Silent, patient, hidden, the flowers wait.

They are very good at waiting.

3.

The seedpod isn’t our only beginning: that doesn’t suit the lifecycle we’re chronicling here, which has many parts and many players. It also begins in a hospital, in a small town in Washington State, where a woman—call her Caroline; say that she is pretty and she is tired and she is trying very hard, even though she is very frightened—has just given birth to her daughter. See her now, sweat matting down her hair, tears on her cheeks, cradling the small, screaming creature she has made with her own body, fueled with her own blood. Is it any wonder she loves and fears it in equal measure, this tiny thing that can cause her so much pain and bring her so much joy at the same time?

The nurses take the baby away. Caroline, exhausted, uncertain, goes to sleep.

When she wakes, her parents—her frustrating, beloved, infuriating parents—are in the room. Her mother is holding the baby. Her father is sitting next to the bed, holding her hand. For the first time, Caroline is struck by how much he looks like she feels, how much parental love transcends generation and gender and even estrangement, even if she can’t quite remember what made her decide she needed to do this on her own.

“Before you get mad, your sister called us,” says her father. “She said that no-good boyfriend of yours ran out as soon as he heard you were in the family way.”

“He didn’t want to be a family with me, and good riddance,” says Caroline. “I don’t need him. I can be a family just fine on my own.”

“Not entirely on your own,” says her father, with a meaningful glance toward the tiny bundle still cradled in her mother’s arms. “What are you going to name her?”

This feels like a test. That was part of what drove her away, she remembers that now: the way her father always seemed to be testing her, the way she could never be sure she had the right answer. It wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t fair. Caroline takes a breath.

“Anastasia,” she says. “Like Grandma.”

Now her mother looks up, surprised and pleased and smiling. “You’re naming her after my mother?”