Read The Year My Mother Came Back for Free Online Page A

of four living together under one roof. Julia didn’t rebel in high school in that cataclysmic way you expect from adolescents. She’s always been preternaturally good-natured and easy-going. But as soon as she got back from Canada, something must have kicked in. Her subconscious registered, “Oh, shit, I forgot to have my teenage rebellion! This is my last chance before I go to college.” Consequently, she and I lock horns at least once a day. She’s embarrassed by things I do (oh, for example, breathing). She lowers her eyelids in that way only a teenaged girl can do—that special, glowering look reserved for mothers—which makes me grumpy, so I try to glower back, but she’s by far the superior glowerer. At six feet tall, she has the advantage of looking down at me when she glowers.
    Julia can’t wait to go to college. Another month at home and we’ll both implode. I commit the cardinal sin of offering unsolicited suggestions. “Are you sure you should be drinking so much coffee?” I ask her, in our little kitchen. She ignores me, while brewing another pot for herself and Emily, her best friend since second grade. “Oh, never mind, your caffeine habit is excellent preparation for college life. Just promise me you won’t join an eating club. Those elitist clubs are the last bastion of Princeton’s old-boy privilege.”
    â€œMom,” she says with a teasing grin, putting her hands on my shoulders and looking me straight in the eye, “I am planning to join an eating club. It’s one of the things I’m looking forward to about Princeton.”
    â€œNo, no, not the eating clubs! When I was in college, I joined a vegetarian cooking group and loved it.”
    â€œReally, Mom? That might have been cool when you were in college—in the
seventies.
”
    â€œ
I’d
like to join a vegetarian cooking group,” says Emily, reassuringly.
    â€œThank you, Emily.”
    Julia laughs. “Emily is a vegetarian and she goes to Hampshire College, so that doesn’t count.”
    â€œI guess this is not your mother’s Princeton,” I sigh. The girls laugh.
    A FEW DAYS after she gets back, Julia wakes at noon and asks if we can talk. We have the apartment to ourselves. Julia sits cross-legged on the sofa in the plaid boxer shorts and forest green tank top she wears as pajamas—her hair over one shoulder in a tousled, slept-in braid. I join her on the sofa, and she tells me, for the first time ever:
    â€œMom, I’m interested in finding my birth mother.”
    â€œWow!”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œThat’s wonderful,” I say. And I mean it. I was at Julia’s birth, and I fell in love with her birth mother, who was twenty at the time. Zoe didn’t want to have any contact after the birth, but I always intuited that Julia would one day want to find her.
    â€œThis summer, for the first time in my life, I suddenly found myself wondering about Zoe, wanting to meet her. Being adopted didn’t seem like a big deal for me growing up. I mean, this is my family. I always felt totally loved by you. And because you and I look so similar, people never assumed I was adopted, so that wasn’t an issue.”
    Except for our height differences—she’s six feet, I’m five feet three inches—Julia and I look uncannily like mother and daughter. We both have long, straight, brown hair, dark lashes and eyebrows, similar almond-shaped faces. Ever since she was a little girl, people have frequently said, “Julia, you look just like your mother,” to which she politely agrees. If they ask, “Is your father tall?” she says, “Yes, he is.” In fact, Julia’s biological father is six feet seven inches. Ironically, I look more like my adopted daughter than my biological daughter. Eliana looks more like Michael.
    â€œI’d love to help you with your search,