Jessica Hamilton did not particularly want children. She hadn't thought about it either way, really. But that was what you did, really; you got married and you had kids. It was defaulty, and Harold Marks was, you know. Nice. Comfortable. They dated for two years, and they got along, and there was certainly nothing wrong with the sex. So when he proposed, she said yes, and when he said he thought it was time for kids, she said yes.

The first sign that there was anything wrong came when it was time to name them.

She didn't think anything much of it at the time. They had agreed on the names Eleanor and Maria, after their mothers, after all, and it wasn't unfair that he got upset when she decided when the girls were born that they really didn't look like an Eleanor and Maria, and that, instead, they were going to be named a pair of collection of syllables that she happened to feel were appropriate. Idaia and Imliss. She won the argument by relegating Eleanor and Maria to middle name status and shouting at him that if he wanted to name them he could push them out through a hole in his torso.

She worried, some, when she realized that she felt nothing more than a perfunctory fondness for them. She made sure to hide it very, very well, and swore to herself there would be no more children. This was fine with her husband, who hadn't particularly wanted more than two.

No, the problem came with the fact that while he was fine with sharing the logistical labor of infancy--changing diapers, getting up in the middle of the night to heat a bottle in warm water--he seemed to feel that it was the wife's job to provide emotionally for the children, and the husband's to provide financially.

And he has ideas about how it is correct to bring up children.

He has some give--when she tells him, firmly, that spanking is not on the table, he never defies that to raise a hand to them. But no, they are not allowed to do this, no, they are not allowed to do that, no, that's not appropriate for little girls.

Jessica nearly tears her hair out trying to convince him that these are not ordinary little girls, they are bright and precocious and in need of intellectual stimulation, and even if they were he's being backwards and misogynistic.

He is not convinced.

She divorces him. She wins custody, possibly because he doesn't care enough or isn't interested enough in raising two little girls alone to contest it very hard.

She still doesn't feel more than a perfunctory fondness for them, and despite what she thinks are good acting skills she can tell that they can tell.

She takes care of them. She makes sure they're fed and warm and signs them up for every summer camp and workshop and after-school activity they want, tries to cover the increasingly obvious fact that she should never have been a mother in the first place with her best effort at making sure they get what they need anyway. It's not really enough. They get older and they get stranger, and there's something different about them besides their smarts and Jessica hasn't the faintest idea what to do about it. Their peers can tell, too. They get upset and cry for no reason at all, at odd moments. When they're thirteen Idaia kisses a boy and then freaks out and shoves him off and runs away. When they're fourteen they want to change their names--take off the middle name and change the surname to something odd and hyphenated, and she does what she's always done, which is cover for her own lack of knowledge of what to do for them by trusting that they know what they need. When they're fifteen there's a class trip to a beekeeper's, and Idaia breaks down sobbing and apologizing to the single bee that stings her.

They are not popular with their peers.

It's with no small relief that she packs them off to early college when they're sixteen.