“My Lily is my Lily.” Lily was her genetic daughter. Hannah had been the surrogate, after recourses of IVF, acupuncture, herbal steam baths, pro-uterine diets, and pretty much every snake-oil remedy under the sun had failed. She supported her half sister on account of vestigial gratitude. “How you cope with loneliness determines whether you are strong or weak, particularly if you are a woman,” she said. “Hannah isn’t equipped to cope.” Sad as that was, Helen wasn’t about to let Hannah turn her daughter against her. I stood inarticulate, at a loss. When I interviewed Helen, it felt fake, rehearsed. There was no vulnerability, no spontaneous insight. Hannah was scrupulously candid, as exposed as a decomposing shack in the wilderness. “My responses were premeditated,” was her justification, “in that I’m constantly meditating upon what responses I would give to questions. Don’t blame the subject for your poor skill.”

She could tell I was intelligent, but my values were droll, conventional. “There isn’t one blueprint for how to build a life. Character and family are also constructions.” This advice of hers wasn’t new, either. Architecture can insidiously rank and organize us: from medieval thatched cottages where everyone slept communally on a straw dais and if there were extramarital shenanigans, well, it had to have been that roguish incubus, to our contemporary thrall to individualism borne out in individualistic enclosures like the capsule pods in Tokyo or microapartments in Manhattan. Each individual requires their own tiny niche, their own luminous screen to satellites, social media. “We have separated ourselves out,” Helen has said in previous interviews, “as the home was separated out in the Industrial Revolution. What was the source of work, play, sex, the gamut, has been butchered and sold off piecemeal as chops and steaks.”

Neither I nor society at large—strangers—had the privilege to judge how she raised her daughter—such judgment was evil—or how she demonstrated her love. “Thoroughly fact-check your story before it appears in Inhabit. Oh, and if you were scouring my house for a souvenir, feel free to have whatever you like from my stuff.”

After my first tête-à-tête with Helen, I had a disturbing dream—please pardon me for sharing. A woman went through an excruciating metamorphosis. Her sinews stretched, her bones elongated into a suprascaffolding, her joints a joinery. She towered in agony. I roamed her muscular corridors, investigating the warp and thrum of a high-rise circulating with lymph, hemoglobin, nerves, hormones. It was a monstrous architecture, an architecture for monsters, an attempt by her to accommodate tenants who would never believe she had done enough. We take for granted that our mothers accept whatever risks to bear us, that they would die for us, or that they otherwise gladly sacrifice for us their quotidian hours, days, and weeks, but this is a fallacy. If children are born or become cruel and reproducing is a vice, as Hannah Dannenforth suggested, perhaps it is not because it is in our nature, but because we too easily forget the distinct identities of our mothers.