The truth is that they never really got along. It was
strange, because not only did they resemble each other with
their striking blue eyes and straight black hair, but they
also had the same intense personality. But Rose had never
noticed that. In fact, she had never understood why Kayla
irritated her so easily. Her other daughters, with their
honey-colored hair and hazel eyes, could do almost nothing
wrong in her eyes. They were so undemanding and helpful. She
forgave them easily for any of their minor mishaps. But Kayla
had been difficult since the beginning.
She remembered how hard she was to please even as a baby. And
she was the most difficult toddler that Rose could ever
imagine. With some of her tantrums, she could easily make
Rose cry. Of course, Rose never did actually cry. But she
came close to it, and she resented the two-and-a-half-year-
old tyrant who seemed to be able to push every button she
had.
To be fair, Kayla was the firstborn. She was the one who
suffered from all of her inexperience and enormous
expectations. But the tension between them had never abated
from those toddler years. It seemed to grow more complicated
as Kayla grew. And not once did Rose realize that almost
everything that Kayla did that annoyed her was just a mirror
image of her own faults.
When Kayla became engaged, Rose tried to ease the hostility
between them. She tried to give Kayla a lot of space and even
let her make a lot of the decisions about the wedding that
Rose desperately wanted to make herself. But Kayla didn't
seem to notice her effort. Instead she found fault with
almost everything that Rose did during that time period. If
she was wearing a sheitel, it was styled all wrong. If
she showed up for a shopping expedition with a scarf, she
looked too sloppy. Eventually, it got to be too much for Rose
and a week before the wedding they were embroiled in one of
their screaming matches that only subsided when Tatte came
between them and gave them one of his disappointed, tired
glances. It was amazing how Tatte just had to look at Kayla
in order to placate her. Why couldn't Rose do that?
When Rose stood under that chuppah with the star-
studded, Jerusalem sky arching above them, she could not stop
crying. And she wasn't crying for the reasons that everyone
probably thought that she was crying. She wasn't going to
miss her little girl. In fact, with a pang of guilt, she
realized that she was indeed relieved to have Kayla finally
out of the house.
She was crying because she had failed with this child. She
had never found a way to create love and warmth between them.
They had tolerated each other but barely even that. And as
she watched Kayla encircle her chosson, her heart-
shaped face framed by wisps of lace, Rose was startled.
For the first time, she saw it! This kallah in front
of her, with the stubborn walk and intense eyes, was almost
an exact replica of herself as a kallah. All this
time that she had been resenting Kayla, she had really been
angry with herself!
But in the months following the wedding, Rose could not seem
to break through the barriers in their relationship. The
bitterness had grown for too long. Nevertheless, Rose began
to see Kayla differently as she watched her set up her own
home. She understood her insecurities and silently took pride
in her ambitious home making. Then, a year later, her first
granddaughter was born.
Nechama was a miniature replica of her mother and
grandmother. A few weeks after her birth, Nechama looked up
at her grandmother with her piercing, blue eyes and smiled.
Rose clasped her hands in delight as the rest of the family
insisted that it couldn't have been a real smile yet. But
Kayla, sitting next to her mother and newborn daughter,
looked up at Rose and said:
"Ima, she smiled at you. I saw. It was real." And those words
were the first of many words to be spoken between them
without a trace of past resentment. In fact, Rose thought she
even saw a hint of a smile in Kayla's ice-blue eyes. The time
had come for them to forgive each other. And as the baby
grasped one of Rose's fingers in her tiny hand, Rose realized
it was also time to forgive someone else. The baby let go of
her finger, and Rose let go of her anger. She was ready to
forgive herself.
