I burst into a workshop room where twenty other crabby-looking pregnant women had just been informed they couldn’t eat whatever the hell they wanted during their pregnancies and needed to draw their own blood three times a day in lieu of scarfing cupcakes. I worried for the peppy young nutritionist. She sat in the middle of the ring of famished, irate, heavily pregnant women. She looked as though she was surrounded by a pack of bloated, hungry wolves. There wasn’t a single question that was asked in a non-confrontational way. One woman kept asking about twisters. “WHAT ABOUT A TWISTER?! ARE YOU TELLING ME I CAN’T EAT A TWISTER IN THE MORNING? COME ON! NOT EVEN A TWISTER!” The group of women, who were mostly Asian, WASPy, or Black, had no clue what a twister was. Though I knew what it was, I initially had the good sense to stay well back from the fray. A Southeast Asian woman dared to ask what many were likely wondering. “I’m sorry. What is a twister?” She was met with a shriek of “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT A TWISTER IS? FROM HAYMISHE’S! YOU KNOW! COME ON! WHAT IS THIS PLACE?!” The nutritionist, who clearly had not been on the job very long, acted politely curious about the exotic cuisine being discussed and asked someone to explain what a twister was. “It’s bagel-like,” I finally offered quietly, unable to stay out of any fray for very long. “Oh! You mean a bagel!” the relieved nutritionist exclaimed. “A TWISTER!! IT’S WAY BIGGER THAN A BAGEL!” was the response. “Oh, well,” the nutritionist said. “You can only get away with half a bagel in the morning, so I guess a quarter of a twister would be okay. But that would have to be it! And it’s probably better to spend your carbs on something more nutritious.” I decided she was suicidal. Twister Lady was in a state of total combustion. “Give me that sheet!” she said. She grabbed out of the nutritionist’s grasping claws the sheet of information about what could and couldn’t be eaten and in what portions. The nutritionist went red as she tried to ignore the physical aggression and suggested we all practise pricking our fingers. There were moans. One woman screamed.

Many nights in those years I lay awake wondering if the thing I wanted most would simply not be a part of my life. I regretted the inordinate and unseemly amount of luck I had had thus far. Why should I deserve to get the thing I most wanted, when so much had been handed to me?

She was adored. As an adult, I am still sometimes stopped on the street by people in their seventies or eighties who tell me how much they loved my mother, how much she made them laugh, how much she helped them and believed in them. One of her former colleagues told one of my siblings that they remembered her rushing into a meeting late one day, which was odd, as she was usually so organized and responsible at work. He noticed that her face was greasy-looking and sweating. He said, “Diane—were you just sunbathing?” She yelped. “Yes! I’m so sorry! It was just such a beautiful day!” She managed to pack these shards of joy into a life that was constantly overstuffed.

I take a deep breath and I answer Soap-Opera-Hot Doctor’s mother’s question. I say that I didn’t know how much I missed my mother until I was pregnant. I say that I didn’t know how angry I was at her for dying. I say that now that I’ve lived two and a half years with my child, and felt the intensity of our subterranean, inexpressible, and indelible knowledge of each other, I’ve gone from feeling that eleven years with my mother was not very much, not nearly enough, to knowing that to feel adored and cherished by a mother who was full of warmth and joy is quite a lot, actually. More than most people get in a lifetime. And because, as I became a mother myself, I was nurtured, for a short time, by a team of wise and skilled people at Mount Sinai Hospital (an incubator that finished off the work that my mother left undone), I’ve been able to remember, clearly, what was best in her, and to discover what was, in fact, fully formed in me.