Things I Wish I Told My Mother

Things I Wish I Told My Mother Plot Summary

Introduction

The call comes at dawn. Dr. Elizabeth Ormson, the woman who delivered half of New Jersey's upper-class babies, sits in a hospital bed wearing a gown that makes her look smaller than death itself. Her heart betrayed her in the night, and now she's asking her daughter Laurie to take her to Paris. Not tomorrow. Today. The sixty-eight-year-old gynecologist who built her life on precision and control suddenly wants to wander the city of love with the daughter she barely knows how to love. Laurie stares at her mother through the antiseptic haze of Ridgefield Hospital. This is the same woman who criticized her parking, her olives, her toilet paper choices. The woman who made Disney World feel like detention. Yet something has shifted in those Scandinavian blue eyes, something that looks dangerously close to vulnerability. When Dr. Liz says she's always wanted to see Norway again, to visit the family she abandoned fifty years ago, Laurie finds herself saying yes to a journey that will either kill them both or teach them how to be human.

Chapter 1: Hearts in Distress: A Daughter's Promise

The heart monitor beeps like a countdown to judgment day. Laurie watches her mother argue with Dr. Malcolm Akers about discharge papers, her voice carrying the authority of someone who's spent decades telling other people's bodies what to do. The EKG shows irregularities, possible silent heart attacks, but Dr. Elizabeth Ormson doesn't believe in surrendering to weakness. "I have patients to see," she declares, as if death itself should reschedule around her calendar. Laurie sits in the visitor's chair, still wearing yesterday's clothes, still processing the 3 AM phone call that dragged her from Manhattan to this moment. Her mother looks fragile for the first time in thirty-six years, IV tubes snaking from her arms like surrender flags. The machines surrounding her bed pulse with electronic heartbeats, measuring time in increments too small for hope. "We could take a trip," Laurie hears herself saying, desperate to offer something, anything that might put light back in those dimming eyes. "Just the two of us. Somewhere you've always wanted to go." The words hang in the sterile air. Dr. Liz turns her head, and for a moment, Laurie sees not the intimidating physician who raised her, but a woman whose body has just reminded her that invincibility is a lie we tell ourselves until the machines start beeping. "Paris," her mother whispers, and suddenly she's sitting up straighter. "I've always wanted to go back to Paris. And then Norway. To see where I came from." The heart monitor steadies. The machines stop their urgent chorus. In the space between one breath and the next, two women who've spent decades misunderstanding each other find something that might be the beginning of grace.

Chapter 2: Paris Lights and Shadow: Exploring the City of Love

The City of Light spreads beneath them like a promise written in stone and shadow. Laurie watches her mother come alive in the taxi from Charles de Gaulle, chattering in fluent French with their driver Jean-Claude about cesarean sections and vaginal births while Paris rolls past the windows in all its clichéd glory. Their hotel on the Île de la Cité gleams with marble and crystal, a Belle Époque palace that makes even Dr. Liz smile. But the real transformation comes when they hit the streets. Elizabeth Ormson, who spent Laurie's childhood criticizing everything from her posture to her college boyfriends, becomes someone else entirely among the patisseries and chocolate shops of the Right Bank. "You're beautiful," she tells Laurie in a boutique on Rue Saint-Dominique, holding up a black knit dress. "If only you believed it." The words hit harder than any criticism ever did. Laurie stares at her mother in the mirror, seeing not the woman who made her teenage years a battlefield of impossible standards, but someone who might actually give a damn whether her daughter knows her own worth. That night, Laurie slips downstairs to the hotel bar and meets Richard Northcott, a British solicitor with kind eyes and a crooked smile who makes her laugh for the first time in months. He's charming, self-deprecating, quotes Pride and Prejudice with the timing of a man who knows how to make a woman's heart skip. "You've bewitched me, body and soul," he says, and for the first time since her divorce from Andrew, Laurie remembers what it feels like to be wanted. But upstairs, her mother waits in the dark, hands pressed to her chest, feeling the irregular flutter that reminds her why they're here, why time might be running shorter than either of them wants to admit.

Chapter 3: Norwegian Echoes: Returning to Forgotten Roots

Oslo rises from the North Sea like a city carved from winter light and Nordic dreams. The airplane descends through clouds that taste of snow and memory, carrying two women who've never been more different or more determined to understand each other. Dr. Liz transforms again in the land of her birth. Among the tall blonde Vikings who populate the streets like genetic echoes of her own DNA, she moves with a confidence Laurie has never seen. She speaks Norwegian like a woman remembering how to breathe, buying hand-knit sweaters from artisans who treat her like royalty returning from exile. "My grandmother gave me this," she says, pulling out a yellowed prayer card on the train to Bergen. "A traveler's blessing. I've carried it for fifty years." The fjords unfold outside their window like God's rough draft of paradise, all jagged cliffs and impossible waterfalls. Laurie watches her mother's reflection in the glass, seeing something she's never noticed before. The way Elizabeth's face softens when she thinks no one is looking. The way her fingers trace the prayer card like a rosary of regret. "There was someone else," her mother says suddenly, her voice barely audible over the train's rhythm. "Before your father. Someone who mattered more than I ever admitted." The confession hangs between them like a bridge neither knows how to cross. Laurie wants to ask who, when, why, but something in her mother's expression warns her off. Some stories, she realizes, have to be earned. In Bergen, Richard appears like a ghost from her Paris dreams, tracking her across a thousand miles with the desperation of a man who's forgotten how to be alone. Their reunion burns bright and brief, all urgent hands and whispered promises, but Laurie can feel the distance growing even as they make love. Something's wrong. Something he's not telling her. The charm feels rehearsed now, the accent less adorable than calculated.

Chapter 4: Secrets Unearthed: The Love That Was Left Behind

The northern lights dance across the Arctic sky like drunk angels, painting the darkness in shades of green and gold that make Laurie understand why people used to believe in magic. She stands beside her mother in the frozen wasteland above the Arctic Circle, both of them wrapped in hazmat suits that make them look like astronauts exploring an alien world. "Four hours of freezing for five minutes of beauty," Dr. Liz mutters, but she's smiling as she says it, her breath creating clouds that catch the aurora's glow. They're heading home now, or what passes for home in a journey that's become less about destinations and more about the space between two hearts learning to beat in rhythm. The flight from Alta carries them back toward Oslo, toward the family reunion Laurie planned as a surprise, toward secrets that have been waiting fifty years to surface. "You contacted my sister," her mother says when Laurie finally confesses, and the temperature in the plane drops twenty degrees. "Without asking me." The fight that follows is nuclear, all the accumulated resentment of thirty-six years detonating in the cramped space of their rental car. They scream at each other on a Norwegian roadside while traffic flows past, two women finally saying all the things they've swallowed for decades. But they go to Kongsvinger anyway, to the white wooden house where Jeannie Ormson Hamre has been waiting half a century for her sister to come home. The reunion is everything Laurie hoped for and everything her mother feared. Tears, laughter, aquavit, stories that span generations. And then Tore walks in. Six feet of silver-haired Norwegian farmer, moving through the crowded room like he owns not just the space but time itself. He takes Elizabeth's hand in both of his and says her childhood name like a prayer. "Lissa. You haven't changed a bit." Laurie watches her mother's face crumble and rebuild itself in the space of a heartbeat. This is him. The one who mattered more. The road not taken made flesh and standing in his sister-in-law's kitchen, still beautiful, still gentle, still lost to her forever.

Chapter 5: Family Bonds: Reunions and Revelations

The family photographs spread across Jeannie's kitchen table like tarot cards predicting a past that might have been. Young Elizabeth, barely seventeen, laughing beside a tall boy with worker's hands and eyes full of dreams that didn't include letting her go. Laurie pieces together the story through aquavit-loosened tongues and half-finished sentences. The brilliant girl who was meant for more than a farming town could offer. The boy who loved her enough to let her leave, even when it meant watching her disappear into a life he could never share. "He married me on the rebound," Jeannie admits when Elizabeth steps outside for air. "We all knew it. But sometimes rebound love grows into the real thing, if you're patient enough to let it." Through the kitchen window, Laurie watches her mother walk toward the small cemetery behind the house, Tore following at a respectful distance. Two old people moving like ghosts through a graveyard of possibilities, finally able to say all the things they never got to say. The conversation that follows will remain between them, but when they return to the house, Elizabeth's eyes are red and Tore's hand shakes as he pours another round of beer for everyone. Some endings, Laurie realizes, hurt just as much as beginnings, maybe more. That night in their hotel, her mother finally tells the whole story. The teenage love that burned bright enough to make her question everything she thought she wanted. The choice between staying small and safe or risking everything for a future that might destroy her. "I tried to kill myself," Elizabeth admits in the darkness of their shared room. "The night before I left for America. I couldn't imagine living without him." The confession hangs between them like a bridge made of pain and understanding. For the first time in her life, Laurie sees her mother not as the invincible Dr. Ormson, but as a seventeen-year-old girl whose heart broke so completely it took fifty years to heal.

Chapter 6: The Letter: What Never Was But Always Could Be

Richard's betrayal comes with perfect timing and brutal efficiency. The Indian restaurant in Oslo, the careful confession delivered between courses of curry that turn to ash in Laurie's mouth. A wife. Three daughters. A life in London built on lies and convenience. "I never meant for it to go this far," he says, but Laurie is already standing, already walking away, already learning that some men collect hearts like stamps, pressing them between pages and forgetting they ever beat. Her mother finds her crying in the hotel room and does something she's never done before. She holds her daughter without offering advice, without pointing out the obvious mistakes, without making it about anything except the simple fact that love sometimes feels like dying and you have to let yourself grieve for what never was. "I was wrong about him," Dr. Liz admits. "I thought he was just another tourist passing through your life. I didn't realize you cared." They spend their last night in Norway at a spa, sweating out toxins and disappointment in a cedar sauna that makes everything else seem small and temporary. Salt scrubs and seaweed wraps, the kind of ridiculous luxury that would have made them both laugh a week ago but now feels like exactly what broken hearts require. "Some men leave footprints on your heart," her mother says as they sip terrible seaweed smoothies. "Others leave craters. The trick is learning to tell the difference before you let them close enough to do damage." The flight home carries them over an ocean of regrets and small redemptions. They've learned things about each other that can't be unlearned, built bridges across distances that seemed impossible to cross. But as the plane descends toward Newark, Laurie wonders if this fragile peace they've constructed will survive the return to ordinary life. Her mother sleeps against the window, clutching the prayer card her grandmother gave her, and for the first time in thirty-six years, Laurie thinks they might actually understand each other.

Chapter 7: After the Journey: Living in the Afterglow

The ending comes not with symphonies but with the simple, terrible sound of machines stopping their electronic song. Three in the morning, a phone call that shatters dreams and delivers the news that Dr. Elizabeth Ormson's heart has finally surrendered to the inevitable. Laurie sits beside the hospital bed, holding a hand that will never squeeze back, understanding too late that the trip they planned was never meant to happen. Her mother knew. The letter hidden in the nightstand drawer explains everything with the clinical precision of a woman who spent her life dealing in facts. "You must take our trip alone," the letter reads. "Write the story of what we would have done, where we would have gone, how we would have fought and laughed and maybe learned to love each other better." Paris becomes a pilgrimage undertaken in memory and imagination. Laurie walks the streets they would have walked, eats at restaurants her mother would have chosen, buys the clothes Elizabeth would have insisted she try on. She meets the family in Kongsvinger, learns about Tore and the love that shaped her mother's life more than any marriage ever could. The story she writes becomes the story she needed to read, the version of their relationship where understanding comes before death, where forgiveness flows both ways, where two difficult women learn that love doesn't have to be perfect to be real.

Summary

Four years later, Laurie sits in her New York apartment, a toddler named Eli playing at her feet while her husband Rob makes coffee in the kitchen. The boy has his grandmother's stubborn chin and her determination to get his own way, traits that once drove Laurie crazy but now make her smile. The book about their imaginary journey sits on bestseller lists, touching hearts that recognize the universal struggle between mothers and daughters who love each other imperfectly. Readers write to say they've taken trips with their own difficult mothers, made peace with parents while there's still time, learned to see criticism as a clumsy form of caring. The real trip happened not in the City of Light or the Land of the Midnight Sun, but in the space between grief and acceptance, between the woman Laurie thought her mother was and the one she discovered in memory and imagination. Elizabeth Ormson never made it to Paris, but her daughter carried her there anyway, in stories and dreams and the fierce love that survives even death. Sometimes the journeys we never take become the ones that matter most. Sometimes the conversations we never have echo louder than the ones we do. And sometimes, if we're lucky, we learn to forgive our parents for being human just in time to forgive ourselves for being their children.

About Author

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James Patterson

Patterson crafts narratives that resonate with universal themes of justice and resilience, drawing readers into high-stakes worlds through his masterful use of suspense and emotion. Known for his ability to create compelling characters and intricate plots, Patterson's books explore the complexities of the human condition, making him a staple in the world of thriller and suspense novels. His method often involves collaboration with co-authors and detailed outlines, allowing him to maintain an impressive volume of work, with series like the Alex Cross and Women's Murder Club becoming particularly notable for their psychological depth and multifaceted plots.\n\nWhile Patterson's prolific output and fast-paced storytelling have secured him a vast readership, his influence extends beyond his fiction. He has played a pivotal role in promoting literacy through initiatives like the ReadkiddoRead website and the JIMMY Patterson imprint. Therefore, his work not only entertains but also contributes significantly to the literary community. His nonfiction efforts, such as "Walk the Blue Line," further showcase his ability to engage with profound themes, emphasizing his versatility as a writer.\n\nPatterson's impact on readers and the literary landscape is underscored by numerous accolades, including the Edgar Allan Poe Award for his debut novel, "The Thomas Berryman Number." His collaborative work with notable figures like former President Bill Clinton in titles such as "The President Is Missing" highlights his innovative spirit. By weaving together accessible prose with strong protagonists, Patterson's books continue to capture the imaginations of diverse audiences, solidifying his legacy as an influential author in contemporary literature.

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