Every year at the start of school the mothers come to give you medical forms, which is when you learn the fragilities of their children, their antibiotics, their antidepressants, their EpiPens. Maybe sometimes you want to say, Oh, escitalopram, I was on that too when I was ten. Would that be comforting, who knows? It’s also when the vaccine exemption forms are turned in, and you have to process those and not say anything. The women who hand these to you often look like your mother, waspish and WASPy. One of them has a button clipped to her purse strap that says “Mothers know best.”

A couple years ago you were visiting your mother—just for the afternoon, you only ever visit for the afternoon—and there was an anti-vax rally on local television, which you were watching instead of talking to each other. The reporter was talking about those parents who’d brought smallpox back to California—brought, like they were carrying it on their backs, in their purses; in jugs, in jars, in BabyBjörns—your mother’s forehead kept scrunching up, making worry lines. “What?” you said. She chewed her lip. “What?”

“I wish they wouldn’t use that tone,” she said, and you restrained a scoff. Your mother gave you a baleful look, as if she’d seen the scorn on you anyway, and folded her hands up so tightly her knuckles went white.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Maura,” your mother said. Which was true, you didn’t. On the TV, a woman lifted her baby into the air, maybe so that the camera could see him, but for one absurdist second you thought she might toss him into the crowd. Your mother was quiet for a moment too long and you braced yourself, as you had learned to do against a certain kind of silence. You glanced around the kitchen for the remote, but couldn’t find it. Looking past you, at the screen, your mother murmured, “It’s terrible to have a child.”

You raised your hand to your mouth unthinkingly, the tips of your teeth resting against your knuckles. “Don’t do that, Maura,” your mother said. And she sighed, pressed her palm against her forehead. “I hate it when you do that.”

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