I can say this with complete certainty:
My mother didn't want me.
To be honest, it's less hurtful than you might think. I'm really relieved that she didn't raise me, because it would have been a complete disaster.
She wasn't the mothering type, she was the mastering type. During the few years she looked after my aunt after their mom died, all kinds of bad stuff kept happening. And that was before the entire town fell in.
I spent most of my early childhood with Aunt Willow and her wife Kennedy. They were the first of my mother's close friends to retire, so they looked after me for a few years. Aunt Dawn got married when I was six, so I lived with her and Uncle Xander until they had their first kid. After that, I bounced around between members of the old gang, and by the time I was sixteen, I'd lived all over the world.
Most of my mother's friends wanted to retire early, they just wanted a normal life. She didn't.
I've met my mom twice that I can remember. The first time, I was eleven. She came over for coffee in the afternoon on a Friday, and she and Dawn were sitting in the living room when I got home from school.
She looked entirely out of place sitting on Aunt Dawn's old couch, her dark blonde hair pulled back. The room was small but tidy, like the rest of the house. Every piece of furniture was old and used, but in decent condition. She was wearing a black sweater, jeans, and boots. She looked young, for mid-thirties, and well taken care of.
"You're due in April?" She was asking Dawn, smiling. "That's so great, Dawnie." She seized her sister's hand and squeezed it.
"Yeah," Dawn said, a smile coming over her face. "Oh, look, Kate's home."
She turned to me, pursing her lips. She smiled. "Hi, Katherine."
"Baby, this is your mom." Dawn said, standing and taking my hand. "Buffy, this is Kate."
I smiled at her, trying to be happy. At a young age, I had wondered about my mother. Raised by two women, it was no wonder I was curious. They told me she had a demanding job, and couldn't give me the attention that I deserved. Willow had told me that my mom's life couldn't make space for me, that she just wanted me to be safe. It sounded like a line, but I was four. How was I supposed to know that?
She hugged me, and I sat beside her on the couch, listening mindlessly to her and Dawn's chatter about the baby for the rest of the afternoon. That day, she left me a gift-wrapped necklace: a silver cross. I hadn't known at the time what it would mean.
"Hey," A woman with long, dark curly hair and full lips was sitting at the breakfast table when I came down one morning months later, reading a small, worn paperback over two bowls of cereal at the table.
"Who're you?" I asked her.
"I'm Faith." She said, dropping her book and looking right at me. "I'm an old friend of Buffy's." She turned towards me. She was long-legged, had long, dark glossy black hair and dark eyes. She was muscled and lithe, with pale skin and a mischievous smile. She wore tight jeans, a brown leather jacket, and combat boots. She looked like she belonged on the cover of a magazine, thought she was slightly grimey. Maybe the cover of a motorcycle magazine. "Dawnie sent for me." She jerked her head towards the chair across from her. "Sit."
I sat in the other chair, and she gestured for me to eat. I took a bite of the dry cereal and looked up at her. She was looking at me with a critical eye, as though she was trying to dismantle me with her eyes. "Sorry," She said, with less than apology in her voice. "You've gotta be used to people staring at you like that, kid." She smirked at me. "The product of true love. Trying to see them both in you."
I didn't understand. Sure, I was used to people staring. A few times a year, Dawn and Xander had friends over for drinks and dessert, and they were always asking about me. Dawn would come into my room, where I was reading, and beckon for me to join them. I would be led around the room, introduced to an endless sea of faces I didn't recognize, and told a million stories about their great times with my mother, none of which ever really sunk in. The gist of most was her bravery, intelligence, her fearlessness. To these people, to her estranged friends, my mother was some great figure of legend. To me, she was just a big question mark. A lot of those people seemed to be full of shit. Like, each of them wanted to share a piece of my mother with me, as if them confiding their stories of high school glory could somehow be built into a solid person, who I could hold in my arms, tuck away in my mind as my mother. All of them had parents, they should have understood the implausibility of that. Except Faith.
She ate a bite of dry cereal and gave me a look. "This is terrible. Why didn't you speak up, kid? Let's go get something better." She smiled at me, and I followed her out the door of Dawn and Xander's tiny house.
Faith took me to a diner, where she opened my eyes to the world. "Where have you been hiding away all of your life, kid?" She asked me, pleasantly. She sipped a mug of black coffee and regarded the menu with some amusement.
"I lived with Willow until I was six, and Dawn ever since." I said, by way of explanation. Dawn always said that I reminded her of my mom when she was in a mood, brief and quiet. It's no wonder I grew up sullen, though, being raised by almost everyone except my parents and the queen of England.
"Well, I see no reason why we haven't met before." Faith said, crabbily. "Well, there was that time I almost killed Dawn. And I think she still holds that time with Xander against me. And I almost killed your grandmother once." Faith smiled. "I liked your grandma, she was one hell of a woman."
"You knew her?" I asked, surprised. I was always bombarded with stories about my mother, but my grandmother was a mystery to me. I only knew that she had gotten sick and died long before I came around. I guess everyone thought that just because I had never met the woman meant that I couldn't miss her. Also, I was pretty sure my grandmother hadn't been all with the demon killing.
"There was a time when I was almost like family." Faith said, her eyes a bit far away. "But, like almost all other parts of my life, I screwed that up thoroughly." Her eyes hardened, coming back to the present, she pushed her hair back from her face and swallowed. "I knew your dad too. I suppose people don't much like to talk to you about him."
"I know almost nothing about him." I admitted.
"You're a little young to hear the whole story yet, but I bet you've heard a lot about Buffy." Faith smiled, wryly.
"Everyone has a story." I said, simply.
"Buff's like that. She inspires loyalty, heroism, love." Faith shook her head, her hair falling in waves over her shoulders again. "Never could learn to do that myself. But I didn't need to. We had her back then."
"What happened to her?" I asked simply, hoping, for the first time in my life, to receive a straightforward answer from this woman who seemed to hate the bullshit as much as I did.
"Something happened to your dad, and it destroyed her." Faith said, simply. "No time for that now, we have to discuss your future."
"What about it?" I asked, totally flummoxed.
"Dawn's having a baby." Faith said, bluntly.
"Yeah, I know." I replied, raising her eyebrows.
"Well, do the math, kid." Faith raised her eyebrows as well, hailing an unshaven waiter with her right hand. With her left hand, she took another deep draft of her coffee. "They live in a two bedroom house. Baby makes three, kid."
"Quit calling me 'kid.'" I said, my mind suddenly spinning. While I had never felt totally at home anywhere that I remembered, Dawn's was the only place I had concrete memories of living and being loved. "Spit it out."
"Dawn needs you off her hands." Faith replied brusquely. "She didn't say it in as many words, but she's due in five months. She and Xander need their space." She turned away from me a minute to speak to the cute waiter. He had dark circles under his eyes, and a square jaw further strengthened by a few days of stubble. She ordered, flirting briefly with the waiter before turning her full attention back to me.
"So, you have a few options." Faith told her, stirring her coffee. "You can go back and live with Willow and Kennedy, who are currently going through a bitter divorce-" She took a sip of her coffee to allow for my surprise. "-You can go live with Andrew, creepy nerd-extraordinaire, in Manhattan, or you can come with me to London to live with Giles." Faith smiled. "Actually, you really have only one option, but I like to give people choices." She shrugged, and leaned in towards me. "What's it gonna be, Kitty?"