It was a humid morning in May, the kind where your skin sticks to your clothes before you’ve made it past the mailbox. I had walked four blocks with baby Sergio in his stroller to Fran’s house, something I did often without thinking. I didn’t call first. I never had to. Fran had always been my safe place, my honorary aunt, my other mother. That morning, though, I wasn’t walking into comfort. I was walking straight into a storm.
Fran answered the door flushed and sweating, her eyes already lit with something angry. She had recently quit smoking. I was two months postpartum. Neither of us was at our best.
“You’ve always been jealous of Nicole,” she snapped.
I blinked. My heart dropped. The words felt like someone had yanked the floor out from under me.
“I love Nicole,” I said, already crying. “I’m not jealous of her.”
And I wasn’t. I had loved Nicole since I was in first grade and she was a newborn in a bassinet, all tiny fingers and big eyes. She was family. I had celebrated her wins even if my face didn’t throw a party. I wasn’t the jump-up-and-down type. I was the clap-once-and-feel-it-deep kind.
“You never smile when something good happens to her,” Fran said. “You looked mad when she made Browardettes.”
“I didn’t try out. I had no reason to be jealous,” I replied, still trying to logic my way out of the quicksand. “Just because I’m not a smiley person doesn’t mean I’m not happy for her.”
“Don’t talk to me that way! I changed your diapers!” she fired back.
And there it was. The moment when love twists into resentment, when history becomes ammunition.
The argument went on for a few more sweaty, miserable minutes. She was on edge from nicotine withdrawal. I was exhausted, hormonal, and standing there in my postpartum body and a sleeping baby wearing sunglasses. Eventually, I turned around and pushed the stroller back over the bumpy tracks on Dixie Highway, the sun burning down on my scalp.
When I got back to the apartment, I didn’t even unbuckle Sergio. I left him snoozing in his stroller, sat down on our scratchy tweed couch with the cats, and cried. After I blew my nose and got myself together, I called my mom, who lived across the pool in the same apartment complex. Mom’s advice was simple and as emotionally stunted as ever.
“Fuck her! She only took care of you because I paid her,” she said.
But of course, it wasn’t that simple. Fran had been a stand-in mother when mine was too cruel or too absent. She had been there. She mattered. That made it worse.
We didn’t speak for over a year.
Not every family fight comes with a resolution or a moral. Sometimes it’s just a memory that sticks, a sore spot you press once in a while to see if it still hurts.
Spoiler: it does.
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