I packed her lunches.
Every single school day for twelve years. Peanut butter and honey, never jelly. Apple slices with a little lemon juice so they wouldn’t turn brown, because she wouldn’t eat brown apples. And a note. Every day. Written on a napkin or an index card, folded in half and tucked under the sandwich.
“Good luck on your spelling test.”
“You are braver than you think.”
“Mr. Hops says hi.”
When she was fourteen, she told me the notes were embarrassing and to stop. So I stopped. Two weeks later, she came home and threw her lunch bag on the counter and said, “You forgot the note.” I started again the next day.
I found out years later that she kept them. All of them. In a shoebox under her bed.
I sat up with her through strep throat. She was eight. Her fever went up to a hundred and four, and she was so hot and miserable that she couldn’t sleep. Mark was on a business trip in Chicago. I sat on the floor next to her bed all night with a cold washcloth, singing every song I knew. When I ran out of songs, I made them up. A song about a rabbit who wanted to fly. A song about a girl who could talk to clouds.
Around four in the morning, she finally fell asleep with her hot little hand wrapped around my finger. I didn’t move until the sun came up. My leg was so numb I couldn’t stand.
I taught her to drive in the church parking lot.
This church. The same one where I was sitting in the last row in a dusty rose dress.
Every Sunday afternoon for three months, after the service let out and everybody went home, we’d sit in that big empty lot in my old Honda. She’d grip the wheel so hard her knuckles went white. She’d stomp on the brake so hard we’d both fly forward against our seatbelts.
“I’m going to kill us,” she said once.
“You’re not going to kill us.”
“I’m going to hit the dumpster.”
“You’re nowhere near the dumpster.”
“I’m going to hit Pastor Jim’s car.”
“Pastor Jim’s car is at his house, honey.”
She laughed so hard she had to stop the car. Then I started laughing too. We sat there in the church parking lot laughing until we cried.
She passed her test on the first try. She called me from the DMV, screaming. “I did it! Laura, I did it! I didn’t hit anything!”
That’s what she called me. Laura. When she was little, it was Mama Laura. She came up with it herself when she was seven. She said she couldn’t call me just Mama, because she already had one of those somewhere, but she didn’t want to call me just Laura either, because that was what the mailman called me.
So, Mama Laura.
When she turned thirteen, she dropped the “Mama.” It was just Laura after that. I told myself it didn’t matter. It was just a name. Teenagers do that.
But I’ll be honest. It hurt a little.
I never had children of my own. Mark and I tried for a few years. It didn’t happen. The doctors couldn’t tell us why. After a while, we stopped trying, and I stopped crying about it.
Because I had Hannah.
I went to every parent-teacher conference. Every dance recital. Every soccer game in the pouring rain. I helped her with her college applications at the kitchen table at two in the morning. I held her when her first boyfriend broke up with her in tenth grade, and when her grandfather died, and when she didn’t get into her first-choice school.
And every year, on her birthday, I watched her wait by the mailbox.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
Sophia holds a degree in Journalism from the University of Toronto, where she developed her skills in news reporting, media ethics, and digital journalism. Her expertise lies in identifying key stories, crafting compelling narratives, and ensuring journalistic integrity in every piece she edits.
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