Sugar and her children

Sugar and her children are bound together by a form of love that is neither effortless nor uncomplicated: she enters motherhood with real ambivalence, then learns to meet her children’s questions and vulnerability without pretending that pain can be kept outside their lives. Their relationship also carries her mother’s absence forward, as her children become a source of new memories and a living continuation of family affection.

Choosing Motherhood

Before having her first child, Sugar considered a life without children and feared what the decision to become a mother would require. She does not present that uncertainty as a mistake that motherhood simply erased. Rather, the first weeks with her son brought a clarity she had not possessed beforehand: his body against hers made the choice newly real, while the knowledge of how close she had come to choosing otherwise left her rattled. She describes becoming his mother as a life ending and beginning at once, a transformation that did not make the preceding uncertainty unreal.

Looking back, Sugar says she would make the same choice again in a moment. Yet she continues to imagine the life she did not choose, which she calls her sister life. That alternative might have included different journeys, encounters, work, and forms of care; she wonders what she did not write while tending to her children, as well as what she was able to write because she became their mother. She does not claim to know which life would have been happier or better. The relationship is therefore presented without a simple victory over ambivalence: she loves the life she has while acknowledging that the unchosen one remains important, beautiful, and permanently unknowable.

Teaching Children About Suffering

Sugar’s approach to parenting is tested when she takes her children, then four and nearly six, to a Christmas pageant at a large Unitarian church. She intends the visit as a history lesson about the non-Santa background of the holiday, not as religious instruction. Because her own mother had rejected organized religion and Sugar received no religious schooling as a child, she explains the basic story of Jesus as best she can, from the birth in a manger through his preaching and crucifixion.

Her children seize on the crucifixion. They want to hear about Jesus’s death repeatedly and in graphic detail, not about his birth, teachings, divinity, or resurrection. For months, Sugar describes his flogging, humiliation, crown of thorns, and the nails driven through his hands and feet. Sometimes she recounts these events while hurrying through the aisles of an upscale organic grocery store, where other shoppers turn to stare. Her children are both horrified and fascinated; they respond to Jesus not as a Messiah but as a human being who was made to suffer. Her son asks whether the cruelty hurt Jesus’s feelings, while her daughter wonders where his mother was.

Sugar initially questions whether she should have exposed them to such brutality, since she and Mr. Sugar had shielded them from much of the world’s cruelty. She comes to understand their intense attention as evidence that they are ready to know something difficult: suffering belongs to human life. The episode shows her parenting moving beyond protection as concealment. She does not treat the children’s questions as proof that they need a religious answer; she recognizes instead that they are trying to understand pain and the people who endure it.

Vulnerability and the Example She Sets

A smaller domestic moment reveals how quickly children absorb a parent’s words about herself. When Sugar’s daughter is five, she overhears Sugar complaining to Mr. Sugar that she is a big fat ugly beast who looks terrible in everything. The child repeats the description back in surprise, taking the self-insult as a sincere account. Sugar hurriedly claims she was joking, then tries to act as if she does not believe those things about herself, ostensibly to protect her daughter’s future self-esteem.

Sugar recognizes that impulse in the advice she is giving another woman: she wants to replace a complicated reality with an encouraging assurance. The scene makes the mother-daughter relationship reciprocal in an important way. Sugar is the adult responsible for the child, but the child’s immediate repetition also forces Sugar to hear her own language as it might sound to someone learning how to regard herself. Her response reveals both a wish to protect her daughter and the difficulty of doing so by denying her own vulnerability.

Grief Across Generations

Sugar’s experience of motherhood is inseparable from the death of her own mother. Her mother was absent when Sugar’s children were born, as she was at other milestones in Sugar’s adult life. That absence is not resolved by becoming a parent; instead, it becomes part of the emotional setting in which Sugar raises her children and understands what they mean to her.

Several months after her mother died, while clearing the house she had thought of as home, Sugar found a glass jar of stones in the far reaches of her mother’s bedroom closet. The stones had been given to their mother by Sugar and her siblings, collected on beaches, trails, and grassy margins near parking lots. As a child, each had pressed a found stone into their mother’s hand; she had kept these small offerings together. Holding the jar, Sugar felt its cold weight as if she were briefly holding her mother. She emptied it onto the bedroom floor and touched the smooth, mostly black stones, smaller than potato chips, that her mother called worry stones because rubbing them against the palm could soothe the mind.

The stones could not restore her mother, and Sugar admits that the hoped-for recovery of her was impossible. But the gesture of giving stones has not ended with the earlier generation. More than twenty years after her mother’s death, Sugar’s children give her stones in turn. She keeps the best ones in her pockets, sometimes carrying a particularly perfect stone for weeks and finding its black curve with her hand. The object links children, mother, and grandmother without pretending that love cancels death: what changes is who gives and receives the stones, while the practice of keeping what matters continues.

A Relationship That Holds More Than One Truth

Sugar’s writing about her children resists the idea that love makes every choice simple or every loss bearable. Motherhood gives her a decisive intimacy she could not have known in advance, but it does not erase the imagined life she relinquished. Her efforts to protect her children coexist with a willingness to let them encounter painful truths, and her wish to model confidence is complicated by the self-criticism they hear at home.

The relationship also shows how family love can persist through absence and change. Sugar’s mother is not present to meet her grandchildren, yet the stones they give Sugar revive a practice that began with their mother’s own children. In that exchange, her children do not replace the mother she lost; they make a new bond through which memory continues to be handled, carried, and felt.