Mind of Winter by Laura Kasischke

Author:Laura Kasischke
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

NOW, AS HOLLY looked into her nearly grown daughter’s stricken and pale blue face, and although it was all out of chronology, out of context (Tatty was sad that Thuy and Pearl and Patty wouldn’t be here for Christmas, not that she’d been taken to day care as a toddler!) she thought, Dear God, do I have to be punished for all of eternity for having left her there, screaming, at Wee Ones? For not having done the “better planning”? For not having had the courage to tell Eric that it didn’t matter, that we would have to start planning for it that very day because I would not be abandoning my daughter at that place ever again?

Why couldn’t she have quit her job?! At least for those first prekindergarten years? To keep the tiny girl by her side, to spare her that separation? Holly and Eric had lived on nothing all through their twenties—one crappy car and a two-bedroom apartment—and their lives had been completely filled with inexpensive comforts and joys! Why couldn’t they have done it for a few years later in their lives, too?

But, of course, no one did that. Some of the mothers who brought their children (even younger than Tatiana) to Wee Ones arrived in cars that cost the annual salaries of two of the day-care workers who watched their children nine, ten, eleven hours every day. She had no idea why those mothers had done it, but why had Holly done it? How quickly those years had come and gone! And what had she been doing all those hours and days of her daughter’s earliest years while she watched Dora the Explorer in a colorful institution surrounded by strangers—her sippy cup empty, her eyes dry, her little chin pointed upward toward the television as if to say that she had suffered worse, that she had suffered before, that she could suffer again?

No. Surely, no. It hadn’t been that bad. Tatiana had made friends (although, where were those friends now?) and she’d grown to love the day-care ladies (although, where were those day-care ladies now?). And after that one terrible morning Tatiana had never again cried upon being left at Wee Ones! The tantrums she threw after that (and she did throw tantrums) were not about being left somewhere, but in reaction to others leaving:

Thuy might stop by the house for the briefest or longest of visits, but as soon as she picked her jacket up off a kitchen chair and started to put it on, Tatiana would blanch, stagger over to Thuy, pleading as if she were a child being left alone on the Titanic, Don’t go. Sometimes there were even Russian words—words Holly had assumed her daughter had long since forgotten—uttered, sobbed, or screamed. Sometimes that well-timed Tickle Me Elmo or graham cracker managed to calm her down, but often she just had to be left to sob until she fell asleep, curled on the couch or standing with her head resting against a wall.

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