For the first few weeks after she brought her baby home, Kate’s daughter sunk into a deep depression. She refused to even look at her child, at her perfect dark eyes, her full baby lips. Kate couldn’t be sure if it was because looking at her reminded her daughter of the father, who she claimed not to know how to find, or if there was another kind of sadness working its way through her heart. Walter was still angry at her for getting pregnant to begin with, and her twin sister had moved in with that boy and was preoccupied with the business of being in love, so during these times Kate cared for the baby herself. She fed her from a bottle she carefully heated on the stove, sang lullabies to her in the still-mediocre nursery, and walked with her through the fields down to the river, naming all the trees and animals along the way – an ability she took so much for granted then. When it got too cold to go outside, they sat on the floor in the living room and watched Sesame Street in front of the old television set and read books about barnyard animals and construction equipment and talking vegetables. And still, Kate’s daughter lay on her bed in her room, staring at the wall. Every time the baby cried, she simply pulled the pillow over her head to drown out the noise.

Her daughter’s post-partum depression seemed to lift only when she got pregnant again. Kate is not in any position to judge her children on their sexuality, but she could never understand how, in this day and age, she could let it happen again. When her girls had turned sixteen, Kate made them both appointments with a gynecologist. She didn’t want them to grow up the way she did, not knowing anything about how their bodies worked. They refused to let her go with them, or even go together, so Kate has no idea what took place at those appointments, but it wasn’t too long after that she found condoms in the girl’s mother’s room, lying out on her dresser in plain sight. Looking back, Kate can only assume that she planted them there so Kate would think she was having safe sex. Either way, it’s not that she wasn’t prepared or informed. When she got pregnant the first time, Kate thought maybe she had just made a mistake, an error in judgment. It can happen to anyone, even someone who is prepared and informed. When, two years later, she got pregnant again, there was no doubt in Kate’s mind: she had done it on purpose.