Dr. Bill left the room with Andy, which left me facing my daughter. Alone.
Sierra bore into me with my eyes. No, not my color, mine are green and hers are blue. But they're my eyes. She gazed at me with my own face.
"Why'd you come here, Mom?"
"I came to see you, sweetheart, and to talk to you."
"I don't want to hear anything you've got to say to me."
I took a deep breath. "You need to, Sierra."
"Is Dr. Bill making you talk to me?"
Shaking my head no, I replied, "I'm talking to you because I want to. I'm talking to you because I love you and I know you're hurting. I never realized how much you were hurting."
"You don't even know me, Mom."
"You're right, I don't know you. Not as well as I should. When you turned teen you distanced yourself from me, your dad, and the whole family. When your brother was in the hospital, you didn't even bother to come see him on your own accord, we had to make you come."
"All you were going to do is fawn all over him like you always do."
"Sierra, I love all of you, and I do my best --"
Sierra stormed out of her seat. When she gets angry, when her temper flares, it is a scary sight. Her nostrils tensed up and her eyes got bigger than they already are. The table we were sitting at wound up on the floor.
"Dad raised us, mom, not you! You weren't even there! You thrust all of us on him while you did whatever the hell you wanted!"
"Sierra, that's not true."
"Yes it is, mom! You think I didn't know when you snuck in the house at three in the morning? Of course I knew. I was often the only person up, everyone else was sleeping, even Max our butler tried to sleep. You know who changed our diapers? Cooked us dinner? Read us bedtime stories? Taught us how to walk and talk? Signed our report cards? Dad did, not you. And now you want to take the credit."
"That's not true."
"Yes, it is! It's all true! Remember the mother-daughter breakfast at school? You promised me you would come, but at the last minute your agent called and sent you to do a book signing."
I sighed. "I'm sorry, Sierra. I'm sorry for missing the breakfast. I didn't know it was that important to you. Had I known I would have told my agent to wait until after the breakfast was over."
"You missed everything, mom! You missed my softball games, my scouts awards ceremony, my swim team tryouts. So I said, you know what? If you did whatever you pleased, why can't I?"
"This is what you do, Sierra, every time we try to have a conversation, you blame all of your problems on me."
"You are my mother! And you were not there!"
Dr. Bill walked in a few minutes later. "I heard that entire conversation in the next room, and I have it taped to listen to again later. But here are some pointers I have right now.
"Mrs. Cheesman, it's clear to me that Sierra does not respect you."
"I know that now."
"She does seem to have some respect for her father, who she regards as the person responsible for raising her and her siblings."
"I agree."
"But she has no respect for you whatsoever. And to be honest, given the behavior pattern, given what I've seen, given her statements, combined with that of her sister's earlier statement where she had many of the same issues, she kind of has a right not to respect you, and there's a consistency there between what both of the girls are saying. They said it in different ways, one with a three-page letter and the other by acting out, screaming and yelling -- but they're saying the same thing. The girls have, and to a lesser extent your son, have all regarded you as an emotionally distant parent. You have demonstrated a consistent pattern of psychologically and in some respects physically removing yourself from your children. And, in some respects, you've repeated the pattern that you grew up in, because you had a cold and distant mother yourself."
"My own mother and I don't have much of a relationship at all. Never did, really."
"So, you see, because you lacked the proper example, and because, quite likely, she -- your mother, that is -- never had the proper example of a nurturing, loving parent, the cycle has repeated itself. You've done the same thing to your children what your mother did to you. You've abandoned them, lady, and they're paying the price. All of them. In different ways, but they're all paying the price."
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