Lily tiptoes into my bedroom, but I don’t hear her. She gently taps me on the shoulder. “Mom,” she says, giving me a little shake. I blink my eyes open, trying to make out her shape in the darkness. “What is it?” I ask, but I already know what she’s going to say. She woke up and can’t get back to sleep.
I pull the blanket back and slide over to make room for her. She climbs in, not hoisting herself up like she did a few years ago, but gently slinking into the bed and under the covers. She is almost nine and still, somehow, her body fits perfectly against mine—a little spoon nestled into a bigger one.
I kiss her head and smell her hair. Earlier, after I’d tucked her into her bed, she came out into the living room and said she couldn’t get to sleep. I could tell something was on her mind, but she didn’t want to talk about it. She just wanted to sit with me for a few minutes while I watched TV, so I let her.
And now, a few hours later, after we’d both drifted off to sleep, here she is again beside me in the quiet.
I never tire of these middle of the night wakeup calls, the need for a cuddle and a bit of reassurance. Are you still here, Mom? Can I find you when I need you? Sometimes I need it as much as she does.
A few minutes go by and I can feel her breathing start to change. “It’s time to go back to bed,” I whisper. “You’re safe in your bed. Try to rest.” As soon as I say it, as soon as she lifts her head from the pillow and starts to move away, I wish I’d said something else: “Remember how much I love you. Think about that while you fall asleep.”
It was the middle of the night when I went into labor with her, this baby of unknown gender. Earlier that day, I’d gone to the doctor and begged him to strip my membranes, a desperate attempt to get labor going as I inched my way closer to being two weeks overdue. He agreed and, once he’d finished, said, “I think that’ll do it.”
When I woke around 2 a.m., I wasn’t surprised. It had worked, and I was relieved. But it was also the middle of the night, and my contractions were regular enough that I couldn’t get back to sleep. I tiptoed out of bed, careful not to wake my husband, and headed to the couch to lie down. I had borrowed a season of Gilmore Girls from the library and flipped it on while I tried to rest.
I’d already watched the entire series and was on my second time through. Back then, nearly nine years ago, I related most to Rory and her experience as a student trying to find her way in the world. She had something I didn’t: a good relationship with her mom. So, I’d watch the show closely, wondering how Lorelei and Rory did it, how they became so close. I wanted that.
It was when I was pregnant that my mother and I decided to reconcile our strained relationship. I’d been married for nearly four years and only talked to her a handful of times since my wedding. But now that a grandchild was in the mix, she suggested we simply move forward. “It’s all water under the bridge now,” she told me over lunch at a bagel shop. I was six months pregnant and in town for a baby shower. “We can put the past in the past and move on.”
I believed her. I wanted so desperately to have that Lorelei-Rory connection, not the estrangement of Lorelei and her mother Emily. I’d spent years struggling through my relationship with my mom before finally moving out at age sixteen. We didn’t talk for years and, when we finally did, it was sporadically. All that time, I’d wished for a different kind of mother, someone to love and understand me, a place to be safe. I knew it existed. It was right here in this TV show. Mothers and daughters can have good relationships.
The night my labor started, I watched episode after episode of Gilmore Girls, trying to rest, knowing the hard work that was ahead. I wondered about this little person inside me, whether the baby was a boy or a girl, whether I’d be a good mother. Later, at the hospital, after hours of labor and a half hour of pushing, the baby was born. The doctor asked my husband if he wanted to announce it, and my husband said the words I’d been hoping for.
“It’s a girl.”
I threw my head back with relief, and rivers poured down my cheeks. She was here. I had wished for her, and she was here. Now I had my own daughter, and it would be up to me to write this story, hers and mine.
Last year, Lily and I started watching Gilmore Girls on Netflix. She was eight and a lot of it went over her head, but we’d cuddle up on the couch or in my bed and watch an episode every couple of days. We started calling it Girls’ Night, a sacred time where we watched our show, just the two of us, while my husband and son did their own thing.
By then, I’d watched every season multiple times through, each viewing changing my perspective a bit. I associated less with Rory and more with Lorelei. Not only was I growing closer in age to Lorelei, but I also stood in that middle ground between the relationship I was building with my daughter and the strained one with my mother.
For years, my sole focus has been Lily, doing everything in my power to make sure our relationship is close and that she knows she’s loved unconditionally. We’ve disagreed and apologized, cried together and laughed, and time after time that I’ve held her and said that nothing will ever change how much I love her. And in all those years, despite wanting to put the past in the past, my relationship with my mom continues to be challenging, disconnected. The strain that’s always been there is still there, like a bruise that won’t heal.
I am Lorelei standing between her daughter and her mother, bridging the gap between the past and the future, writing a new history.
It didn’t occur to me that I’d been watching Gilmore Girls the night I went into labor until Lily and I had made it through three seasons. We were sitting on the couch, her shoulder tucked up under my arm, slightly entangled in the way we usually sit, and I told her about that night. “I didn’t know if you were a boy or a girl,” I said, “but I really wanted a girl.” I wanted this, I thought, this moment right here with you on this couch.
And I wanted the moment in my bed in the middle of the night, her warm still-small body curled into mine—our relationship wholly our own. I wanted to tell her to think of how much I love her, to think about it as she drifted off to sleep. But I know I don’t have to say it. She already knows.
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