MY TODDLER CRIED FOR HER “OTHER MAMA” – BUT I’M A SINGLE MOTHER
Her face scrunched up like something inside her was breaking, and then she wailed, “I want the other Mama.” Just like that. Like I was a substitute.
At first, I laughed. Confused, exhausted, maybe a little stung. “What do you mean, baby? I’m your only Mama.” She shook her head so hard her pigtails swung. “No. The other one. The one with the yellow cup.”
Yellow cup.
My stomach went tight. Her plastic yellow cup had disappeared about six weeks ago – figured it got left somewhere or thrown out by accident. But I didn’t say that. I just crouched down next to her and asked where she’d seen this “other mama.”
She looked straight at me. “When you go away. She does the ‘bunny song’ and makes me pasta.”
I haven’t left her with anyone except my neighbor Deanna, and even then, only a couple of times. Deanna doesn’t sing. And she complains every time she has to boil water.
I texted Deanna. “Did you ever make her pasta or do a bunny song?” She sent back a question mark.
So I did what any completely wound-up mom would do. I pulled up the baby monitor app. The camera tucked inside the bookshelf in the living room.
I went back through a few days, then the week before. Nothing off. Then – Two days ago. 1:43 p.m.
She’s sitting on the rug. By herself. Talking to someone out of frame. Grinning. Holding something yellow.
Then, a voice.
Too solid to be imagination. Soft, kind of lilting. Familiar.
I rewound it. Stopped the frame. And when I caught the edge of the sleeve, I dropped my phone – Because that jacket…
The Jacket I Knew Before I Could Name It
Navy blue. Fleece lining. The left cuff had a small tear near the snap, a little L-shaped rip I’d seen a hundred times.
I knew that jacket.
I sat on the kitchen floor for a second, phone face-down on the tile, trying to arrange my thoughts into something that made sense. My daughter Rosie was in the next room watching her shows, completely fine, completely oblivious to whatever was happening in my chest.
The jacket belonged to my sister, Pam.
Pam, who I hadn’t spoken to in fourteen months. Pam, who I’d blocked on everything after the fight we had at our mother’s house in October of the year before last, the kind of fight where things get said that both people know they mean and neither person can take back. She’d told me I was selfish. I’d told her she’d been waiting her whole life for me to fail so she could feel better about her own choices. We’d said other things too. Worse things. The kind that curl up inside you and stay warm for a long time.
She lived forty minutes away. I knew this because our cousin Terri still talked to both of us and occasionally let things slip. New apartment. Near the reservoir. Works at the dental office on Clover Street now.
I hadn’t asked for any of it, but I’d filed it all away somewhere.
I picked my phone back up. Rewound the clip again.
Rosie is two and a half. She’d never met Pam. She couldn’t have. Rosie was born four months after the fight, and Pam hadn’t reached out, and I hadn’t either, and that was that.
Except apparently it wasn’t.
What I Actually Heard on the Recording
I turned the volume all the way up and listened with my ear close to the speaker.
The voice first: “Can you hop like a bunny? Hop hop hop.”
Then Rosie, shrieking with laughter. That full-body toddler laugh where they can barely stay upright.
Then: “Okay, okay. One more time. Ready? Hop hop…”
And Rosie, breathless: “Hop.”
I watched the yellow cup come into frame. Rosie’s little hand wrapped around it. The sleeve of the jacket appeared at the edge of the shot, and then a hand, a woman’s hand, steadying the cup so Rosie could drink.
The hand had a small tattoo on the inside of the wrist. A sparrow. I knew that tattoo too.
Pam got it when she was twenty-two, the summer after our dad died. She’d drawn it herself on a napkin at the kitchen table and taken the napkin to a tattoo parlor on Route 9. Our mom cried. Pam said it was for Dad because he used to call her his little bird. I’d thought that was one of the most embarrassing things I’d ever witnessed. I was seventeen and cruel and I’d told her so.
I closed the app.
I sat there for a while.
The Part Where I Had to Figure Out How It Was Possible
Rosie goes to a small home daycare on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Sandra’s place, three kids total, Sandra’s been doing it for eleven years, I’d checked her references twice. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Rosie’s with me. I work remotely, medical billing, so most days she’s either napping or playing while I’m at my desk.
The times I’d left her with Deanna were a Thursday in March when Rosie had a fever and Sandra couldn’t take her sick, and once in April for a dentist appointment.
The dentist appointment.
I pulled up my phone again. Found the text chain with Sandra. Scrolled back to April. “Hi Sandra, I have a dentist appointment Wednesday the 9th at 2pm, is there any chance you could take Rosie for a couple hours?” Sandra had said yes.
Wednesday the 9th.
The recording was from a Tuesday. Two days ago. Which was the 14th.
So it wasn’t the dentist appointment. That didn’t line up.
I opened the recording again and looked at the date stamp. Tuesday, May 14th. 1:43 p.m.
Tuesday. Rosie’s a daycare day. She should have been at Sandra’s.
I called Sandra.
“Hey, did anything happen last Tuesday? Did someone else pick Rosie up?”
Sandra went quiet for a second. “Your sister came. She said you’d called ahead. She had your note.”
My note.
“What note?”
“The one you’d written. Said you had a work emergency, your sister Pam would be picking up at noon. I had her ID. It matched the name. I thought you’d just forgotten to text me separately.”
I hadn’t written any note.
The Part I Wasn’t Ready For
I called Pam.
I’d unblocked her number at some point, I don’t even remember when, one of those 2 a.m. things you do and then forget. The phone rang four times and I was already rehearsing the voicemail, already building the wall back up, when she picked up.
“I was wondering when you’d call,” she said.
Not defensive. Not guilty. Just tired.
“You forged a note from me,” I said. “You picked up my daughter without telling me. You were in my house.”
“I have a key,” she said. “Mom gave it to me. Before she moved to Florida. She thought someone should have one.”
Our mom had moved to Boca Raton eighteen months ago to live with her boyfriend, Gary, who I also hadn’t met. The key thing tracked. Our mom operated on her own logic, always had.
“That doesn’t explain why,” I said.
Pam was quiet for a second. I heard her exhale.
“Terri told me about Rosie’s surgery,” she said.
I went still.
Rosie had a minor procedure in February. Ear tubes. Outpatient, forty-five minutes, she was home by lunch and eating popsicles by dinner. I hadn’t told many people. I hadn’t told Pam.
But Terri had apparently told Pam, and Pam had apparently sat with that information for three months.
“I needed to see her,” Pam said. “I know that’s not an excuse. I know I went about it wrong. But she’s my niece, and I’ve never even met her, and I just.” She stopped. “I made her pasta. I taught her the bunny song. I brought her yellow cup back because I found it at the park near Sandra’s in March and I figured it was hers.”
The yellow cup.
It had been at the park. Pam had found it in March, two months before she ever came to the house. She’d been carrying it around for two months.
“She called you the other mama,” I said. My voice came out strange.
“I know.” Pam’s voice cracked just slightly at the edge. “I didn’t tell her to. She just. She started saying it.”
What I Did Next
I didn’t forgive her on the phone. I want to be honest about that. I was angry, and I told her so, and she didn’t argue with me. She just said she understood and that she was sorry and that she wouldn’t do it again if I told her not to.
I told her I needed a few days.
That night, after Rosie was asleep, I sat in the living room with the lights off and thought about the fight at our mom’s house. What I’d said. What she’d said. The things we’d both meant and neither of us had taken back because neither of us had talked since.
I thought about Pam at twenty-two, drawing a sparrow on a napkin at our kitchen table. I thought about our dad. I thought about how I’d been seventeen and I’d called it embarrassing and she’d just folded the napkin up and put it in her pocket and gone anyway.
I thought about Rosie, sitting on the rug, holding her yellow cup, laughing at the bunny song.
I texted Pam four days later. Not an apology, not yet. Just: “She asks about you. She calls you the one with the yellow cup.”
Pam wrote back: “I know I did it wrong. I’d do it again.”
And I sat with that for a long time. The honesty of it. The stubbornness. How much it sounded like something I would say.
I haven’t called her back yet.
But I haven’t blocked her again either.
—
If this one sat with you, pass it along to someone who might need it.
For more intense moments, read about another mother’s heartbreaking decision in She Pressed Her Palm Against the Window and I Saw What Was Tucked Under Her Seatbelt, or perhaps about a family betrayal in My Son’s Wife Planned to Cut Me Off the Moment My Check Cleared and My Mom Woke Up From Surgery and the First Thing She Typed Wasn’t For Me.
