The reality behind motherhood
Being a mother had not been the smooth ride Audrey Lim had expected. Whenever she was on the phone with her best friend Linda, it seemed Emma was the perfect child. Always polite, calm, cheerful, never displaying any bad behavior, the straight A's kind of child and music prodigy… the list of Emma's qualities was endless all the while her only flaw seemed to be her lack of patience for anything from sitting down to listen to a story to waiting for the clay to dry. However, since she and Kashal had adopted Emma, raising her had proved to be more than a challenge. Audrey couldn't help wondering if the accident had somehow rewired the child to the point of wiping out most of the qualities she had apparently been displaying.
Audrey had to go through facing a kid traumatized by a violent car accident, trying to convince the said kid to learn English (something she had only managed to do by dropping her off to school one morning and coming back in the evening to figure out that not only she could perfectly understand English, but she could also speak it and that she had just simply "refused to use this ability until she would really need to"), soothing the nightmares, going through a divorce with an abusive ex-husband and juggling the child's needs with a demanding career just to name a few.
And Emma's needs were a massive load to deal with. Not only was she a gifted child but she had an appetite for learning that she had never seen before. The girl was playing the violin since the age of 6 and she had had to buy a piano to satisfy her musical creativity. She was also full of energy (where had the calm and doll like little girl gone?). It felt like she was never getting tired. Putting her to sleep at night was a challenge that she gladly abandoned into the hands of a nanny when she was on a 36-hour shift or on night call. Those shifts even felt more relaxing than having to deal with Emma's emotional and intellectual needs.
Soon Audrey took the decision to sign Emma up for gymnastics lessons and made sure she was exercising every day. The kid never really shone as a gymnast, her nerves getting the best of her on competition days. And she didn't really like gymnastics. But where she shone was in running. In PE class she ran faster than the boys. In elementary school, she had won the cross country every year, even when she was running against the older girls.
Her first year of middle school, Emma made a deal with her mother to stop gymnastics and sign up for the school's running team instead. Audrey agreed, as long as she was in a sport that somehow was supposed to make her feel tired at the end of the day. Emma loved it and somehow, running did help her finding a balance between her over abundant levels of energy and her need to do something she enjoyed. The transition to middle school made Audrey's life a lot easier. It also helped that she was finished with her residency and fellowship year and had secured a job as an attending trauma surgeon. That and the balance she and Kashal had found to allow Emma to see her father who had accepted a job in Florida, made things feel smoother. Emma was more independent now that she was riding the bus to school and between practice and homework, it felt like most of her needs were met. In the meantime, Audrey was spending more and more time at the hospital, so that the two barely saw each other.
Even though things were working fine, Audrey still had the nagging feeling that she was failing Emma. Despite her parents being dead for over three years and Audrey and Kashal doing their best to raise her well, they were helpless when it came to her night terrors. Emma couldn't spend a night without waking up crying or sweaty from a dream – or rather a nightmare – of her life with her deceased parents. When Audrey was coming back home in the middle of the night, Emma was often awake or she could hear her screaming or begging. The distress in her daughter's voice was usually hard to handle and running away from the problem by working long hours was a coward solution. But it was that or having her thirteen-year-old finally crawling in her bed every night, asking her if she could use her scarf to soothe her back to sleep. Audrey had chosen to run away; she was a coward and she wasn't proud of herself.
Eventually the nightmares seemed to go away as Emma reached teenage hood. At the hospital, very few people knew about Emma. Audrey liked to keep her private life to herself and would never mix personal matters with work related ones. Only a few of her closed colleagues knew, and that included Melendez who had had to cover for her when her trip to France had been longer than expected in order to bury the parents and organize everything to bring Emma home. On the other hand, Emma never set foot at Saint Bonaventure's. It was her mother's territory and she refused to trespass it.
As she went to High School, the two drifted away from each other even more. Emma resented her mother for never attending her cross country or track meets or music recitals, while Audrey was clueless as how she could bridge the gap that was deepening between them. At some point, she gave up and let Emma lead the life she wanted to live.