With only a few days left between now and Fall Break, I decided that mother and son needed to separate for a while. It was a hard sell, but with the threat of another outburst, Dash eventually agreed. She’d go to her parents’ house for the week, and Haze would spend the week with the Apples. Everypony would get some time off, hopefully Mrs. Windy could knock some sense into her, and maybe Haze would try to see a bit of her perspective, though I don’t know how he could since he doesn’t know why she’s like this in the first place.
I’d commissioned Fin and Applejack to try to tell him some stories of how Dash used to be, since, if they didn’t come from me, he might believe them. If I can get him to ask her what made her change, then she might tell him the story. The only problem is, I don’t know if there’s anything on this earth that could induce Dash to tell him the truth. Then again, I don’t even know if Prism remembers what happened that day.
Ugh, what a mess. A week to relax and I get to spend it trying to repair the rift in my family.
Maybe if things had been different, I would know how to deal with something like this, but my own family never had this problem. If anything, we were the opposite. After the divorce, Dad and I had this weird kind of business casual relationship. To this day, I’m not close to him. He’ll come and see the kids once or twice a year, but that’s about as often as we talk too. In addition, I could never see Sweet Wing as anything but ‘Dad’s replacement mare.’ It was harsh, but my world was broken. She couldn’t be the pony I wanted her to; nopony could.
Except Downy Snow, who, nowadays…
I suppose, if nothing else, I can understand what it’s like to be frustrated with a hard-headed, uncooperative mother.
I was sitting on the couch, contemplating this very idea, when Prism asked, “What’s up, Dad?”
I’d finally started on that book of famous plays Haze gave me a while back, but even though I was into it now, I couldn’t keep focused on it. My other son, who may very well be my reincarnation in real time, picked up on my distress immediately.
“Oh, you know. All’s quiet on the western front.”
Prism rubbed at his temple. “Dad, please. I know I don’t, like, read all that much, but you gotta talk to me in a way I understand.”
Ah, my boy. If only everyone could speak in his favorite Roboknights cartoon, then he’d have no problem. “Look, the phrase is like, ‘nothing has changed,’ but in denial that everything is spiraling out of control. In this case, it’s more like, ‘shit is about to hit the fan.’”
Laughing, he clapped his hooves. “See? That I understand.” Sitting in his spot next to me, he settled on the couch. “So, what are you gonna do about it? I mean, this is definitely a Mom-Haze issue, but left alone, they’re just gonna blow up again. Like you said.”
I blew air out my lips. “Buddy, if I had any idea, I’d have put it in action by now.”
He shrugged, thinking on it. “I don’t really know what to say. I mean, she really does baby Haze, but I don’t know. One of these days, I feel like Mom’s just gonna tell me to go off and not fuck anything up. She treats us a little different, ya know?”
“Prism, there are other words than that one. Use them. Or learn them, at least.” I rubbed at my snout. “But yeah, I’m sure she would. Probably using that word, too. Like, you don’t think she hates you or anything, right?”
“No, no.” He waved the words away as if Fallacy had said them. “Mom just… I don’t know, she gets me. Oh, she trusts me, that’s the one. But like, it’s two extremes between us, ya know? If I ever get as good as Mr. Cheese and Mrs. Pie, she’d probably let me drive her around, and you know how she is about that. But like, at the same time, I don’t know if she’d let me drive Haze around. Like, she’d trust me to drive, but not to have Haze in the car, like he’s made of glass or something. And that couldn’t be further from the truth because he’s, like, stronger than I am. Like, a lot.”
Me too, nearly. I’m running out of excuses to do the heavy lifting because he’s better at it. I wonder if it’s worse when your kids are unicorns and you aren't.
“Well, you aren’t wrong.” And what he says is true, but that’s not the root of all this.
He frowned. “Okay, but why say it like that? Is there something I don’t know? Like, a different reason than just, ‘Haze is the baby?’ Because, at least a few of my friends’ moms are like that with their youngest, too. Well, the ones who don’t have a billion kids, anyways. Mrs. Scootaloo is real bad about that with Kick Flip, though she gets weird about it when they’re at a skatepark. She’ll freak out when he flies on his own, but if he isn’t doing something he could break his head on at the park, he’s doing it wrong.” Crossing his forelegs, he shook his head. “Mares are weird.”
I chuckled. “Careful, Romeo, you’ve got one yourself.”
And Prism scoffed. “Chessette is, like, not weird in the slightest! She just gets it. She gets me even better than Mom. And she’s not crazy, either. If anything, she’s the only normal one in her family. Everypony else has some weird hobby or some other wild extreme, like Cotton and the mean pranks, or Croquette and her obsession with rocks, or even Cheese—her twin brother, not Mr. Cheese—with his birds. Cheesette just likes to bake!”
Likes to bake obsessively, though. They’re all really into something, and I’d say Croquette is the odd mare out in that family, only in that she takes after her grandparents. Cheesette takes directly after her mother in that she’s very bubbly, often weird in the way she’ll turn anything into some kind of confection and I mean anything, and Prism is either the beneficiary or the victim of those very creations. If Dash got us all sick once on accident, Prism has been sick a few times deliberately because of one of Cheesette’s experiments. It helps that they genuinely like each other and could end up together one day when they’re older, but I worry for Prism’s health when he says she’s given him a new pie to try.
He, too, is simply used to Fallacy and Discord, and can’t see much as weird when it doesn’t break the laws of physics and magic.
“But that’s not important here. There’s something else, right? Something we don’t know?”
I chewed on my hoof. Damn it. He’s not going to let this go.
A deep breath. “Prism, do you remember when we lived in Cloudsdale?”
His face grew solemn. “Well, kinda. I’ve got a memory that sticks out.”
“The day the power went out, right?”
He nodded.
I swallowed. “What do you remember about that day?”
“I was… building a castle, and then… something happened.” Prism furrowed his brows in concentration. “There was a really loud noise, and the power went out. Mom came back and grabbed me and wouldn’t let me work anymore, and then… there were police officers at the door, with you.” He rubbed at his rainbow mane. “That’s… that’s all I’ve got.”
“To make a long story short, on that day, Haze fell out of the sky, and your mother blew out the power in Cloudsdale to save him. This killed two ponies.”
He swallowed. “It… she…” His mouth opened and closed a few times, trying to find the words. When he couldn’t, he shook his mane and put his hooves on his head. “What!? You can’t be serious! Mom knows better! She… she went supersonic right next to a city!?”
“To save your brother’s life, yes.”
“Good Goddess…” He took a deep breath. “Just two? How were there not more? I… I can only imagine how destructive a sonic boom would be that close to so much glass.” He massaged his forehead. “How did Haze even fall in the first place? I thought we moved here right after he was born, or… wait a minute, why was Haze in Cloudsdale? Isn’t it, like, mega dangerous to have a non-pegasus foal up there in the first place?”
“Preaching to the choir, buddy.” I clasped my hooves together. “Let me go a little further back. After you were born, it became clear to me that, once a year had passed, Dash wanted another foal. I really had to fight her to get her to tell me that, but you know how she is: anything but honest when it’s important. Anyways, we did try, and she did conceive. Only, not even a month had passed, and she slipped.”
Prism frowned. I know he’s been through biology now, so he should understand the gravity of that sentence. “Oh.”
“She took it hard. She was moping and crying and despairing for months. It took a long time for your grandma to talk her out of it, but eventually she did.”
“Mrs. Windy or Mrs. Wing?”
And here, I made a mistake.
“What? Sweet Wing isn’t your grandmother.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “She’s… not?”
I covered my face with my hooves. Goddess damn it. “Uh, no. So, Grandma Windy talked her out of it, and we went ahead and tried to have another foal. Around March of 2011—”
“No, stop.” And Prism held a hoof up. “I mean, I need to hear the rest of that story, but what do you mean, ‘she isn’t my grandmother?’ What else don’t I know, Dad?”
“Motherfucker.”
He giggled. “There are better words, right, Dad?”
I fell back on the couch. Well, now you’ve done it. Broke your promise to keep the secret, and Prism knows about Sweet Wing. Good job, Dad.
“Your grandmother, my mother, is not Sweet Wing. Not many ponies know that, and I tried to keep it a secret from Dash for the longest time, too. She is, however, an earth pony, which is where Haze gets it from. That’s why it was such a surprise and a point of contention for us when we found out about Haze midway through the pregnancy.”
He tapped his lips, then pointed an accusing hoof at me. “So, you keeping quiet about your own drama is what led to this drama, since, if you’d told Mom the possibility was there, she might not have been so… well, I could imagine what trying to get Mom to move out from home was like. Because that’s what had to happen, isn’t it? Haze can’t be in the sky with the rest of us, Mom is Mom and tries her hardest to keep things from changing, and then something goes really wrong, and it forces her hoof. Or, Haze falls and Mom gets two ponies killed in a city wide power outage.”
I put my hooves together and leaned over my knees. Good Goddess, this isn’t really my fault, is it? Even if Dash knew about Mom, that wouldn’t have stopped her from losing it when Haze ended up an earth pony, right? Right?
“Well, actually… if you came home with the police, how was Mom never tried for that? Two ponies dead? That’s still ponyslaughter, even if it was a desperate situation.”
I ran my tongue over my teeth. “Did you know that one of your mother’s best friends just so happens to be the princess of this city?”
Crossing his forelegs, Prism nodded in understanding. “Ah, I see, I see. Getting punished is only for poor ponies. Sure am glad to be a part of the bourgeoisie.”
Sighing, I put a hoof on Prism’s shoulder. “I’m glad to see you’ve taken the history lessons seriously, but there are some words we don’t use, and there are some things we don’t say. Even if they’re true.”
Melancholy taking over, Prism let out a breath. “I mean, I get it. It’s not like I would’ve wanted to grow up without her, but what about the ponies who died? And all that glass… I’d bet the whole power grid shattered. Somepony had to pay for it, but Mom just gets away scot-free?”
“There’s nothing I can say, dude. She was banned from Cloudsdale for a decade, but the official story is that it was a freak accident. You, me, your mother, her friends, and the princess are the only ponies who know about this. So, one, keep it to yourself, and two, take it in stride and count your blessings.”
He raised his hooves in defeat. “Alright, alright.” But then, he turned a brow up. “So, tell me about my real Grandmother. Is she still alive? What’s her deal?”
Now that was an ordeal.
If… all this really could be traced back to my own problems with my mother, then… maybe it’s time I set that straight myself.
“It’s not a pretty sight. Are you sure this is what you want?”
He nodded. “Well, yeah. If everything is screwed up right now, it wouldn’t hurt to see what she has to say about it.”
“Uh, it definitely could.” And I shivered. “Oh, it definitely could. But ya know what? I’d planned on going to see her this week, anyways. If I bring you along, she probably won’t throw anything at me this time.”
Confusion washed over Prism. “What?”
“I’ll explain on the way. Let’s go.”
“So, I’ve waited long enough, what’s the deal?” Prism asked.
We’d stopped to pickup flowers, as I can’t just go see Mom empty-hooved, and I hadn’t really explained anything to him. In truth, I still don’t want to, and I’m taking the trip slowly just to stall. I can only imagine what kind of insults she’ll sling at Prism, or even how she’ll react to him. He’s fifteen and I never told her I got married.
The mare in question had originally lived in the old District 1 before the castle sprouted. When the economic development plan went into effect and the princess started buying all the land around the castle, she was one of the last ponies to take the buyout and move. Mom hasn’t worked a day since. Now, she lives all the way out in what became District 39, seven districts north-west from us, drinking and smoking all that money away. Flying with haste would get me there in about half an hour, but driving it would take almost two hours.
“I suppose the reason I can empathize with Haze so well is because of her. His situation with Dash… is more or less the opposite of mine.”
He tilted his head in the noonday sky, cerulean bathing the bustling cityscape below.
“Opposite as in… she, like, won’t go near you?”
I nodded. “Yeah. When I was little, Mom was always there for me. Maybe even a little too much, like Dash is for Haze. Everything I can remember from back then, she’s in the picture, smiling or laughing with me, like… how it should’ve been. Dad worked a lot and he wasn’t with us as much, but he still taught me how to fly, and for all I could see, I thought we were a perfectly normal, happy family.”
Somewhere down below, I noticed a tree had been struck by lightning. Split right down the middle, burnt at the edges but raw in the center.
“And then, like a bolt from the blue, she left. She and Dad had a fight as soon as I got home. Quiet voices became screaming hysterics, and at the end of it all, she called me a ‘defect’ and threw a picture frame at me. I was eight.”
“Oh geez. That’s, uh…”
I sighed. “Yeah. Dad and I moved away, since we lived in Trottingham at the time, to Cloudsdale, where he remarried Sweet Wing within the year. For the longest time, I blamed her for the divorce. But I’d never know if that was the case because Dad would never tell me why it happened in the first place. The best I’d get was, ‘I didn’t want to, but she forced my hoof,’ or, ‘She left and I couldn’t stop her.’”
“So…” The young stallion was working his brain. “If all that happened, when or how did you find her here?”
“Well, to be honest, it was a little like providence.”
“Dad. Normal words, please.”
I rubbed at my temples. “You know that book I was reading at the house? You need to read it. Cover to cover. If you don’t know a word, look it up. I need you to be able to recite The Tempest before you get to practice anymore. I’d been ignoring your Equestrian grade before, but now I can see it’s a problem.”
Prism’s head fell. “…if you think it’ll help, I guess. It’s not like I don’t try, it's just… it’s hard, ya know?”
I patted his mane. “I get it, buddy, really. But this is important, especially if Haze ends up with some kind of mark related to acting. It’d be a little embarrassing if you couldn’t understand what your brother was saying in a performance, ya know?”
“Yeah… but, back to the Grandma thing.”
So much for my ploy.
“We’d come to Ponyville for a performance one day. We were on a tour, and this stop was the odd one out because, back then, this place wasn’t much more than a backwoods little village with a few shops and the acres to its name. It was my first performance as a Wonderbolt, and I was one of the backup fliers in case somepony got hurt and needed a replacement.
“When they did need me because even professionals like to hurt themselves going too far, I got to take over the lead in our show. There was a point in the routine where we’d shoot off fireworks mid-flight and drag colored smoke over the stands.
“I saw her, sitting right there, watching me. Just like she used to. All those years before. She was smiling, even.
“But as soon as I locked eyes with her, she was mort— er, horrified. She got out of her seat and left the show early. The moment I got the chance, I swapped out and chased after her, since she couldn’t have gotten all that far on hoof.
“I did catch up to her, and when I called to her, she said, ‘Go away!’ I wouldn’t, and she eventually went back home, where I followed her inside. She yelled at me, threw things at me, said everything she could to make me leave, but when I wouldn’t, she started crying.”
I chuckled, throwing my head back in exasperation. “She said things like, ‘I gave you up! You weren’t supposed to see me again! Please, just go away! Forget you found me, forget about me, do what makes you happy!’ I tried to talk to her, to at least make sense of what happened and why she… tore my world in half, leaving all those years ago, but she just curled up in a ball and kept crying.
“I finally did leave, but I made it a point to come back on Mother’s Day, hoping she would finally talk to me. I’ve not missed a Mother’s Day in eighteen years, and she still hasn’t told me what happened. As a matter of fact, it was on one of those Mother’s Day visits when I met Dash here for the first time after she got expelled from the academy.”
Thoughtfully, Prism nodded along with the story. After I’d finished, he said, “That’s rough, Dad. But, uh…” He scratched at his mane, uncomfortable. “Why keep coming back if she’s so against it?”
I let my eyes drift to the cirrus clouds way up above in the stratosphere. “Sometimes, I wonder that myself, buddy.”
And so it continues. Why do I keep coming back to this pony? She’s not been anything but abusive since I found her again. Cursing me, throwing things at me, telling me what a mistake I am. Yet all the same, I’ve never believed her once. She always loved watching pegasi fly; that’s why she and Dad hooked up in the first place—as far as I know, anyways. She… she knew I was going to be there, at that performance; she came to watch me.
“I guess, she’s my mom. As much as she wanted me to, I could never forget her. She can be mean and cruel, and she can push me away with all her might, but… she can’t not be my mother.” A smile crossed my lips. “And I’m ‘always’ Soarin. If I’m set on a task, I simply don’t give up.”
Smiling like a goof, Prism rubbed at his snout. “Well, you’re kinda cheesy, but that is pretty cool.”
Rustling his mane, I brought my son in and we flew in tandem for the rest of the trip.
Course, as we got further into the poorer parts of the city, the mood started to lose altitude.
“She, uh…” Prism swallowed. “She lives here? I thought…”
“That’s why she lives here, actually. She’s really good with her money. Property values suck here. Half of everything you see here was built twenty years ago and hasn’t seen a wash or a remodel since. It’s easy to live cheap so she can spend all that money on the alcohol and the cigarettes she likes so much. Oh, and she has a lot of cats. And, uh…” I rubbed at my mane. “She doesn’t know about you. Or your brother. Or Dash.”
As we descended into the crappy neighborhood Mom lives in, Prism became more and more nervous. “She’s not going to call the cops on us, is she? I mean, would they even come out here?”
“Oh, so now you’re fine with the bourgeoisie life you have, huh?”
“Yes, okay! This is… ugh, can we just get on with this already? I don’t want to be out in the open.”
In his defense, he was being prudent. It’s like she chose the shittiest neighborhood in Ponyville she could find to settle down in. Rusty chain-link fences, elaborate graffiti gang tags, run down cars on blocks, broken windows and windshields, overgrown grass and trash rotting in heaps.
Only one around here with nothing of that sort but grass taller than Prism was Mom’s house. The stuff was so unattended that I could swear she had a car hidden somewhere in the jungle. Not that she needs to go anywhere often.
Making our way through the canopy, we finally arrived at the front porch. Here, Prism was assaulted by the smell. “Oh Goddess. It’s like being drenched in cigarettes and cat piss.”
I huffed. “What do you mean, ‘like?’ That’s what it is. This is what you asked for. I did warn you.”
“When you said it wasn’t pretty, I thought you were talking about the looks, not the smell.”
“Oh, buddy, we haven’t even gotten inside yet.”
“Who’s out there!? If it’s those damn hoodlums, you’d better start runnin’ before I get the nine loaded! I’ll cap your asses faster than any of them other gangbangers!” Mom yelled at us, probably holding the pistol at this very moment.
Prism gritted his teeth. “Is… she serious?”
“Hundred percent.”
She opened the door of the rundown house, leaving a locked screen door between us when she finally laid eyes on my son and I, pistol in hoof.
Mom, or Downy Snow, was a white earth pony mare who smoked more than she ate, and drank more than she hydrated. In spite of that, she’s relatively stout for a mare of her age and has a fire in her to the detriment of her name. Prism and I owe her our green eyes, and her mane is a frail, scraggly dark blue. When I was young, Mom was a sort of hefty mare, but she lost a lot of weight fast after the divorce, and it’s left her skin leathery and baggy.
Scowling and clicking her tongue, Mom lowered the gun. “Oh, it’s you.” She looked around at the partially dead grass that made her jungle. “It ain’t May yet.” Then her eyes fell on Prism. “Who’s the clown? You into kids now? One of them pedophiles like that pop singer?”
The poor boy was flabbergasted. “Good Goddess, Dad.”
“I know.”
Mom’s scowl dug deeper into her face. Somehow, this only made her uglier, which was kind of impressive, all things considered. She wasn’t more than sixty, but she definitely looked ten or twenty years older than that.
“You telling me this worthless piece of meat is your father?”
“Y-yes, ma’am.”
She looked between us, studying Prism closer. “Stole my damn eyes!” She shook her head, turning back inside and putting the gun down on a table nearby. “I can’t believe there are more of you. What mare was dumb enough to let you knock her up?”
She paused, possibly realizing she forgot to invite us in, in her own way. “Don’t leave the door hanging open. Get in or get out.”
“That’s our cue.”
I opened the screen door, and tentatively, Prism trotted inside.
After being presented with flowers, Mom took the dead ones from May and put the new ones in the vase, going so far as to replace the water. Prism was already having an effect on her, and a positive one at that, since she even put plastic over the cat-piss infused couch and sprayed it down with air freshener before ordering us to sit.
She complained all the while about showing up without announcing it (not that she’s ever shared a phone number with me) and not giving her any time to make the place ‘not look like shit’ while, at the same time, making quick work of herding the cats out and cleaning up all the trash. Ashtrays were emptied and thrown in the sink to soak; the dirty carpet was vacuumed, swept, and vacuumed again till it was relatively clean, though the stains couldn’t be removed.
As she spent half an hour at this, Prism whispered to me, “And she lives like this?”
“Even before she came into the money. In effect, she worked to pay for the luxuries since that’s really all she wanted out of life. Well, as far as I could gather. Again, she won’t tell me much. I usually come for an hour or so on Mother’s Day to eat lunch in this hellhole with her and don’t come back till next year.”
Suspiciously scanning the couch beneath the plastic sheet, Prism grimaced. “Goddess. I’m not, like, a clean freak, but this is just… it’s just…”
“Disgusting,” I finished.
“Yeah.”
Upon finishing her work, Mom went to the kitchen. She set a kettle on, then started on a tray of cheeses and fruits. More than anything, I was surprised she was going so far as to get snacks out. She must really be surprised by Prism.
“How old are you?” she called, not bothering to look at us.
I nudged him, and he answered, “Uh, fifteen, ma’am.”
“Fifteen!?” she shouted. “You’ve had a kid for fifteen years and never bothered to tell me? Goddess among us, Soarin.” She turned back to glare at me, knife in hoof.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, one, you’ve never asked. Two, I figured since you won’t tell me what happened between you and Dad, I wouldn’t tell you that: I’ve been married for sixteen years, Prism is fifteen, and my youngest is twelve. I’m still married, by the way.”
“Ugh, this shit again.” She shook her head and went back to slicing fruit. “I figure you went and fucked that rainbow mare you were always pining after, right?”
Prism gagged, and I poked and winked at him. “Yes, ma’am, though I’d appreciate it if you used nicer words. For Prism’s sake.”
Finished with her preparations, she rolled her eyes as she set the food, hot water, and tea bags in cups before us on the coffee table, recently wiped down, but still stained and burnt from leftover ashes. “Whatever. Nailed her twice, huh? What about the other one? Are…” She paused, looking for the words. “Do they both fly? Like you did?”
Ah, how her tone betrays her. I ran my hoof through Prism’s mane. “He’s better than me, but Haze is an earth pony, like you.”
Running her tongue across her teeth, she narrowed her eyes. “Well, well, well. Can’t keep the Snow out forever, can ya? Damn genes would do that, wouldn’t they?” She crossed her hooves and shook her head. “Sorry for your loss, kid.”
My boy tilted his head at her. “Keep the snow out? What does that mean?”
“The snow? Boy, don’t you know your own lineage?”
She sent her frown at me, and I frowned right back. “I don’t know what you mean, either.”
Which was the truth… kinda. As the internet came into being here, I eventually did try to learn more about her. Only, the more I did, the more confused I was about all this.
She picked up a cracker and a slice of cheddar, mulling over what she had to say. Once she was done, she explained it like so: “Snow, my name, is a family name. You know them Apples who kinda own this city? With the new headmare more or less directing the princess at times, and so on.”
“We are familiar.” I didn’t know how she felt about them, so I decided to keep as much to myself as possible here. If Mom is in an explaining mood, she might finally talk.
“Well, it’s always been like that in Ponyville. Back up north, you’ve got the Snows of Horseshoe Bay. We’d been in that bay since the Princesses came to power, and every damn one of us is an earth pony, going back thousands of years. On the rare occasion that somepony who wasn’t an earth pony was allowed to marry in, none of their kids ever ended up anything but an earth pony. It’s all we are. It’s all we’ve ever been.”
Cold green eyes stared right through me. “You were the first to break the trend.”
Oh. Oh, that explains… a whole hell of a lot.
“Uh, Miss Snow?” Prism asked.
“Ugh, fuck, boy,” Mom spat. “Grandma. Or, I wouldn’t mind Granny, either. Goddess, am I a stranger to you?”
Yes, actually.
Prism coughed into his hoof. “Well, Granny, I don’t understand what you mean by, ‘allowed to marry in.’ Don’t you just get to choose?”
Mom chuckled something ugly. “Oh, you’re a sheltered little brat, aren't you? You must have it good. Considering that one—” she waved a hoof at me “—I’m surprised. You’ve always been easy. The rainbow mare’s got to be bossy, huh? Stallions like you’ve got to be led around by the snout.”
Never would I call my mother imperceptive. Rude, though.
But Prism giggled. “Yeah, pretty much. Though, Mom’s name is Rainbow Dash, by the way.”
Nodding, Mom clapped. “Damn. You traded up. Rich, well-connected, Wonderbolt record breaker for the last century. How’d you swing that?” She put a hoof on her forehead then held one out to stop a reply. “No, wait. Sixteen years? You… you were the racer who dipped to catch her when she blew out her wing, weren’t you?”
In a weird way, it lifted my spirits to know she’d always been watching. Our races and performances were some of the first television programs ever aired in Equestria. Even if she just read about it in a paper, she still remembers it, all these years later.
“Huh. How’d ya know that?” Prism asked.
And here, she looked like she’d been caught in a lie. Mom stammered for words. “I, uh. I’ve… always kept up with the Wonderbolts, yeah. Before all this crazy tech popped up in the last twenty years, all you had were books and plays and sports to look forward to. Had to entertain ourselves somehow when we weren’t working. Heh. My family’s pastime seems to be having more kids. You’ve got more relatives than you know, boy.”
Prism frowned. “That’s a weird thought. Mom’s parents are her only immediate family before us, and Dad doesn’t have any other siblings either, so we’ve always been kinda… to ourselves, I guess. My friends and my marefriend all have really big families, so I never imagined…”
“You have a marefriend?”
She’s more shocked than his own mother was at this revelation.
“I do! She’s the best. Her name is Cheesette and she wants to run a pie shop one day, though her mom owns a bakery just south of here in District 18, and she’s the only one who seems like she’d take over after Mrs. Pie gets too old to run it. She likes all kinds of cakes and popsicles and ice cream and all that, but pie is really her thing. Uh, have you ever been to Cheesy-Pie Café?”
Mom surveyed the stained, sparsely decorated, well-worn living room. “Boy, do I look like I go anywhere often?”
Prism coughed in his hoof. “Well, I didn’t want to assume…”
She waved his niceties away. “Assume away, you’re probably right. I’m just some bitter old bitch living in squalor because that’s what suits me.” Finally, she turned her eye on me. “What brings you here, anyways? It’s not May and you never told me you had a family in the first place. Why bring him with you? What, am I your bad example to show off now?”
Didn’t even think about that on the way here, but that is an excellent point.
So I sighed. “As right as that would be if I’d thought about it beforehoof, no, that’s not why we’re here.” Clasping my hooves together and resting my chin on them, I took a deep breath. “Mom, I have a problem.”
Again, Mom surveyed the living room. “What in the Goddess’s name makes you think I have any wisdom for you?”
“Selling yourself awful short there, Mom. Look, you abandoned me when I was eight, and you know what? It fucked me up. I don’t know what having a mother is like. I don’t know what growing up with a mother is like. I don’t know what getting along with a mother is like. If anything, it put me off on parents as a whole. I don’t even know how to talk to Dad these days. But now, it’s starting to mess with my family. My youngest and my wife are fighting, and I don’t know what to do about it.
“Unlike you, she’s horrified at the thought of losing Haze, and she clings to him like he keeps her alive. Now that he’s nearly a teenager, he’s starting to rebel against her, and between the two of them, there aren’t harder heads in the world. He deserves some space, but she’s too traumatized to give it to him, so they’re just yelling at each other and unwilling to talk to each other.”
I stared her directly in the eyes, feeling that heat myself. “Sound familiar?”
Glowering right back at me, she answered slowly and deliberately, “You think I’m some unicorn with a magic spell to fix all this shit?”
My blood boiled. “No!”
I nearly flew out of my seat. I just wanted to grab her by the neck and beat her into shape. Eighteen years of this is more than enough.
“I want you to talk to me, damn it! Good Goddess, would it kill you to explain it all to me? To tell me the truth? To tell me why, after all these years, you left that day? The more I see Haze and Dash fighting, the more I see what happened when I was a kid playing out in front of my eyes again. Somepony is going to get hurt. Somepony is going to say something they can’t take back. Somepony is going to sever ties and run away if this keeps up, and I refuse to let that happen to my family again.”
Unable to contain it, I stood up off the couch. “Why are you content with this? We were fine back then, and now, you live like some poor, destitute spinster with nopony to call your own, yet I keep coming back to see you every year because I just can’t let you go! Why do you keep trying to make me hate you? Why do you try to push me away at every turn? You can’t even keep that facade up in front of Prism, so why put yourself through this?”
I could feel the heat building up in my face, leaking out my eyes. “Don’t you realize I’ve been waiting all this time for you to come back home? You didn’t have to go! Goddess damn it, Mom, don’t you realize… there’s nothing you can do that would make me stop loving you?”
For the first time in my life, I made that shriveled up old mare cry. She was sitting there in her dirty recliner, shivering, clutching the cloth of the chair with all her might, scowling at me with all the hate in the world while rivers ran down her cheeks.
“Wh-what do you think it would’ve been like, if I’d stayed, huh, Soarin?” She sniffled and wiped at her eyes. “You think you would’ve been raised around other pegasi? Trained into the flier you ended up becoming? Rising all the way to Cloudsdale Wonderbolt, meeting and stealing away the mare of your dreams? Do you think any of that could’ve happened if you’d been raised on the ground in Trottingham? If that same mother you say you love had been there, you wouldn’t be who you are, where you are, or what you were. Without a weight like me on your back, you could fly.”
She got out of her chair to stand in front of me. Ugly and mean as she was, she wasn’t some frail old mare. “You wanna know why I left? Because, with me in the picture, you were doomed to a life on the ground.”
Her teeth bit into her lip. Her face quivered. Tears flowed down anew.
“A-and… y-you were always meant to Soar.”
Her haunches fell to the carpet. Mom covered her face with her hooves and sobbed loud and violent.
“Oh Goddess, Mom.”
For the first time in thirty-one years, I embraced my mother.