#derseweek2022

Truth be told, you've never been much for parties. One of the many benefits of being famously reclusive back on your version of Earth was not having to fake your way through the sorts of society affairs that Strider crashed through like a man dressed in a bull suit ironically charging through a china shop.

So when Roxy invites you to a "shindig" for "all the kids and guardians and everyone who went through the game", your first instinct is to say, "Oh hell no."

You don't, of course. You couldn't bear the thought of disappointing Roxy. You'll simply have to gird your loins and make the best of it. Perhaps even attempt to — shudder — socialize.

Luckily, once you arrive at the party, you're saved from the burden of attempting small talk with all and sundry by Roxy's older counterpart — your own younger self's mother — who accosts you almost immediately to drag you off to talk about "wizzerds". It's almost embarrassing what a relief it is to find yourself at a quiet table on the outskirts of the party with "oh just call me Roxanne, it's not my name but we gotta have some way to tell the Roxys apart right?"

(You're amazed that she's willing to give up her name so easily. You have no intention of relinquishing yours. The other Rose will just have to deal.)

It turns out that "Roxanne" has read your entire oeuvre since the last time you met, which you must admit is rather flattering. She enthuses at length about the characters — evidently she was especially taken with Frigglish — and drops an apparently accidental hint that she not only ships him with Gastrell but has written fanfic about said dalliances, which you instantly resolve to track down and read by any means necessary.

You answer some of her behind-the-scenes questions and politely refrain from correcting her on some of the finer points of the narrative. You could hardly expect a first-time reader to pick up on the parallelism between Zazzerpan's Unimaginable Gallery and Calmasis's tendency to hoard enigmatic artifacts, and Roxanne of course doesn't have the cultural context required to understand all the symbolism that pervades the merfolk uprising.

From there, the conversation eventually turns to Roxanne's profession, which she describes as "oh nothing much, just your typical foxy ectoscientist slash hacker extraordinaire" with a mixture of humility and boastfulness that you can only characterize as "worryingly charming". ("Worrying" because you're not sure you like the psychological implications of the way your heart is starting to flutter over a woman who's so like your own long-distant but much-beloved daughter.)

There's a lull in the conversation after an extended digression on the finer points of feline genetics, during which both of your attention is caught by your own younger counterparts giggling with each other over a board game they're playing with their friends.

"God, they're such incredible girls, aren't they?" she says.

"Indeed," you say, feeling the corners of your lips curve up irresistibly as always at the sight of the daughter you thought you'd never meet. "Truly admirable. We couldn't wish for braver and more compassionate children."

"I know, right?" Roxanne is getting a little choked up. "Fuck, what — what did I do to deserve such a wonderful daughter?"

Something in her tone catches your attention, and when you turn back to her, you're alarmed to see that, far from the tears of joy you expected, her face is screwed up in abject misery and sloppy tears are starting to stream down her face.

Fuck. What are you supposed to do about this?

After a moment of internal panic, you decide that if it was you, you'd want privacy, so after a glance around, you urge her up by the elbow and lead the both of you into an empty room nearby, which appears to be some sort of shrine to Strider's movies. Or perhaps to the younger Strider's comics. You're a bit too preoccupied with Roxanne right now to perform a stylistic analysis to determine which generation of Striders is responsible for this particular artifact-ridden ocular assault.

"So, um. What's going on?" you say. Smooth, Lalonde. Truly people will believe that you're a professional wordsmith with seven award-winning novels under your belt when they hear lines like that come out of your mouth.

Roxanne is too immersed in whatever mental crisis she's going through to pay the slightest bit of attention to your awkwardness, which makes you feel briefly self-absorbed for even worrying about it.

"It's about Rose," she says in a small, miserable voice. "And me. I think — God, you're going to think I'm a monster. Um. I think I might not have been a very good mother. I think maybe I was a pretty shitty one, actually."

"How so?" you ask, even as the certainty settles into your bones that you'd be happier if you never knew the answer. Well, you've never been one to shy from unpleasant truths.

"Ok, so, um. Storytime, I guess. Did you know… for Rosie's tenth birthday, I had such big plans. We were gonna take a sleigh ride into the little town nearby and stop at all these quirky little shops there. I'd have bought her whateeeever she wanted, no matter how freaking weird it was, which it totally woulda been. She had a knack for picking out the freakiest items in the whole damn store, weirdass shit I don't think even the owners knew was on the shelves. One time she even found… well, I'm getting off track. Anyway. When we came home after that, there'da been two huge cakes in the shape of dueling wizards taking up the whole dining room table, with sparklers and shit to represent the magic wands. And I was all on top of planning for that shit. Had the sleigh ride reservations set up, cakes ordered, all that jazz.

"But the night before, I had. A little too much to drink." Roxanne glances at your skeptical expression and winces. "Ok, a lot too much. I got completely shitfaced, actually. Don't even remember most of that night. But when I woke up I was surrounded by broken unicorn figurines for some goddamn reason and the sun was already setting. I'd slept through her whole damn birthday."

You refrain from commenting on the rather obvious symbolic potential of the shattered unicorns.

"'Course I got up and went looking for her, once my head stopped pounding so much," Roxanne continues. "I guess I wanted to — I dunno, apologize? Try to take her on the stupid sleigh ride anyway even though it was already nighttime? But I couldn't find her anywhere.

"What I did find was two cakes in the kitchen. Not the ones I'd ordered, I'd forgotten to pick 'em up from the bakery. Rose must have made these herself. One said 'Happy Birthday Rose' in the most perfect purple calligraphy, with ten unburnt candles in it and one single slice taken out of the corner. And the second one had 'Happy Pushing a Baby Out of Your Vagina Day' written on it in pink frosting, with two tablets of Advil and an Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlet next to it."

That… certainly sounds like the sort of thing you would have done, had you been faced with a situation like this at the tender age of ten.

"You'd think that would've been a wakeup call, but nah," Roxanne says. "Actually — god. I was mad at her? I was mad that she made me feel so bad about it when I felt like I'd tried so hard for her and just slipped up a little. How fucked up is that?"

"Pretty fucked up," you concur. Roxanne laugh-sobs.

You won't lie: Roxanne's story makes you sick with a sort of furious envy. She treated her daughter like this, and yet was still granted the privilege of holding her, hearing her voice, watching her grow from a baby to a girl to an astounding young woman. She had her daughter, had thirteen years with her, and she threw those precious years away into the bottomless void of the bottle, even as you would have given anything, anything, for the chance to embrace your own daughter for even a single minute. The injustice of it tears at you.

You want to believe you would never have disappointed Roxy this way, if you'd ever been in a position to disappoint her in any way other than the one way that matters most.

But life is never that neat, is it? You consider your awkwardness when it comes to expressing genuine emotion, your tendency towards passive-aggression. You recall your own struggle with alcohol. You think about how you get so absorbed in your work that even the slightest interruption festers in your mind into a seething resentment.

You'll never know what kind of mother you would have been, if you'd ever been permitted the honor of taking the role on. But it's a near certainty that you wouldn't have been perfect either.

"So," you say, "I assume that this story you've shared, while perhaps notably more dramatic than other occasions, wasn't an isolated incident but rather part of a pattern of behavior that characterized most or all of your daughter's childhood."

Roxanne nods miserably.

"Right," you say, folding your arms. "I won't sugarcoat this: you'll never get those years back. You'll never be able to redo your daughter's tenth birthday party. You'll never find out what bizarre trinkets she'd have picked out at the shops that day. You'll never know what your relationship could have been if you'd been the sort of mother she needed you to be.

"And more importantly, Rose won't get those years back either. She'll always carry the marks of the way you raised her on her soul."

Roxanne sniffs loudly and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing her mascara. "Fuuuuck. I know you're right, but damn it hurts to hear."

"I'm not trying to hurt you." Are you? You're not even sure, and you're forced to count that as another black mark against the already highly suspect "Rose Lalonde would have been a perfect mother" hypothesis. You sigh and continue. "I'm trying to say… you can't take back what's already happened. But you still have a chance at a future. Rose clearly still wants to build a relationship with you."

"How do you know?" she asks. "What if she's just… bein' polite, and really she doesn't want anything to do with me?"

Your lips quirk up. "Trust me on this. She and I, we're not that polite. If she didn't want you in her life, she would never have invited you back into it in the first place. Besides, it's so obvious in the way she looks at you. She loves you. She wants to get to know you better." You can sympathize. Roxanne Lalonde is proving to be a fascinating, albeit perhaps slightly infuriating, woman. Though one hopes that the other Rose's feelings on the matter are rather more filial than yours are.

"Ok, but… how? Rosie's 16 now, she's a freakin' god, she's been taking care of herself without me for years. What does she even need from me anymore?"

"I — " you say, then pause.

Your instinct is to bluff, to spin up some vaguely-reassuring-sounding psychobabble. But… perhaps this situation calls for some reciprocal emotional vulnerability, as much as you're loath to ever allow that to anyone. You take a deep breath and steel yourself for the exercise of sincerity.

"I admit," you say finally, "I'm rather at a loss there myself. Perhaps it hasn't been obvious given my psychoanalytic bravado, but I'm hardly an expert in navigating the nuances of motherhood either. To be honest, I've been struggling to figure out how to relate to Roxy, too."

"Whaaat?" Roxanne gasps. "No way! You seem like you got it all together. Roxy loves you, what do you got to be worried about?"

"Well. For example. You may notice that my beloved daughter invited me to a party, and yet instead of spending time with her, I've absconded into a Striderian hell-closet with her sister-mom's mom-sister."

"Oh!" Roxanne says with a surprised laugh. "Nah, you're doin' great there, actually. Roxy's not gonna want her mom hovering over her the whole time anyway. No offense! But having parental units hanging around all the time kinda puts a damper on getting your flirt on, you know?"

The thought of your daughter "getting her flirt on" with anyone sets your insides twisting with an anxiety that you have no idea what to do with, even though it's obvious in retrospect that she must have long since started to experiment romantically and perhaps even sexually. Hell, you're the one who carefully composed a "Talk" for her and left it hand-bound and labeled to be read at a developmentally appropriate age. But the thought that she might be putting that knowledge into practice with who-knows-who —

Your alarm must show on your face, because Roxanne laughs and claps a hand on your shoulder. "Ok, I got an idea. Let's make a pact. We'll figure this mom shit out together, ok? And I can be your shoulder to cry on too, if you ever need it. Don't want you thinking it's just me who's gonna be mooching off your words of wisdom all the time. Sound good?"