“Horrible. Like a monster. I’d never pinch Harriet. I’m not that kind of person.” The mother next to Frida rolls her eyes.
“But?”
Frida purses her lips. “But I am a narcissist. I am a danger to my child.”
* * *
Standing beside the instructors’ desk, with Ms. Khoury guiding her, Frida articulates her shortcomings. She is a bad mother for fighting with her co-parents. She is a bad mother for wasting her Sunday phone privileges. She is a bad mother for not understanding the limits of her current role in her daughter’s life.
“Anger is the most dangerous emotion,” Ms. Khoury says. “There is no excuse for violence against children.”
Frida’s counselor thinks she’s the architect of her own misery. She’s dismayed by Frida’s downward spiral: the pinching, talk circle. Ms. Gibson said Frida wasn’t listening to the other women, that Frida seemed reluctant to participate in the hug chain.
Frida wanted to say that the hug chain was the stupidest part of the whole evening. At the end of the session, Ms. Gibson hugged the mother on her right, who passed the hug to the next woman. They joined hands and closed with the mantra of the school: I am a bad mother, but I am learning to be good. They repeated the phrase three times, as if they were Dorothy trying to get home.
Last night, she almost revealed more. Ms. Gibson wanted to hear about her childhood. Had Frida been abandoned as a child? Was abandoning Harriet the result of intergenerational trauma?
Though she and her mother are closer now, though her mother started softening in her fifties, as a child, Frida sometimes felt a chill. She made up her own explanations, blamed herself, thought her mother didn’t want her. Her mother didn’t like to spend time with her, didn’t like to touch her. She had to beg for hugs. She felt like a nuisance. Her father and grandmother were always telling her to leave her mother alone.
She didn’t find out about her mother’s miscarriage until she was pregnant herself. The baby boy who died at six months. Frida had been two at the time, too young to remember her mother’s growing belly. There were no photos of that pregnancy in the family albums.
She doesn’t know if her parents yearned for a boy, if they named him, what they did with his remains, if they do anything to mark the date of his death, if they ever talk about him with each other. She knew better than to ask.
Her mother warned Frida not to exercise too much, not to lift anything heavy, to manage her stress. The doctors blamed her mother’s miscarriage on stress, unfair as that was.
That phone call was only the third time Frida had ever heard her mother cry. When Frida finally found out about the miscarriage, she apologized for all the times she complained about being an only child. It had been a sore subject when she was in elementary school. She’d shout: “What’s wrong with you?” Her classmates had mothers who gave them siblings. Frida thought that because she was a bad, ungrateful daughter, her mother didn’t want to have another child like her. Ms. Gibson would have loved that story. But her mother didn’t cause this. She did. Her mother’s ghost child, her ghost brother, has no place in her file.
* * *
If Emmanuelle ever loved Frida, she doesn’t anymore. The doll’s arm is still dented. The instructors opted not to send her for repairs. The dent is only a surface wound, and the technical department is overtaxed, and leaving the dent will help Frida think about consequences.
Emmanuelle murmurs, “Hate you, hate you,” as Frida sings lullabies.
Frida’s temperature remains elevated. Her anger levels are rising. She remains woefully distracted. Harriet has been calling Susanna “Mommy.” It slipped out during the last call. Mommy Sue-Sue.
Gust and Susanna were embarrassed. “It happens sometimes,” Gust said. “I don’t think we should make a big deal about it.” Harriet hasn’t seen Frida in person since November. She sees Susanna every day. “No one is trying to hurt you,” he said.
Susanna took Harriet out of the room as her parents fought. Frida said it wasn’t acceptable. They had an agreement. Susanna is Sue-Sue. Only she is Mommy.
“I don’t want to put more restrictions on her,” Gust said.
He asked Frida to calm down. Was it necessary to fight about terms? When Frida finds a new partner, down the line, he’s fine with Harriet calling that man “Daddy.”
* * *
While the dolls sleep, the mothers must meditate on their faults. For bedtime prep and nightmare management, the same protocol as naptime applies, but now, the dolls wake up twice within each four-hour cycle.