“She looks exactly like your mother,” Rowena whispered, and her voice cracked in a way that had nothing to do with joy. For a moment I didn’t understand why that would drain the happiness from her face. My mother had passed away three years earlier, before any of this, and Rowena had loved her deeply. I leaned closer, confused, and saw that she wasn’t disappointed at all. She was overwhelmed, her eyes filling with tears she was trying desperately to hold back. “I spent so many years wanting a daughter,” she said, “that I convinced myself something was wrong with me for not being grateful enough for our boys. And now she’s here, and all I can think about is how afraid I am.”

I sat on the edge of the hospital bed and asked her what she meant. Rowena looked down at our sleeping daughter, then back at me, and finally said the thing she had been carrying alone for months. “When I was a little girl, my own mother left. I have no memory of a mother-daughter bond, only the empty space where one should have been. I wanted a daughter so badly because I thought she would fill that hole. But holding her, I realized I have no idea how to be the mother I never had.” Her confession stunned me, because in fourteen years together, she had never once spoken about the woman who abandoned her.