Author’s Note
The second anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization being upon us, I submit for your consideration this short story, which anticipated that decision, and pondered the deep meaning of that throwaway slogan, the right to choose.
Author’s Earlier Note
I wrote this story a couple of years ago, the idea for it coming to me as the liklihood seemed to be growing that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade, thus resetting America’s most long-running and acrimonious political, legal and cultural conflict. In “Mothers and Daughters” I tried, with what success I leave for its readers to judge, to depict the human dimension of “choice,” that keyword of the abortion debate. Now that Roe has indeed been overturned, I thought that my tale might be of some interest to readers on Substack.
“Mothers and Daughters” is included in my second short story collection, The Double: Twelve Stories and a Poem, which is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions. If you read and enjoy this story, I hope you’ll share it with family and friends, and perhaps even go on to read the other tales that comprise The Double.
Mothers and Daughters
A Short Story by Thomas Gregg
The feeling that my marriage was a sham, a caricature, performance art masquerading as commitment, had grown on me gradually. But I didn’t face it squarely until the Thanksgiving weekend when our daughter returned home from college with news of her future plans.
Lynne and I had married young. We met in college and tied the knot early in my graduation year, she having dropped out upon discovering she was pregnant. That was a hard, lean time for us. After our daughter was born, Lynne found work via a temp agency, supporting me through law school and the early years of my career in the law. I started out as a public defender; the hours were long and money was tight. But the three of us settled down quite well as a family and for years I thought we were happy. By the time Lynne turned forty, however, it was becoming obvious to me that she wasn’t happy and I found myself wondering if she ever had been.
My college friends had shaken their heads over our decision to marry, telling me that Lynne was difficult, that she’d be a high-maintenance spouse. But I knew that they didn’t much like her, so I ignored my friends’ advice. It was true enough what they said, though, that Lynne and I were very different people. I was the studious, ambitious one; Lynne was the party animal. Yet despite her beauty, vivacity and love of a good time, she was never particularly popular on campus. Perhaps it was her edgy, rather malicious, sense of humor. For although she often struck people as light-minded, even frivolous, Lynne possessed a keen and rather uncharitable intelligence. She saw through the cant and phoniness and self-dramatization and virtue signaling and braggadocio of our privileged college peers, and gave the impression, subtly but unmistakably, that she considered herself superior to them all.
“Don’t worry about that, darling,” Lynne said when I wondered whether she’d regret dropping out to marry me. “I won’t miss it. And anyhow,” she added, putting a hand on my arm, “I can always finish up later…”
But between one thing and another, Lynne never did complete the two semesters of coursework necessary to earn her degree.
My own career prospered and by the time that our daughter Sam finished high school, I was an equity partner in a well-regarded downtown law firm. Having served that grinding apprenticeship as a public defender, I practiced criminal law, defending the indefensible with few qualms of conscience. Once you’ve gotten an up-close look at the lengths to which cops and prosecutors will go to destroy the life of some hapless loser who was peddling meth, or who’d robbed a liquor store, or who’d clocked his girlfriend for mouthing off — well. By comparison with corporate work and family law, my small department wasn’t wildly profitable. But between the socially conscious pro bono work and the occasional high-profile trial, we did our bit to burnish the firm’s image, and so were tolerated by the named partners.
“You’re quite the crusader these days,” Lynne said to me once.
“You know I’m in it for the money,” I replied, and we both laughed.
Needless to say, I still worked long hours. As for Lynne, her time was largely taken up with the onerous duties of postmodern parenthood: the unending round of medical appointments and parent-teacher conferences and play dates and youth soccer and dance recitals and, a little later, the storm and strife of female adolescence. Lynne was a contentious, exacting mother, not at all permissive: a rule maker, a setter of standards. For some reason not quite clear to me, Sam was our only child. We’d talked about having one or two more but somehow the time was never right, and then Lynne was edging close to forty and the option was dropped. So my wife was free to concentrate her attention on the production of a model daughter and there, it seemed, she succeeded.
Samantha inherited her mother’s good looks: blonde, slender, slightly broad-shouldered, with graceful movements, a melodious voice, luminous green eyes set in a face of startling beauty. She also inherited Lynne’s intelligence. From her very first day of school, Sam had been a star student, easily meeting her mother’s expectations, obviously destined for big things. Even with the scholarship she’d landed, it cost us serious money to send her to an elite East Coast university. But Sam was worth it and more: so I reminded myself each time I wrote one of those substantial checks. She chose to major in history with a minor in English, planned to go on to graduate school, and talked of a career in public service.
But though Sam favored her physically and intellectually, in personality she was quite unlike her mother. She had none of Lynne’s edginess, seldom threw a sharp elbow, and despite the inevitable upsets and dramatics of her teenage years she’d never given us serious trouble. Our daughter was not temperamental. She was compliant. She understood our expectations, accepted them, and met them. Sometimes that worried me a little. Sam, I thought, seemed a bit too willing to meet her parents’ expectations. But she was so accomplished on the whole, so poised, pleasant, agreeable, charming and beautiful, that it was hard for me, the prototypical proud father, to evaluate her with a critical eye.
And I suppose I felt a little guilty: Concentrating on work, I’d left most of the parenting to Lynne. So it seemed unfair that Sam chose me, not her mother, as her friend and confidant. It was to me that she came with her problems, not infrequently soliciting my advice on how to to extract from her mother permission for this, approval of that. Often in the course of such conferences, our eyes would meet and Sam would flash a conspiratorial smile: You and me, Dad, against Mom. Knowing how intelligent Lynne was, how narrowly observant, I suspected that she understood quite well the role I played in Sam’s management of the mother/daughter relationship. But she never mentioned it, so neither did I. And the thought that occasionally troubled me, the possibility that Lynne’s authoritarian parenting style might weigh too heavily on Sam, was one that I kept to myself.
It was curious that despite the demands imposed by her diligent approach to parenting, Lynne eventually found time for other things. In college she’d never been politically active — in fact she’d often mocked the histrionic student activists who paraded their causes around campus. But when Sam was in eighth grade, Lynne became involved in the congressional campaign of a woman known for her progressive and feminist views. Running against the incumbent, a male Republican who’d been in Congress seemingly since Reconstruction, the female progressive lost badly. Lynne, though, was not discouraged.
“Honestly, Jack, don’t you agree that we need new faces, new ideas?”
“Well…”
“You’re always talking about criminal justice reform.”
“Sure.”
“Well, who’s going to support that?” Lynne’s tone was scornful, “Republicans? Conservatives?”
“Look, Lynne. You know what I think about politics. It’s mud wrestling—a damned dirty business. Nothing good ever comes of it.”
“That’s a terribly cynical attitude. What would Sam think if she heard you say such a thing?”
“Would it offend her youthful idealism? Well, maybe the job I do has made me a bit cynical.” I sketched a smile. “So fine. Great. Save the world. You go, girl.”
“You know I don’t like that expression, Jack. Or your condescending attitude.”
“No, but I’m serious. Really. It’s a good thing.”
So Lynne became a political activist. In our suburb there were many women like her: the fortysomething-to-fiftysomething wives of career-driven husbands, the mothers of one or two children, who’d given up or placed on hold their own ambitions and craved an outlet for their bottled-up energies. And they were not hobbyists, not political dabblers. These were women of dedication and drive who, in the fullness of time, sent that female progressive to Congress. And they were active in many other causes. When Sam was a sophomore in high school, Lynne and her sisters—she actually called them that—spearheaded a protest that resulted in the state legislature’s rejection of a bill imposing various restrictions on abortion. With equal fervor but less success they opposed George W. Bush’s war on terror, putting themselves forward as mothers against sending their children off to fight.
“So how many of your…sisters…have children serving in the military?” I asked.
“Well…” Lynne hesitated. “There’s Mary Humphrey’s son. He’s in the Navy.”
“Oh, right, he graduated from Annapolis, didn’t he?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Just saying. It’s not as if he got drafted.”
“That’s not the point, Jack.”
No, I suppose it wasn’t the point. But then, what was the point? In our comfortable suburb, with our comfortable income, surrounded by similarly comfortable people, we had little to do with the war that America was fighting. George Bush’s war on terror was being fought by another America, one quite distinct from the country in which we and our friends lived. Its burdens were borne for the most part by the sons and daughters of families much less well-educated and prosperous and secure than Lynne and me. There were reasons to worry about our daughter—worry being the wages of parenthood—but the possibility of her death on some foreign battlefield was not among those worries. Parental anxiety assumed more sophisticated forms for people of our class and station, as when in her college senior year Sam came home for Thanksgiving break with news of her future plans.
She spoke to me first, of course, trusting in the solidity of our conspiratorial relationship. But when she broke her news, I momentarily lost my composure.
“You’re what?” I snapped. We were sitting on the leather sofa in my study, surrounded by wood paneling and shelves of leather-bound books, “Jesus Christ, Sam!”
“Dad,” she said, “Dad. I need for you to keep it together, okay? Because you know…”
It was a sentence that she had no need to finish. However upset Sam’s news might make me, it would set Lynne off like a Fourth of July skyrocket.
“Who is the professor?” I ground out the question. “What does he think — ?”
“She,” Sam looked away. “Professor Riemeck—Ulrike—is a woman.”
“A woman,” I repeated, taking up my brandy and knocking half of it back. Sam’s glass of wine sat on the table before her, untouched. “I see. So your relationship…”
“Dad. Come on.” Sam met my eye again and now her expression was resolute. “You’re not going to…?”
“No.” I shook my head. “No, of course not. It’s just that…well, you’ve never mentioned this matter of, um…”
“Sexual orientation,” she finished for me. “No, I haven’t. Because up to now I wasn’t sure about it. Or maybe I was but didn’t want to admit it to myself, to make the commitment.”
“And…Ulrike…settled the issue for you? Is that what’s going on here?”
“I guess so,” she nodded. “Yes, I think so. If you knew her, Dad! Then you’d understand. She’s brilliant—marvelous! And I know how trite this is going to sound, but Ulrike has shown me a new world!”
“So you love her.”
“I do. Are you disappointed in me?”
“Ah, Sam. That I could never be.” Noticing that the snifter in my hand still contained a swallow of brandy, I knocked it back. “But what will you do in Salzburg?”
“I’ll work with Ulrike, of course. As her research assistant. And I’ll complete my degree, of course. Eventually we’ll be partners—I mean professionally as well as personally.”
She sounded so certain, so mature, that my distress eased a bit. This was the daughter we’d raised: poised, responsible, competent.
“All right,” I said, “as long as you have things worked out…well, your mother’s not going to be thrilled about this…”
“But she’ll understand, don’t you think? Yes,” said Sam. “I’m sure she will. In a way, she’s been through it herself…”
“Um, yes, I suppose you could say that.”
“And she made the right decision.”
But later, sitting alone in the old armchair I’d salvaged from my parents’ house when they moved to Florida, I found myself wondering whether Lynne would understand. For the feeling had been with me for years: that to rap my knuckles on the facade of our marriage would return a hollow echo. She’d never professed to regret the accident of biology that redirected her from college into marriage, never reproached me for carelessness or selfishness on that score, never lamented her conscription into motherhood at the age of twenty-one. All such regrets, all those reproaches and lamentations, had been directed away from me, channeled elsewhere, turned to account. Not for the first time, I reflected that the female progressive my wife had done so much to send to Congress could have been Lynne herself. She had the intelligence, certainly, and the energy, and perhaps the ambition for it. But I’d knocked her up in college and for some reason, despite the easy availability of a remedy, she allowed the course of her life to be determined by the existence within her of the cell mass that became Sam.
For the first time in a long time when brooding over Lynne, I experienced a stab of emotion. It was compassion, for despite my long estrangement from her inner life, despite my inability as a man to appreciate the complexities of the mother/daughter bond, I thought I knew enough to understand how deeply wounded Lynne would be by Sam’s decision.
But as it turned out, I understood nothing. Nothing at all.
The inevitable family conference took place on the Friday after Thanksgiving. That morning we sat around the kitchen table with untouched mugs of coffee before us while Sam spelled things out. To my surprise, Lynne took the news calmly. Her face remained composed and her voice, when she interjected a comment or asked a question, neither rose nor quavered.
“Does anyone want more coffee?” Lynne asked once Sam was done.
“Thanks Mom, no.”
“I could use some,” I said, pushing my mug across the table, “This has gone cold…”
While Lynne busied herself at the counter, Sam and I sat looking at one another. She smiled at me, the old conspiratorial father/daughter smile, but I couldn’t bring myself to smile back.
The night before, clicking my way through a cascade of websites, I’d discovered that Ulrike Riemeck was well known—one might say notorious—in academic circles. She was a historian, a socialist, a feminist of the most radical stripe. Her academic writings were variously described as transgressive, subversive, revolutionary. Her time as a visiting professor at Sam’s university had been marked by acrimonious debate, intemperate rhetoric, turbulent protest. For Professor Riemeck was no cookie-cutter campus feminist. For instance she was scornful in her rejection of transgender orthodoxy, calling it frivolous and harmful to the interests of “actual women.” She was dismissive of same-sex marriage, arguing that marriage was a repressive bourgeois institution, stifling to human individuality and creativity, alien to gay life and culture. She was of course a strident critic of patriarchy and misogyny—but was remarkable for her pointed and specific denunciations of those evils as practiced in Third World cultures, Islamic culture prominent among them.
All in all Ulrike Riemeck seemed alarming—a ticking time bomb of a woman, fated for some large, dramatic crackup. The thought that my incomparable daughter’s fate was now bound up with that of such a termagant quite simply terrified me. It seemed monstrous and I knew that I would never approve, nor understand, nor cease to grieve.
But there was nothing to be done. Sam was an adult. She’d made up her mind. She would go her own way, regardless of her parents’ objections. Accepting all that, accepting Sam’s choices, was the price that Lynne and I would have to pay for the preservation of a relationship with our daughter.
Lynne returned to the table, set a fresh mug of coffee before me and sat down. For a time nobody said anything. Sam kept glancing at her mother, biting her lip, and finally she spoke.
“Mom. I know this wasn’t…” she hesitated, then went on, “I’m sorry.”
Lynne smiled then—she smiled in a way that made a chill grip my spine.
“Why should you be sorry?” She shrugged. “You’re doing what you want.”
“I’m doing what I must,” Sam replied.
“Oh, are you?” Lynne’s tone was tinged with irony. “Because there’s absolutely no choice?”
“I thought that you’d understand,” Sam sighed.
“I understand about choices, all right.” My wife’s hands were clasped together on the table and I noticed that her knuckles were white. “It’s all about choices, Sam—choices all the time. You make your choices, then your choices make you. And that’s when you begin to get acquainted with the things you must do.”
“You’re angry with me.” My daughter sounded so sad, so sorrowful, that I felt a painful constriction of the heart. How had it come to this—this dismal confrontation around the table in our sunny, spacious kitchen, all white cabinets and granite counter tops and shining stainless steel appliances? I experienced a sudden rush of hatred for Ulrike Riemeck, an angular Austrian redhead, all ideology and jargon and attitude, fourteen years our daughter’s senior and not a quarter as beautiful.
“Yes,” said Lynne, “I suppose I am mad at you. Can you understand why, Sam? Can you? No, I suppose not. You took it all for granted, every bit of it. Well, that was natural enough when you were a child. But you’re not a child now, Sam.”
“Mom,” There were tears in Sam’s eyes now. “I do understand. Truly I do. And I’m so grateful to you…and Dad…for everything. All you’ve done.”
“You don’t understand a thing,” my wife replied. Then she got up and left the kitchen.
Nothing more was said that Friday, though a current of tension flowed through the house. Sam retreated to her room, I to my study. Sitting once more in my father’s old armchair, I remembered him on my law school graduation day, looking natty in a brand-new Robert Hall suit, white shirt and striped tie that probably my mother had picked out for him. Like Sam I was an only child, and for my father it had been a prideful moment. He’d never gone to college himself, though by dint of hard work, Dad eventually achieved modest prosperity as a building contractor. Even so, it seemed a matter of wonder to him that his son was graduating from a top-tier law school, would be a lawyer, a profession whose prestige he perhaps exaggerated. After the ceremony he shook my hand, muttering stilted words of congratulation, stoically repressing his emotions, leaving the joyful tears and hugs to my mother.
Remembering that day, I realized how much I’d been looking forward to its sequel: Sam’s graduation, my stoic pride, Lynne’s payoff for twenty years of dedicated parenting. Well, it would never happen now. Sam was stepping into a world where such conventional ceremonies appeared ridiculous, if not oppressive. I resented her for that, told myself that there would be plenty of time later to demonstrate maturity, understanding and acceptance. But just then, I felt entitled to savor a few moments of small-minded selfishness.
It was late when I went up to bed. I found Lynne lying awake, staring at the ceiling. A small lamp on the night table diffused a dim yellow illumination. I undressed and slipped beneath the covers; Lynne turned off the lamp.
“We should talk,” she said.
“I’m not sure what there is to say,” I answered after a moment. “There’s nothing we can do—”
“Listen to me.” Her voice, sharp as a straight-edge razor, cut me off. “And don’t tell me there’s nothing we can do. Because there is something we can do.”
“Such as what, Lynne?” I kept my tone even and since the bedroom was dark my frown was invisible to her. “Sam’s an adult. We can’t stop her.”
“No,” Lynne agreed, “we can’t stop her. But we can withhold our approval from this…arrangement.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means this, Jack.” She stirred restlessly beneath the covers. “We can cut off her allowance. We can cut her off.”
“Order Sam out of our lives?” Now my voice was sharp. “Cut ties with her? You could do that?”
“Oh yes,” said Lynne, “I could do that. I will do that, whatever you decide. Why would I want anything to do with her, Jack, after the way she’s repaid me for all I’ve done, everything I’ve sacrificed?”
“She’s your daughter, Lynne.” I rolled on my side and touched her shoulder. “You couldn’t—”
“For Christ’s sake, Jack.” Now she sounded mildly exasperated, as if I’d forgotten a dinner engagement or a dental appointment. “What the hell do you think’s been going on for the past twenty-two years? Did you honestly imagine I wanted it this way?”
“Well…” I hesitated, fishing for the right words. “It was your choice, Lynne. We…we talked about it, don’t you remember? And I told you that I’d support your decision, whatever it was.”
“Yes, that’s true,” she agreed in a softer tone. “You were a stand-up guy, Jack. I don’t deny it. And yes, it was my decision.”
“Then, I’m not sure I understand—”
“But there was really no decision,” she cut in again, “because I couldn’t do it. Have the abortion. End our child’s life. No, never that.”
Now I was confused. Lynne had always been pro-choice, hadn’t she? I remembered how she and her sisters in activism had led the charge against that restrictive abortion bill. And perhaps she divined my thoughts, for after a moment she went on.
“People forget,” she said. “They forget what it means. Pro-choice. Have the baby, don’t have the baby, your choice. Well, I made that choice. And I believe in a woman’s right to have that choice. But having it doesn’t make things any easier, Jack.”
“You never told me. Why not, Lynne?”
“What, tell you that I never wanted that child—never wanted Sam?” Lynne sighed. “Tell you that I’ve never loved her? That would have been cruel, Jack. Because you love her. To me, though, Sam has always been a reminder of what I had to give up to bring her into the world. I could have gone to Congress, you know.”
It was a bit startling to learn that she and I had been thinking along the same lines.
“And now this,” Lynne said bitterly. “I told myself that Sam’s success, her achievements, would compensate me for all the things I had to give up. I’d have that much satisfaction, at least. But instead, she’s ruining her life over this ridiculous infatuation. You know what’s going to happen, don’t you?”
“Look, I know it’s…unconventional.” Not very logically, Lynne’s bitterness put me in a mood to defend Ulrike Riemeck. “But things are different nowadays. So all right, Sam’s gay and she’s fallen for this magnetic older woman and her life’s taking an unexpected turn and it’s not what we hoped for. But if she’s happy—”
“But you know what’s going to happen,” Lynne said coldly. “Don’t pretend that you don’t. Sam will go to Austria with this Riemeck woman. And it’ll be wonderful for a time, exciting, astonishing, passionate. But then, Jack, then…”
And in that cold, cold voice Lynne went on to describe how Sam’s dream would degenerate, bit by bit, into a nightmare of tension, obsession, jealousy, stormy scenes, tears, reconciliations, in a cycle spinning more and more rapidly until…
I lay there beside my wife as she talked, trying to persuade myself that it was all a product of her anger and bitterness and envy—but what Lynne described seemed all too plausible, so that my sorrow and misery swelled and swelled. Then she paused, and I cringed beneath the covers in anticipation of what might come next.
“All that will happen,” Lynne said, almost in a whisper. “Everything I’ve done for her, given to her—thrown away. And you know what’s worst of all, Jack?”
I didn’t answer and I hoped she wouldn’t go on. But she did, pounding home the final nail that sealed our marriage in its coffin.
“It’s the realization that I’ve wasted my life on someone that I’ve never really liked.”
After that night, I never again slept in the same bed with Lynne and several months after Sam moved to Austria, we agreed to a divorce. By then I could scarcely look at my soon-to-be ex-wife, for whom marriage and motherhood had been nothing more than a punitive life sentence. I suppose I ought to have admired her sense of duty, arctic as it was. But how to get past the fact that Lynne had never liked Sam? How could that be? How could Lynne choose life in the abstract, yet coldly reject the daughter who was the astonishing, miraculous, flesh-and-blood outcome of that choice?
And she did reject Sam, who tells me that she hasn’t seen or spoken to her mother since returning from Austria. For yes, Lynne proved prescient in her evaluation of Sam’s relationship with Ulrike Riemeck. Things turned out just as she predicted, our daughter fleeing Austria after contacting me with a plea for the necessary money, which I was glad to provide. It was a relief to have Sam back in the States, but I found that something had changed within her. The charm and poise and self-assurance, if not banished, had been translated from the major to a minor key. Sam was quieter, more solemn, and she no longer dreamed big. She went back to college, earned her degree and took the additional courses necessary to secure a teaching certificate. Now she teaches high-school social studies while slowly working her way toward a masters’s in history. My daughter seems happy enough and her current girlfriend—soon I suspect, to become her spouse—is a young attorney, currently working as a public defender. When the three of us get together, Joyce and I take a certain malicious pleasure in regaling Sam with our war stories from the PD trenches.
Divorce erased Lynne from my life. She moved, I think, to southern California and sometimes the thought occurs that one day I’ll check the news on line to find that Lynne’s been elected to Congress or something similar. But no. The harvest of her drive and ambition was spent on Sam, and I suspect that the heart went out of Lynne when, as she believed, it came to nothing. She could never see, will never understand, that her job was done, and well done—that the daughter over whom she labored remains a glorious piece of work. True, the work exhibits signs of wear and tear. Sam’s been buffeted by life, things haven’t turned out quite the way she expected, but the soundness of Lynne’s craftsmanship is evident in the way that Sam has gathered up the bits and put them back together.
When I reflect on all that, the dead embers of compassion for my former wife flare up a bit. For Lynne could do the same: gather up the bits and put them back together. Perhaps she will. Perhaps one day she’ll reach out to Samantha. But then I hear her repeat—it’s as if she’s whispering in my ear—I’ve wasted my life on someone that I’ve never really liked.
So keep away, Lynne. Keep far away.
I so enjoyed reading this beautifully written, engaging story.
This is a beautiful story even in all of its heartbreak. Thank you for your brave share ...