“Sho, I guess-”
“Pearl, don’t speak with your mouth full. Surely at least somepony has taught you better manners than that.” It may not have been me, even if it should have, but everypony else I’ve pushed her onto would’ve likely done the same.
She rolled her eyes and swallowed her food. “Yes, mom.” At first, she smiled like she was making light with her friends. Then, she frowned, confused. “Huh. That’s… usually a joke. Why are we like this?”
I finished my second slice and shook my head. “The Goddess only knows. Supposedly, I take after my mother too, but she and I don’t exactly act very similar.”
Pearl looked to the ceiling with a hoof on her cheek. “No, no, I can see it. You and grandma have a lot of the same habits.”
I scrunched my snout. “Do we?”
She nodded. “Yeah. That, for instance, is one of those things that you do. Anytime grandpa points out something that she’s unaware of, she makes that face, like, exactly.”
I mulled that one over. Do I make the confused scrunchy face? Mother is so oblivious sometimes that Sweetie and I used to count how many times she did it in a day. I shivered. “Horrifying.”
Pearl reared back and raised a brow. A blue brow that didn’t match my curls on her head. Maybe we should color her eyebrows for the time being too… Her tail she can hide under a skirt or leggings or something, but that she can’t… “Horrifying? Why would you say that? Is… is there something bad about grandma?”
I shook my head. “Well… no, I suppose, but it’s… related to… this.” I gestured between us.
She tilted her head. “How so?”
I leaned back in my chair and sighed. “When I was… Oh, sixteen, maybe fifteen, my mother, your grandmother, and I got into a very large fight about what I wanted to do with my life.”
“Really?”
I nodded. “Oh, yes, we certainly did. Chairs were thrown, words were tossed in a most unpleasant manner, and it was… really something like a bad break up.”
“Wow. I didn’t know grandma could get mad like that.”
“At the time, neither did I. Your grandfather practically had to restrain us from going after each other, and for a while there, I didn’t speak to her.”
“What were you fighting about?”
I let out a breath. Oh, how innocent she is. “Pearl, I was… never a very good daughter. I treated both of my parents fairly poorly in my teens, in part because I was frustrated with how my cutiemark and what I wished I could do with my life didn’t line up, and in part that my parents had been right about that the whole time. When I was little, I had dreams of stardom. I wanted… to be somepony, you know?”
Pearl furrowed her brow. “But… aren’t you? I mean, most of the ponies I talk to know who you are. Even the ones I don’t know very well.”
“Um, well, things may have turned out that way, but… not for the reasons I wanted. Ponies know me because I am a close friend of Princess Twilight’s, because I was an element of harmony in my teens, and now I own a very large, high dollar clothing outlet chain. The first two I had little control over, but the third wasn’t originally what I wanted to do with myself. I didn’t want to be famous because ponies knew me for my craft, I wanted to be famous because ponies knew my face. I wanted to be a celebrity, I wanted to be royalty, I wanted to be… somepony other ponies looked on with awe.”
“I… I don’t think I get it.”
I sighed. “Right, that… may be something hard to understand these days. Anypony can become somepony just by putting out a few well edited videos on the internet these days. But back when I was a teen, it wasn’t that easy to just be ubiquitous. You had to know the right ponies, you had to have your face in the papers, you had to have a presence that other ponies simply couldn’t look away from.”
“Oh! Like Princess Celestia?”
I clapped my hooves and pointed. “Yes, like Celestia. Fame like hers was near unheard of back then, and she and Luna were the only ponies that really had it. I wanted to be something like that. And my cutiemark firmly dictated that I couldn’t. I was good at sewing. I was good at making clothes and creating outfits and ensembles and styling ponies to look their best. I was… contrary to what my cutiemark would have you believe, more like the gold that holds the diamond and not the diamond itself. I was what held up the thing you paid attention to. I… simply didn’t shine in my own right. And I hated that, more than anything else.”
“So… what happened?”
“Well, I um… I got mixed up with a certain pony. He had money and power, and the potential to help me start my business.”
“Was that dad?”
I paused. “… Not the first time this happened, no. His name was Filthy Rich. His wife was, or, is, I suppose, simply awful, and I managed to use my… feminine wiles to charm him into lending me a loan.”
Pearl made the confused scrunchy face. Good goddess, do we all do it? “Did you… did you… ya know… do the thing with him?”
I gagged. “Gah! Bleh, oh, heavens, no. I was a manipulator, I lied my way into his pockets, not… oh, goodness. I was upset with my parents, but I wasn’t desperate… yet. I didn’t even…” I shook my head repeatedly. “No. I-In any case, I brokered a deal with Mr. Rich and managed to buy the original boutique, just a few miles down the road from your grandparent’s house. Neither of them approved, the argument with your grandmother about it overheated and overflowed into a full-blown fight, and I moved out of the house.
“I was quick to set up shop, and though business was slow at first, it eventually picked up, and after a year, I’d paid back half the loan Mr. Rich gave me. I was seventeen and on my way to becoming a successful businessmare, in spite of your grandparent’s protests. However, trying to live on my own and run my shop at the same time was… well, taxing would be the best way to put it.”
“But don’t you do that like, all the time now?”
“Well, yes, after doing this for twenty-two years, I have become quite capable at it. The first year, however, I was not so experienced. I had difficulty feeding myself, I had bad spending habits, and after getting some helpful advice about the math of it, I realized that maybe I wasn’t the one who got a good deal out of that loan. I was in well over my head, but determined to prove my parents wrong, so I suffered until I managed to get a hoof on things.
“The next year was when I first met Twilight. Back in those days, she hadn’t earned her wings, and to be quite honest with you, I thought she was more hopeless than I was at the time. I wasn’t wrong, per say, but I certainly wasn’t right. She had her Spike, and she had us to rely on, and after a time, I wasn’t busy with the boutique all the time, but going on adventures with her and our friends instead.”
Again, Pearl made mother’s face. That must come from me. There’s nowhere else for her to have gotten it. How did this happen? “You? ‘On adventures?’ Like, getting dirty and going out into the woods and stuff?”
A foul taste hit the back of my tongue. “Yes. An old dusty castle that I could’ve sworn was haunted, a castle that sprang up like a spring flower in the far north, dark caves, an invading centaur, an evil wizard, Discord in his early days.”
Pearl raised a brow. “Uncle Discord?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, him. He was a wild character back when we first met him and he certainly didn’t have the best intentions. He’s since been tamed by the most fearsome beast tamer in Equestria.”
Pearl shrugged. “I could see that. Auntie Shy can be… kinda scary when she wants to.”
I nodded. “True as truth gets. But yes, adventures with our friends. After a year of that, Twilight ascended to alicornhood, and in the next year was when she visited the world most of our technology comes from. Things began to change for Equestria in a big way as more and more of it was integrated into our society, and by the time I was twenty-three, about five years after I met Twilight, we’d advanced to the point of having airplanes as a viable way to travel long distances.
“At that point, I had the original store, a store in Canterlot, and I was looking to expand my horizons again with a store in Manehattan.”
Pearl blew a raspberry. “Oh, yeah, that place you live when you’re not home.” Her tone was dripping with sarcasm.
I raised a brow. “I don’t very well like that tone of yours young lady and oh my Goddess, I am my mother.” It hit me like a wave all at once. Those aren’t words that belong to me. Those are words that were said to me. Often.
“Told ya. Grandma says that all the time. You have similar habits.”
Another blow, another arrow. I brought a hoof to cover my mouth and held my other out. “Oh, stop it, it already hurts too much! Oh, dear Goddess, this is exactly what I’ve been afraid of all this time, only to realize now that it was inevitable in the first place.”
Pearl giggled and I let my forelegs drop to my side. “Oh, don’t you laugh! This is your future too, don’t you know? If I’ve become my mother, you’ll certainly become yours, just you wait.” I shivered. “And… let’s try very hard to prevent that, shall we?”
A third time, Pearl made mother’s face. “And there’s that again. I still don’t understand it. Why not? I mean, I get that you’re like… not Auntie Applejack, or Auntie Shy, but I just don’t understand why being like you is bad. I mean, I guess you’re… really not around a lot, and that bothers me… a lot, but… I don’t know.
“We have this big house that feels like it was something you got for me more than you, and we have all these nice things, and you always give out stuff to everypony at hearths warming, and you’re always home for holidays, and… I don’t know, is it really all that bad?”
I scratched my cheek. “Pearl, darling, there are…” How do I put this? I can’t exactly go into graphic detail about what I do when I’m not home. Her getting the wrong idea about what I do would possibly be worse than having no idea… maybe… yes, that should do.
“I… don’t believe that I am a bad pony. I am… far from perfect, and I do things that… well, even I question when I look in the mirror the next morning, but then I find myself falling into these bad habits again and again because… I’m missing something and I don’t know how to fix it. What you did yesterday was… probably a sign that I haven’t been around enough.
“You planned and executed a well thought out, though foolish, idea to get me to come home, and it worked. You manipulated me and the Apples into thinking there was something seriously wrong with you, and a few of us were even concerned for your life.”
Pearl turned away. “Oh… I… I didn’t even…”
“Oh, yes, you scared me half to death and Fin thought you might be suicidal.”
“B-but I wouldn’t!” she protested.
I held up a hoof in defeat. “But I don’t know that. And neither does Fin. This isn’t something you can simply dismiss off hoof, there are ponies, your age, that really take such drastic measures to escape from bullies, permanently.”
Pearl slowly backed down. “I… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
“I know that darling, but this…” I sighed. “This shouldn’t have happened in the first place. I should’ve been here. Pearl, the reason I don’t want you to be like me is because this kind of stunt is exactly the kind of thing that a younger me would’ve done and did to get her way.”
“You… you did?”
I took a deep breath. “When I was an up and coming young mare in the fashion world, I experienced… something of a surge in popularity in my early twenties. Everypony wanted my work because the princesses were wearing my work, and when the only real celebrities in the world before the internet were doing something, everypony followed.
“It was great for a time, but then I became overwhelmed. I needed help, time, resources, and more importantly, a better way to move my products. One of the things I’d always had my eye on was to complete one of my dreams of owning a prominent store in Manehattan square. Even back then, the place was an urban center for the Equestrian elite, and had I a store there, anything else I wanted would fall right into place.
“However, the issue with wanting to be part of the elite is that the elite don’t want more ponies in their club, so to speak. A common mare of common birth, one with no real heritage or credentials that came to her success through unusual channels? I was somepony they despised. I was proof that the dream was real and they wanted nothing to do with me. But they also couldn’t ignore me either because I had connections to the princesses.
“Of all the things that… simply offering to fix Twilight’s mane all those years ago brought me, that was likely the most valuable.” I shook my head. “The point is, though they didn’t want me, they wanted my connections, so at least one of them was willing to talk to me.”
“And… that one was dad, right?” Pearl asked.
“Yes. Fancy Pants. Old money from Canterlot with large holdings in both there and Manehattan, and ties to the princesses, but only as a purely professional relationship. The personal relationship I had with them could potentially get me things normal ponies couldn’t dream of, and privileges that the elite thirsted after. It was… something of a power in and of itself.
“I had something he wanted, and he had something I wanted. But more than that, he had something I thought I desperately needed. I wanted that store in Manehattan bad enough to do anything for it, and Fancy… had a few things he wanted too.”
I crossed my hind legs and looked out the kitchen window at the afternoon sky. Light blue, just like his mane, just like my daughter’s. “I didn’t know he was married. Ponies like him tend to keep information like that a secret so paparazzi and other ‘scandal media’ don’t bother them at home. Had I known though, I… I’m still sure I would’ve done what he asked me to. He had a corner lot open that he’d just bought off a pony that couldn’t afford to keep it, and all I had to do to get it was introduce him to the princesses and… let him use me. No bits would change hooves, he said he’d even wear a suit of mine if I made one for him.”
I let out a breath. “When it came down to… fulfilling the contract, he said he preferred it when things were… as natural as they could be. It felt better that way. I didn’t so much as hesitate.
“When the deal was done, he signed the deed to that corner lot and gave me his measurements for a suit. There was no love in there, it was… purely transactional, and I was disgusted with myself. I felt awful for the entire next week for what I’d done, but I had my store, and that was going to change everything. But… not in the ways I expected.
“I found out you had come into being just a month later. I was… I suppose, ‘terrified’ would be putting it mildly. I remember the words I said when I saw that the test was positive. ‘I can’t have a baby now! I have so much to do, I simply don’t have time to take care of a foal!’ It was funny, really.
“I called Applejack as soon as I knew, and her only response was, ‘Mmhmm. Y’all deserve it. Ah’ve been tellin’ ya this was bound ta happen someday with the way ya treat stallions, and ya never listened ta me. But, well, so long as ya don’t think about doin’ anythin’ stupid, ya should be fine.’ And she promptly hung up on me. No sympathy for the wicked I suppose, but she was exactly right.
“I… never believed I would get married. I never thought I would have foals, and I was always very careful when I… found myself in passionate moments with stallions. The one time there was no passion, the one time I really felt like I’d done something wrong the morning after, that was the day it happened. Because, of course it would. C’est la vie, non?
“However, I also wasn’t one to mope! For… very long, anyways. I had a panic attack or two, I called Applejack again, and then all my other close friends, and finally, I realized that I was going to have to say something to somepony who I really didn’t want to say anything to.”
Pearl tapped her lips. “And… that was Grandma, right?”
I nodded. “Precisely. It was one thing for Applejack to rebuke me like this, we’d been close friends for something like ten years at that point. I would almost say our friendship was based on those little clashes we always had. To face the mother bear herself was… another story entirely.
“She had been warning me about this ever since I was a child. ‘Guard your treasures and never sell yourself short,’ she would always say.”
“She still says that,” Pearl added.
“Well, she should, because she’s right. This life I lead is… certainly part of why I’m as unstable as I am at times, and I’ve little doubt that my promiscuity is one of the deeper roots. Maybe one day, I’ll get a hold on this, and maybe I won’t. I’m not certain I ever will, and that scares me for me, and it scares me for you because… I wouldn’t wish going through this on anypony, and especially not you.”
I shook my head. “Anyways, your grandmother unleashed her righteous fury on me for what I’d done and for several months, she refused to speak to me. I was the rebellious one that disobeyed everything she ever taught me, and disregarded every warning she ever gave. I played games with ponies, and in return I was played with for my troubles. You were the price of that.
“I was afraid that if I told him, Fancy would try to have me kill you, and that was not something I was willing to do, so I never did. It wasn’t your fault that your life began like this, it was mine, and I was going to live with that. I resolved to raise you alone and do the best I could by myself. I didn’t exactly know how to do that, and the one pony I really needed advice from had no desire to speak to me, so I asked my friends for help.
“Applejack didn’t know what to tell me. She was already a mother of three by then, and her life had a level of stability that I wasn’t sure mine could ever attain. With as chaotic as my life was, I figured Fluttershy would be the next best bet. She’d had two of Discord’s little monsters by then, please don’t tell anypony I said that, and chaos was as close to home as it could get for her. But again, she didn’t know what to say to me. As extraordinary as her circumstances were, her life was about as normal as one could get. I still don’t know how she does it.
“After years of courting her, Rainbow Dash had finally given into Soarin’s advances, and she was in the same boat as I was. Prism was born just a few months after you were, after all. Finally, of all the ponies I didn’t expect to help me with this, I talked to Pinkie, and she gave me some good advice.
“She said, ‘No matter who you are or when they happen, so long as you love them, fillies and colts are born with loaves of bread. They come out smiling and happy just to see you, and no matter what you do, they will love you and want to be there with you. You won’t always know what you’re supposed to do, but as long as you’re there, you’ll figure it out. We probably wouldn’t still be around as a species if we didn’t get raising ponies eventually, right?’
“I wasn’t quite sure how she’d done it, or how she knew, but somehow, that eased most of my fears. When you were coming close to being due, your grandmother had finally calmed down enough to give me something more concrete with details about all the things I’d need when you finally did arrive, and then… she taught me that lullaby.
“I’d forgotten it, up until then. It… brought back so many memories of when I was little that I tried to apologize to her and it was… as if she already knew I would. She took it in stride and offered me her support, and from there, I… I really believed things would be alright.”
I turned my head and looked down at my filly. “And then I realized just what a mess I’d gotten myself into when you finally came. I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know what to do with all the crying, it felt like I was changing diapers every five minutes, stacks and mounds and crates full of the things and somehow, I needed to replace them every month. Dresses and clothes ruined just from trying to feed you or wash you on a daily basis. It was a nightmare.”
“Oh… well-” Pearl began
I put a hoof to her lips and cut her off. “Hold on, I’m not done. It was a nightmare… when things were like that. When things were going wrong, when I didn’t know what to do with you in the first few months, then things were horrid. It was… when things were good, when you would smile and laugh while I played with you, when you’d cry if I left you and smile the moment I was back in your sight, it was… then, that I really understood.”
I took my short and wide little girl in my magic and brought her to my lap. “You are my precious treasure, and I wouldn’t trade you for the world. I love you with everything I have, and there is not a day that goes by where I don’t think about how I could make your life better. While I regret the way you came about, I don’t regret having you because…
“You have shown me something I never could have seen on my own. What this… strange internal love that made my mother always find a way to forgive me even when I’d been awful to her is, what makes gross little monsters like foals so appealing to mares, what… makes being a parent so worthwhile.
“Pearl, the truth is… I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve been confident in everything I’ve done in life up until the day I found out I was pregnant with you, and that is the day I began to think differently. How could I be a mother? I couldn’t do this. I’m not stable enough on my own to keep myself healthy, how could I raise another pony? I still don’t know the answer to that.
“My greatest fear is that you repeat my life the same way I’ve done it, that you make my mistakes again, and that… there’s nothing I can do to stop you from making those mistakes. Try as I might, you are a piece of me, and nothing can change that. I thought that… maybe if I stayed away from you, that if I tried to avoid being around you’d start acting like my friends or my parents who all… turned out so much better. But now I see that, that too, was a mistake.”
I held up a hoof and looked her in the eyes. “So, I’ll make a deal with you, here and now. I… am going to stop indulging in my worse habits. I am going to try to be home more, and I will come to every performance, concert, play, or whatever it is you want me to see you doing, as often as I can. And if I do, I want you to promise me… that no matter how many times I fail to be the best mother I can, that… you’ll forgive me for it, okay?”
She looked at me, then eyed my hoof. “If I agree, does that mean we get to make another pizza?”
I rolled my eyes. “Do we really need another pizza? I still can’t even fit into my own sportswear as it is, all these calories are just going to go straight-”
“Mom!”
“Oh, fine, another pizza is yours for the low, low price of forgiveness.”
She smiled, took hold of my hoof and hugged me tight. “Then it’s a deal!”
I couldn’t help but laugh. Just like me, she has a sweet tooth, and she’s spoiled rotten. Like mother, like daughter.
“Thank you, Darling.”
In this life, all things come with a price. For the fame, the power, the money, and my dreams, Pearl was mine. However, I didn’t name her Pearl for no reason. I love my baby, and I wouldn’t give her up for the world. I have made many and more mistakes in life, but she will never be counted among them. She will always be my darling, my baby, my Pearl, my treasure.