In recent years, I had watched my friends with their newborns as their own mothers arrived to help. They folded laundry, washed dishes, and held the baby while the new mothers showered or drank a cup of hot coffee. I longingly imagined the questions and answers exchanged between these mothers and daughters, the tender guidance as well as the unsolicited advice that fuelled the customary tension between a mother’s old methods and a daughter’s modern ways.

I thought of my childhood best friend, Hilary, who worked part time as a pharmacist and had a two-year-old daughter. Remarkably, after all these years, we were neighbours again. Hilary had married a scientist who worked at the National Research Council in Ottawa. She told me that her mother claimed that Hilary was potty-trained before she was a year old. Hilary had rolled her eyes, pointing at her toddler still in diapers, and declared that her mother was out of her mind. Another time, Hilary’s mother suggested that she place her daughter on her stomach to sleep, because the baby stopped crying whenever her mother put her down that way. She reminded Hilary that she had done the same when Hilary was an infant. Hilary was horrified by this advice, which contradicted the guidelines for avoiding sudden infant death syndrome. She vowed never to have her mother babysit during nap time again.

When Hilary told me about her mother’s antics, I said, “She’s just trying to help.”

“Helping by being a thorn in my side,” Hilary scoffed. “She always has to point out that she was a better mother than I am. Like it’s a competition, right?”

I laughed along with Hilary’s indignation, even though I wished I could complain about my mother’s foreign and old-fashioned ideas. I wanted my mother to reminisce with me about when I was a baby. I wanted her to tell me how to swaddle my child. I wanted her to annoy me with ridiculous anecdotes about how well my sister and I slept and firm views about what to do about the baby’s crying.

I looked down at my sleeping daughter. Even though I revelled in our first week home, the sleep deprivation anchored me with a deep sadness. The wound of my mother’s departure felt fresh and deep. I was terrified and longed for her support. But when I thought about why Mother wasn’t here with me, teaching me and comforting me, the magnitude of her decision to leave her children behind devastated me. When the baby howled for me, and pounded and scratched at the skin of my chest hungrily, I vacillated between tremendous anger at Mother’s selfishness and profound sadness as I thirsted for her presence.

Mother had disappeared more than two decades ago. Over time, her presence in my life began to feel like a relic. She was like the old, beaded bracelet I treasured at the bottom of my old ballerina jewellery box, something I thought about once in a while, an object that only I could appreciate. My memories of Mother were scratched up and faded like the beads, yet I still wanted to keep them. As the years moved by, I looked at the bracelet and those memories less and less, preoccupied by the present. Until now.