Your mother opens her mouth.

A hand up to stop her. A long breath, in, out. “She isn’t mine, Mom.”

“She’s you.” Your mother’s eyes are your eyes are Maura’s eyes, big and hurt. She could look so pleading.

“We can’t both be me.” Why do you say it that way? In that way that leaves room for your selfhood to be displaced.

Your mother shakes her head at you. “Did you even read the essays?”

“I already know what happens in them.”

* * *

How’s this for a metaphor? You’re sitting at a table with your mother and each of you has one palm curled half around the white shell of an egg. The egg is organically perfect, round and smooth and cool as if it has just come out of the fridge. You want to put the egg whole in your mouth and swallow it, shell and all, let your throat swell like the body of a snake to accommodate it. Your mother keeps telling you that if you want the egg and she wants the egg that’s fine, things can still be fair. She’ll take her side, and you’ll take your side, and you’ll both just pull.

The hardest thing to explain to someone is something they should already know, so you’re trying to tell your mother why, like a baby, you can’t split an egg in two, but she gets up to walk away with her side and out spills the white-gold heart.

More a fable than a metaphor. Sometimes when you’re daydreaming you imagine writing one very long, important essay, to eat all your mother’s essays like a row of eggs. Maybe you don’t want to be a writer but you can still hook something clever on the end of a sentence. A story is like an egg, because—

No. A memory is like an egg—

No. When you have an egg in your hand—

You’re still thinking about it over a half-written email when you remember that there is a kind of egg that splits and when it does it makes a twin.

* * *

Only once, purposefully, did you make the mistake of reading the comments section under one of your mother’s essays. You know the universal laws of the internet; you don’t read comments sections. There is someone promoting a get-rich-quick scam, and someone saying that if you’re going to give your child psychiatric medication you might as well have them stick a fork in an electric socket, same brain damage. There’s also a woman who’s written, “Jeanne, thank you so much for writing this. It expresses so much I haven’t had words for about raising my son. So glad I found your work.”

* * *