Mom, Please Love Me
My younger sister, Alice Ballmer, rushed forward at just the right moment, wrapping her arms around our hysterical mother, tears streaming down her face.
She turned to me and snapped, "Iris! You're so selfish! You know full well you're nothing but an ineradicable stain, and yet you still provoke Mom like this—are you trying to drive her to her death?!"
A stain?
I froze.
Bits and pieces of the "past" that the adults in my family had occasionally let slip started surfacing in my mind, fragmented and hazy.
Before I ever existed, my parents had been deeply in love, about to walk down the aisle.