emma’s voice has lowered, and I hear a tinge of despair that only adds to my guilt. “You and Dad were so thrilled when I got into Harvard. I think you were more excited than I was.”
“Of course we were thrilled. For you.”
“And for you,” Emma says shrewdly. “I get that. I’d probably be the same, if I were a parent. But it felt like even more pressure, and I already had more than I could deal with. I felt like I was going to explode—or maybe implode. Just… collapse inside.”
I shake my head slowly. “If it was really that awful for you, I wouldn’t have told you to stick it out.” I want—I need—to believe that.
“You would have, Mom. You always would have.”
“Emma—”
“You told me to take the extra AP class because it would look good on my college application. To run for yearbook editor because that was another fricking feather in my cap. To play JV tennis even though I was still the worst member on the team my senior year.”
I goggle at her, as gape-mouthed and gormless as a fish. “Emma, you wanted those things.”
“Not as much as you did. And sometimes I think I only wanted them because it made you so happy and proud. Sometimes I think I would have been just as happy—no, happier—to mess around for four years and go to Conn State.”
Conn State, like Beth had been planning to. Her sad story had left me feeling heartbroken for her, but also a little bit relieved, knowing I wouldn’t make the kinds of mistakes her mother had.
And yet it seems I’ve made a boatload of other ones.
I sink back against the sofa cushions, my mind reeling. I can’t process everything Emma