The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende Page A

mothers struggled with her health problems that seemed never to end. During those first months it took five hours to give Sabrina two ounces of milk from an eyedropper. Fu learned to divine the symptoms of each crisis before it surfaced, and Grace, being a physician, had better resources than any of us.
    â€œAre those women gay?” Celia, my daughter-in-law, asked. She had warned me more than once that she could not be beneath the same roof with someone whose sexual preferences did not coincide with hers.
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œBut one of them is a nun!”
    â€œA Buddhist nun. She didn’t take a vow of celibacy.”
    Celia said nothing more, but she was so impressed with Fu and Grace, whom she came to know very well, that she ended by questioning her own views. She had renounced religion long ago, and had no fear of the devil’s cauldrons, but homosexuality was her strongest taboo. With time, however, she called them and asked forgiveness for the snubs of the past, and often visited them at the Zen Center, taking her children and her guitar to teach her new friends the rudimentary skills of motherhood and to cheer them with Venezuelan songs. Fervent environmentalists, the new mothers had planned to use cotton diapers for Sabrina, but before a month was out they had accepted the disposable ones Celia brought as a gift. They would have had to be demented to go back to the old system of diaper pails and washing by hand. There is no washing machine in the center, everything is organic and difficult. The three became fast friends, and Celia began to show an interest in Buddhism, something that alarmed me because she tended to swing from one extreme to the other.
    â€œIt’s a cool religion, Isabel. The only strange thing about those Buddha people is that they eat nothing but vegetables, like burros.”
    â€œI don’t want to see you with your head shaved, or meditating in the lotus position, until you finish raising the children,” I warned her.

Days of Light and Mourning
    I N S EPTEMBER C ELIA GAVE BIRTH to Nicole as calmly as she had welcomed Andrea sixteen months before. She endured ten hours of labor without a whimper, held by Nico, while I watched, thinking how my son wasn’t any longer the boy I kept treating as if he were mine, but a man who with great composure had assumed the responsibility of a wife and three children. Celia, silent and pale, walked around between contractions, suffering before our helpless gazes. When she felt it was time, she lay on the bed, covered with sweat, trembling, and said something I will never forget: “I wouldn’t trade this moment for anything in the world.” Nico held her as the baby appeared, her head covered with dark fuzz, followed by shoulders and the rest of her body, wet, slippery, and streaked with blood, and once again I experienced the epiphany I had the day Andrea was born and the unforgettable night you left us forever. Birth and death, Paula, are so similar . . . sacred and mysterious moments. The midwife handed me the scissors to cut the thick umbilical cord and Nico placed the baby on her mother’s breast. Nicole was a plump packet of reinforced concrete that avidly latched onto the nipple as Celia talked to her in that unique tongue a mother, hazy from her ordeal and her sudden love, uses with her newborn. We had all been waiting for that child; she was a gift, and with her she brought a breath of redemption and joy. Pure light.
    Nicole started screaming the instant she realized that she wasn’t in her mother’s womb any longer, and she never stopped for six months. Her shrieks peeled the paint off the walls and frayed the neighbor’s nerves. Abuela Hilda, that beloved adopted grandmother who had been at my side for more than thirty years, along with Ligia, a Nicaraguan woman who had looked after you and whom I had hired to help with my grandchildren, rocked Nicole night and day, the only