Opening
These chapters braid a childhood of neglect with a present tense plunge into pregnancy, birth, and the brutal fog of new motherhood. Blythe Connor reaches for models of care wherever she can find them, only to collide with pain—first in her mother Cecilia, then in labor, and finally in the fraught early days with her daughter. What begins as longing hardens into fear, as generational wounds surface and the marriage meant to steady her starts to splinter.
What Happens
Chapter 6: The Ellingtons
After ten-year-old Blythe’s mother, Cecilia, leaves for good, their neighbor Mrs. Ellington invites Blythe to Sunday roast. The Ellingtons’ house hums with warmth, noise, and silliness; it becomes the antidote to Blythe’s cold, neglected home. With her best friend Thomas, Blythe finally feels normal among a family that welcomes her.
Blythe and Thomas make a handmade storybook about a family—clearly the Ellingtons—who find a magical gnome that saves the mother from a fatal illness. Blythe draws herself into their family portrait. When Cecilia discovers the book, she flings it at Blythe’s head in disgust. Humiliated, Blythe gives the book to Mrs. Ellington, who wordlessly understands and keeps it safe.
On the night Cecilia disappears, Mrs. Ellington walks Blythe home after dinner and quietly returns the book. The gesture lands like a blessing and a goodbye, an act of maternal care that Blythe has craved and now clings to. The scene plants the seed of Blythe’s lifelong yearning—and the novel’s meditation on The Dark Side of Motherhood—in the shadow of Cecilia’s cruelty.
Chapter 7: Twenty-one Weeks
Back in the present, Blythe is pregnant and certain she conceived on a particular night. She stops writing, surrendering to daydreams about the daughter she is sure she’s carrying. She joins prenatal exercise classes, watching other pregnant bodies for signs of change, and treats her growing belly like a secret that transforms her.
At the library, a bleary mother wrangling two kids searches for an infant sleep book and tells Blythe, “just figure out the sleep and you’ll be fine. Nothing else matters.” The woman’s exhaustion punctures Blythe’s fantasies. As the woman leaves, Blythe waits for her own “crossover”—the moment she stops being a woman and becomes a mother—hinting at the gap between ideal and reality pointed to by Perception, Reality, and Gaslighting.
Chapter 8: You Aren't Anything Like Her
A box arrives from Fox Connor’s mother, stuffed with baby gifts and Fox’s childhood keepsakes: a worn teddy, a threadbare blanket. Holding these relics of a happy past, Blythe realizes she has nothing comparable from her own childhood. The contrast pricks a deeper panic—what if she wasn’t taught how to mother, and can’t learn now? The fear taps into Nature vs. Nurture and Generational Trauma.
That night, Blythe asks Fox if they can be good parents. She tries to explain that her mother was not like his. Fox cuts it short with a soothing decree: “You’re different... You aren’t anything like her.” Blythe accepts the easy comfort instead of the harder truth. The moment is an early instance of dismissal that opens a fracture in their marriage, an omen of Marital Breakdown and Betrayal.
Chapter 9: The Howl
Labor unravels Blythe. It is violent and overwhelming, nothing like the serene narratives she’s read. In the grip of pain and terror, she thinks the unthinkable: she doesn’t want the baby; maybe one of them should die. She fears they will not “survive each other.”
When Violet Connor is born, the doctor hands her to Fox first. He speaks softly, creating an immediate cocoon that seems to exclude Blythe. When Violet lands on Blythe’s chest, Blythe feels “electric” awe but also a cool, observational detachment. Violet’s “slimy and dark” eyes hold her gaze. Alone that night, Blythe feels an animal urge to taste her daughter’s skin and names the feeling “astonishment,” not love—an early, disquieting note in a relationship already taut with tension.
Interlude: 1962
A brief flashback uncovers the origin of Cecilia’s damage. At five, she sits in a bath while her mother Etta, in a sudden rage, forces her head under the faucet until she nearly drowns. Terrified, Cecilia soils herself. Etta leaves her trembling in the empty tub. Later, Cecilia’s father, Henry, misreads the aftermath as bedwetting and gently asks Etta to change the sheets. Etta complies in silence, and the silence becomes the rule: what happens between mother and daughter stays hidden. Other incidents—Etta locking Cecilia outside for hours—cement a legacy of instability and neglect that Cecilia will pass down.
Chapter 10: I Think the Baby Hates Me
At home, the newborn days crush Blythe. Violet screams for hours, but mostly for her. In Fox’s arms, Violet often quiets. Bleeding, sore, and sleepless, Blythe feels like the only mother who looks at her baby and thinks: Please. Go away.
The crying begins to feel pointed, a rejection. Blythe finally tells Fox, “I think the baby hates me.” He answers with a soft “Shhh,” shutting the door on her fear instead of opening it. The shush seals her isolation and deepens the suspicion that something is wrong between mother and child—and that no one will admit it.
Character Development
Blythe’s hope curdles into dread as fantasy collides with pain. She swings from a pregnancy glow to a labor that terrifies her, then to a postpartum fog that convinces her she’s failing. The Ellington memory shows how early and hungrily she sought mothering; Violet’s first weeks expose how fragile that hope remains.
- Blythe Connor: Moves from idealizing motherhood to experiencing it as bodily and psychic rupture; begins to distrust her instincts when Violet soothes with Fox but not with her.
- Fox Connor: Appears supportive yet repeatedly sidesteps Blythe’s deeper fears; his reassurances flatten her reality and foreshadow emotional absenteeism.
- Cecilia: Reframed not just as cruel but as shaped by violence; her neglect reads as the echo of her own terror.
- Etta: Emerges as the cold core of the family’s cycle—violent, withholding, and secret-making.
- Violet Connor: Introduced as an infant perceived through Blythe’s anxiety—watchful, inconsolable, and already the center of a fraught dyad.
Themes & Symbols
The inherited wound: The interlude refracts present-day fear through a lineage of harm. Etta’s abuse teaches secrecy and hardness; Cecilia reproduces it; Blythe dreads she will too. The novel presses on the question of what is learned versus what is inborn, and how terror of becoming one’s mother can itself shape behavior.
Motherhood without varnish: Birth is animal and terrifying; the postpartum period is pain, blood, sleeplessness, and shame. Blythe’s sense that Violet rejects her punctures the myth of instant maternal bonding and exposes the taboo that love can lag or feel alien.
Perception under pressure: Fox’s smooth “You’re different” and his “Shhh” imply that Blythe’s perceptions are wrong. That subtle invalidation nudges her toward self-doubt and isolation, setting the stage for a reality in which her experiences may be dismissed as hysteria rather than heard.
The storybook: The handmade book is Blythe’s talisman of belonging—an imagined cure and a self-adoption into the Ellingtons. Cecilia’s violent rejection shreds the fantasy; Mrs. Ellington returning it restores Blythe’s right to want love, even if it can’t be found at home.
Key Quotes
“Just figure out the sleep and you’ll be fine. Nothing else matters.”
This blunt advice collapses motherhood into logistics and exposes its grind. It punctures Blythe’s romantic vision, foreshadowing how practical exhaustion can eclipse ideals and warp self-image.
“You’re different... You aren’t anything like her.”
Fox’s reassurance sounds loving but functions as a shutdown. It replaces curiosity with certainty, denying Blythe space to voice lineage-based fear and hinting at a pattern of emotional minimization.
I closed my eyes and I willed something horrible to go wrong. Death. I wanted a death. Mine or the baby’s. I didn’t think, even then, that we would survive each other.
This confession strips birth of sanctity and centers ambivalence and terror. Naming the possibility that mother and child might not “survive each other” launches the novel’s central ambiguity about danger, blame, and fate.
“I think the baby hates me.”
Blythe translates Violet’s inconsolability into intent, revealing how sleep deprivation and fear personalize infant behavior. The line crystallizes her isolation and her emerging belief that something is wrong at the core.
“Shhh.”
Fox’s whisper is a lullaby to the problem, not a response to it. The single syllable symbolizes a broader silencing that will shape Blythe’s version of events and the marriage’s unraveling.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters lay the novel’s spine: a generational chain of harm that bends every present choice. By pairing Blythe’s Ellington sanctuary with Etta’s violence, the book shows how longing and fear grow from the same root. Birth and the newborn days arrive as a reckoning, not a redemption; Blythe’s bond with Violet begins under strain, while Fox’s minimization seeds mistrust.
Structurally, the intercut past deepens the stakes of Blythe’s present perceptions. The reader now sees a pattern Blythe can only sense, heightening tension around whether her instincts are insight or hysteria. The result is a darker, sharper story about motherhood—less a glow than a glare—where love, fear, and legacy blur into something dangerous.