The Magic of Coffee
If ever there was a single lifestyle that demanded more coffee than any other, it was being a single mother to an eight-month-old baby at seventeen. Living with wholly unsupportive parent only amplified this need. Coffee seemed to have magical properties that made everything alright. It allowed her to take anything with a smile, and Lorelai Gilmore was sure it had other powers that remained undiscovered. She would be the one to discover them.
She sipped her coffee as she watched her sleeping baby girl. "Isn't it time you woke up?" she asked aloud, but quietly, so as not to actually wake her daughter. Now that she'd been asleep long enough for Lorelai to collect her thoughts and get a cup of coffee, she was bored. She wanted to play with her daughter.
As if on cue, the little girl opened her eyes. Lorelai smiled. "Good timing," she said aloud. She lifted her daughter out of her crib and sat down on her bed, sitting the baby on her lap. She alternately sipped her coffee and talked to her daughter. "Mommy," she repeated, pointing at herself.
She'd been trying to teach her daughter to talk for almost two weeks, so far without success. Her mother was convinced that Rory was still too young to speak her first words, which, for Lorelai, was even more reason to persist in teacher her. Rory was going to be smart. Prodigy smart. She was going to go to Harvard, not Princeton or Vassar or Yale, and get the education and life her mother had so narrowly missed. All of this she and Rory would achieve with as little help as possible from her parents.
These thoughts seemed to make Lorelai even more determined to teach her daughter to talk. It was as if that was the starting block to everything else. If she learned to talk now, everything else would come. She turned sideways and pulled her legs up onto the bed so that she was sitting cross-legged. She arranged her daughter so that she was sitting, facing her. The look on the little girl's face was either confusion, determination, or a sign that she'd soon need her diaper changed.
Lorelai sipped her coffee, then resumed her teaching. "Mommy." She pointed to herself. "Mommy."
She looked into her mug. One sip and the coffee would be gone. "Mommy," she said again. She lifted the mug to her lips and started to drink the last sip.
"Muh-mee."
She almost spit her coffee out, but composed herself and swallowed. "What?" she asked, as if her daughter would understand.
"Muh-mee," she repeated, as if she had.
"Close enough," she said, hugging the baby. "Yes! Who am I?" she asked, pointing to herself, as if to verify that Rory actually knew what she was talking about.
"Muh-mee."
She couldn't have kept herself from smiling if she'd tried. It was decided-her daughter was going to Harvard, and she was convinced that the reason for this was the magic of coffee.