As Tuffy’s birth mother contacted her anyone would say she would experience great joy but instead she experiences the opposite.
“Around the age of two, I was taken away for the first time and placed alone in a room. I remember the smell of disinfectant and what I would now call despair. Into this disinfected despair, there came a presence, someone or something, who grieved with me and held my hand,” (Page 1). This shows how the presence of the white illusion comes at Tuffy once again at this moment in her life and she remembers the day she was born and how she was left alone.
When her birth mother contacted her and she hung the phone up back in the cradle Tuffy felt this presence once again and she felt as if “it was a kind of replay of my birth. I’d done it over. But this time I had instinctively rejected my mother, left her in the cradle just as she’d left me,” (Page 3). This shows how Tuffy was willing to save a life at the request of her birth mother who once neglected her at birth and now Tuffy has grown into a genuinely caring person who does not want to repeat the actions of her birth mother.
