Sugar something

This fascinated me, not only because the daughter could articulate a moment of pain, but because I was also imagining better alternative realities for the woman who was her mother...

"My mother clearly had wanted children; as a somewhat brittle diabetic, she had them even knowing that pregnancy and birth could endanger her life. But at a certain point--once we acquired wills--she had no idea what to do with us. I must have heard her say a hundred times, whenever she saw or held a baby, 'Don't you wish you could just pickle them at this stage?'

I was ten when my sister and I went into her room to see her stretched out on the bed, refusing the sugared orange juice my father urged her to drink. She was 'low': a sudden, unpredictable infusion of insulin had sent her blood sugar plummeting. 'Who are these goddamn children?' she cried to my father, slurring her words as if drunk. 'Make them go away. I don't want any children. Get rid of them.'

I heard this not with surprise or even deep pain, but with a sense of relief." 

"Amateurs" by Michelle Huneven in Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed