Fiction by Claire Lombardo
Julia Ames is a woman in her fifties who is pretty sure she mostly has her life together. Her relationship with her husband Mark is loving and stable, her grown son Ben is slightly distant but quite successful, and she's relatively close to her high-energy, emotional teenaged daughter Alma. She feels she can at least say she's done better with her children than her own toxic single mother, from whom she is estranged.
But then she sees Helen in the grocery store, and is immediately catapulted back in time to when she was a clinically depressed young mother of an intense little toddler. Helen had been a friend and lifeline back then, but somehow things had gone horribly wrong. Julia and Helen haven't spoken in almost eighteen years.
The story is told in two timelines: First, the current Julia manages her almost empty nest, and decides whether to try once again to reconnect with her mother. Second, the reader is taken back in time to see what really happened with Helen, and how it has affected Julia's life.
This was a really thought-provoking book, and the author does a great job of exploring the ups and downs of parenting, especially the endless never-enough-ness-feeling of motherhood. I loved the characters and the book was extremely well written, but it was also kind of depressing. I didn't like the ending.
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