When the baby is still small and waking up at all hours of the night, we take a trip to Portland, Oregon. It rains every single day we’re there and I spend most of the trip in the back of the rental car with our wailing baby, dangling my tit over his car seat. We meet people we know from the internet at food trucks and they swear the weather isn’t always so bad. “I think, if I was able to enjoy things right now,” I say to Dustin, “I’d really like it here.”
We want milder weather, a real backyard, a change of scenery, a washer and dryer. I’m tired of carrying the stroller up the steps from the subway and waiting forever at restaurants. It’s the typical story: the hard parts of living in New York have eclipsed the magic, and once you lose sight of the magic, the whole project of living there becomes absurd.
I find a Craftsman house in Portland for rent on Craigslist. We tell our friends, who are excited but also a little betrayed. “It just seems so sudden,” Halle says, but I remind her we’ve been talking about leaving for years. It’s just that now, time moves differently. I can see it passing. I can see that we have to act.
We reserve one of those hellish pods that always seem bigger than they are, and I entertain the baby while Dustin and his dad pack half our stuff into it. We leave the other half on the street outside of our apartment. There’s no time for a farewell tour. We have a good-bye party at a bar on our last Sunday afternoon, but I feel gone already. We leave New York just before Christmas.
Our new house has all these extra rooms. A finished basement. I use the washer and dryer almost every day, just because I can. I’ve never been anything but a mom here, and maybe because of that, I feel less self-conscious bringing the baby to restaurants or pushing his stroller down eerily quiet blocks. All the friends of friends we’ve been introduced to here are married and own their houses. Everyone cooks. Has a car. The trappings of adulthood are more conventional, more attainable here. We’ve attained them. In another life I might see this as a sort of bourgeois death but to me right now, it feels like coming up for air.
One of my New York friends introduces me over e-mail to Danielle, who lives in Portland and has a baby a few months older than mine. “You can be mom friends. No pressure.” My impulse is to put her off, to reach out some afternoon when I’m feeling more myself. It’s hard to see why anyone would want to be friends with me when none of my clothes fit and I am too tired to have a sense of humor.
On our first weekend in Portland, Danielle follows up with me and I invite her over. I buy a cake from a bakery down the street and remind myself to offer her tea. It feels like we are going on a date.
She knocks on our door and I swing it open to find her on the porch; she’s wearing clogs, a drapey white sweater, and no makeup. She has long wavy blond hair and a baby slightly larger than mine on her hip. She comes in and takes off her shoes and the baby’s coat and then sits down on the rug. We ask each other questions and move from nervousness to tentative ease. Our babies flop and crawl over the rug and each other like puppies while we eat cake. Neither of us is getting much sleep and we are both still breastfeeding around the clock. “It’s so fucking hard,” Danielle says, popping out a boob when her baby cries.
“Yes!” I say, and some part of me relaxes. Have I just been waiting for someone to come along and say it out loud?
“What was your birth like?” she asks me, and I narrow my eyes and shove a piece of cake in my mouth. “Fucking awful.”
“Mine too,” she says, and we laugh the kind of laugh that changes midway through into something darker. We make eye contact and nod, shake our heads, and then laugh more, full of resignation, laughing at the absurdity, saying more with a look than we had the energy to explain.
We take turns telling our birth stories and cuddling each other’s babies and I feel myself getting manic with the thrill of finally being understood. The ability to be casually despondent, to complain to someone in shorthand and not feel like you have to insert disclaimers about how much you love your baby—I feel like if I could just be around her forever, I would be okay.
Danielle was also in labor for close to forty hours, she tells me. She also had the dream of the perfect birth, but she didn’t give up and get the epidural like I did. Her baby, when he finally came, came barreling out of her so quickly and so traumatically, she got an extremely debilitating fourth-degree tear. She’d been seeing a pelvic-floor therapist, a godsend, and was healing and progressing, but sex was still something she couldn’t quite contemplate. She couldn’t ride her bike or go running. For the first few weeks, she couldn’t even sit down. Despite all that, she went back to work when the baby was six weeks old. She didn’t have a choice.
“It was really dark,” she says.
“No kidding.”
“I imagined all these things I’d do on my maternity leave.”
“Ha.”
“Exactly.”
Talking to her, I realize that when I replay my own labor in my head, a sort of compulsive Monday-morning quarterbacking I can’t stop doing, I imagine that if I had only “stuck it out” and had the vaginal birth I aspired to, everything would have gone perfectly. But there are all kinds of ways for things to go badly.
We’ve been putting off looking into day care even though we both desperately need more time to work. Something about the task of Googling, scheduling tours, and filling out applications feels insurmountable. Maybe we just don’t want to admit to ourselves what is becoming obvious: our little arrangement is not working.
“What if we just wait till he crawls?” I suggest. It seems as reasonable as anything else. Something about the fact that the baby would be mobile, able to move from one corner of the room to another at least, makes it easier to imagine abandoning him.
We need more money, which means we will spend $850 a month on day care and hope that, with the additional time to work, we will earn at least $851 more a month. The ridiculousness of this math is partly why we’ve spent so long splitting the time ourselves.
“Our baby will be a baby only once, and I don’t want to miss out” was the sort of thing I said when I was pregnant, imagining days full of nothing but wonder. It was the sort of message that was ambient on Facebook and parenting blogs. You’ll never get this time back. It’s a threat. What was work compared to being face to face with a life unfolding before you? Now I am increasingly convinced that I do want to miss out, at least a little bit. “Your baby will only be a baby once” sounds less like a threat than a small mercy.
“If I could spend ten good minutes with him every two hours, that’d be ideal,” I say to Danielle over drinks one night. “You know, when they’re really small. And you just…look at them. And there’s nothing to do. And you know you’re supposed to talk to them but it feels insane. And you just, like, boop them with toys on the nose, like they’re dogs…boop.” I feel a wave of longing when I say this stupid word: boop. It was part of my baby language, always would be. I remember his laughter, his stillness, staring back up at me, how his eyes would flash at me a certain way and I’d be convinced we were communicating on some deeper plane, beyond words, and I want to take back all my wild urges to be elsewhere. Wasn’t this life at its most elemental? Wasn’t this what I was working toward with writing?
If only I had the sort of spiritual stamina to stay in profundity longer, to not find it oppressive after ten minutes.
“Taking care of a baby is sort of like driving down the highway,” an old co-worker’s wife told me when I was pregnant as we sat at a picnic table in their upstate backyard. “It’s incredibly boring but you can’t look away.”
I remember thinking, Oh, but it won’t be like that for me.
It was hard to see this time with our son for what it was: an investment in another person, the sacrifice at the start of a long, rewarding project. It was like a hazing ritual, with all the hardest parts at the beginning.
Did it have to be like that? Did you have to get remade? Did you have to hide in the bathroom on your phone, go for long walks and cry? Did you have to hate everybody, yourself most of all?
I didn’t want to simply endure, I wanted to enjoy the experience, to come out the other side of the gauntlet stronger, wiser, and—defying reason—more beautiful. I saw my ability to be present as a test of my character or of my bona fides as a mother: Was I going to be happy, or was I going to flail? Was motherhood going to make everything in my life better, make me better, or was it going to ruin everything?
I operated as if there’d be a verdict. An easy answer. A story. I operated as if we were setting the tone for the rest of our lives.
It did not occur to me that we could simply muddle through. Learn as we go. Change things later. Forgive ourselves.
We go on a few day-care tours with the baby in tow. It’s hard to imagine leaving him anywhere and feeling okay about it, but the last place we visit is impossible to criticize. The day-care director opens the door and welcomes us into a baby paradise, filled with soft mats and mirrors and reassuring women cuddling children and reading them stories. A herd of babies crawls toward us, some of them waving, some saying, “Hiiiii,” in tiny voices as we gingerly make our way across the big room.
Dustin and I look at each other and shrug. “That was easy,” he says as we get back into the car and go home, both of us feeling like we checked off a box.
“What are you going to do on your first day with child care?” Danielle says over dinner that night, her voice giddy. “You should do something fun, just for yourselves. Go out to lunch somewhere nice. Go to the fancy new sauna!” On the way home from her house, I get a follow-up text from her: Have sex in the middle of the day, with the sun streaming in through the windows!
On the baby’s first morning in day care, I sit with him on the rug for a while, then move him off my lap and try to interest him in some toys so I can slip away. I hand the day-care director a bag of frozen breast milk. “I’ll come back at one to nurse him,” I say, and she is chipper, happy to accommodate me. When I finally move toward the door, the baby chases me, crawling full speed toward where I’m throwing on my jacket and rushing to step into my clogs. He’s red-faced and screaming. He can’t believe what’s happening. I feel nauseated as I fight the urge to run over to him and pull him to me, inhale his smell, pull up my shirt and feed him standing up in the entryway. I can feel some part of me close off, out of necessity. “I’ll be back!” I promise him, pleading with him as if he can understand, then I slip out the door. I chant, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, in my head as I walk home.
Leaving him feels wrong. I can’t believe the power of it, the power he has over me, how it overwhelms all rational thinking. When I get home I pace around, nervously tidy the living room. I don’t go upstairs to find Dustin. I know if I see him, I’ll cry. I unload the dishwasher and text Danielle, who tells me to drink a glass of wine, even though it’s ten a.m. I look around. The house is empty. There is no baby in the next room, flinging toys around, no baby underfoot, banging on a pot with a spoon. I feel like I am getting away with something. Like the dream where you find a new room in your house.
Dustin comes downstairs and over to me. “How was it?” he asks.
“He screamed,” I say and I watch Dustin’s face fall. Something about how he’s sad too is what makes me cry into his chest.
“It will get better. And we have to do this. You keep saying you need more time to work. Plus it’s good for him,” Dustin tries. “You know, to be around other kids, to socialize.”
“I think that’s just something people tell themselves,” I say, laughing as I wipe tears away.
“Well, fine. Tell it to yourself!”
I get to the day care at one o’clock that first day having achieved very little in the way of work and even less in the way of having sex with my husband. I peer around the front door, and I can see that my baby is in someone’s lap with a pacifier in his mouth. His face is red and splotchy; he looks defeated. I hurry over to him, and when I grab him to me, he lays his head on my shoulder and whimpers.
“He wouldn’t take the bottle,” one of the caregivers tells me, wincing a little.
“Did he cry all day?” I ask, even though I’m afraid to know the answer.
“Not all day. Just on and off.” I try not to cry myself. This was exactly what I dreaded. This for writing? This for time alone, to work? I nurse him and hand him off, then go back home for a few hours, more on principle than anything else.
On the way home, past daffodils and tulips and people walking their dogs, I give myself a pep talk: You have to do this or you will go insane. It’s for the well-being of the whole family. He will get used to it. You will get used to it. It will be hard and then it will be okay.
Knowing what I am capable of, what I need in order to be a good parent, a good person—it occurs to me that I had to have a baby to figure all of this out. I had to get more than desperate; I had to get low down before I could learn to see and then say out loud what it was I needed. I had to move away from New York. Get a therapist. Meet Danielle.
How I wish it had come easier, sooner. I wish these two things had happened in the other order: me learning what I needed and then becoming someone’s mother. But it’s better than nothing. When I return home, I go right back into my little studio in the backyard, a renovated garage I’ve wordlessly claimed. I put a bulletin board up, light incense, hang pictures, and line up my books. Books by other women. Some of them mothers.
What if having a hard time adjusting to motherhood wasn’t some moral failure or a failure of imagination? What if we thought of the whole endeavor like we do work? Like how a career starts out with a lot of dues-paying, a lot of indignity, a lot of feeling unappreciated and complaining to your friends but then incrementally gets easier or more fulfilling. You get better at it. It becomes part of you. And you start to think, Well, what else would I do all day?
Of course, it’s not the same at all. But you can understand why someone wouldn’t want to have a job. And you can understand why someone would.
Dustin goes to pick up the baby an hour or so later, and once they’re home we sit on the couch together—a trio again. I feel an unfamiliar lightness. It’s five p.m. and I don’t feel like a husk of a human being. I’m not wallowing in misery and resentment or full of rage over the endless question of what to have for dinner. When I nurse the baby, I hug him to me, savoring the feeling of his body pressed into mine.
I take myself to yoga—the regular, grown-up kind, which I haven’t done in years. There are no babies, but there are actual men, which is always weird. Creeping into a new studio, not knowing where to sign in or when to take off my shoes, makes me want to turn back, but before I can, a woman spots me. Perhaps sensing my unease, she leads me into the room and gestures to where I can put down my mat. Feeling a hundred eyes on my lumpen body, I sit there doing and redoing my ponytail, trying not to make eye contact with anyone. The teacher comes by and introduces herself.
“Do you have any injuries I should know about?”
“Well, I just had a baby,” I blurt out, despite it not being quite true anymore. I went through the same thing at the hair salon a week ago. “Oh, how old is your baby?” the stylist asked, and I debated lying to her. I wanted to say the baby was brand-new. I wanted her to understand that I was not quite myself yet. I wanted her to be impressed that I was sitting there, in the salon chair, wearing eyeliner. I want to be granted a special dispensation. I want to extend the grace period indefinitely. To be graded on a curve, have people think, She’s not doing too bad, considering.
I want the yoga teacher to understand why my arms will shake in downward dog, why I will spend most of the class in child’s pose, hiding my face. Why I might cry in pigeon pose, with my leg pulled up under me and my new stomach brushing against my calf. I want her to know that I used to be able to do everything, that I used to be in better shape. I want her to know this isn’t me.
“He’s nine months old now,” I volunteer before she asks me, shaving off a few months the way you shave ten pounds off your weight on your driver’s license. “I had a C-section, though. But I should be fine.”
She nods, making deep eye contact, and puts her hand on my knee. “Just take it slow and make any adjustments you need. You know your body best.”
Do I?
Our unspoken deal is I do the dishes most nights while Dustin gives the baby a bath. This means I get to be left alone to listen to podcasts. Most of what I listen to are interviews with people whose careers I am jealous of, writers mainly, people who are in the world. People who still live in New York. I am still in the world, sure, and still writing. In fact, I am writing more and earning more money than I did pre-baby, but I still feel left behind. I am always thinking, too much, about what I could do if I had the kind of time some of my friends have. My friends without children. I harbor fantasies of ordering in sushi and staying up all night working as I did in the old days. And yet, I know I never got shit done then either. It is refreshing, I suppose, to have something outside of myself to blame.
Tonight I take a break from careerism to listen to a parenting podcast called The Longest Shortest Time. The host is interviewing Ina May Gaskin, “the mother of modern midwifery” who wrote the books responsible for all my romantic ideas about natural childbirth.
The host confronts Ina May, telling her that the books made her feel like a failure when her birth didn’t go the way she’d envisioned. “I was under this impression,” she says to Ina, “and maybe it was the wrong impression, that you believed that all women could have, if not a pain-free labor, then at least, like, a relaxed labor?”
“No,” Ina May says. “No! Not everybody has a great time. Sometimes it’s really rugged, it’s really hard. You’re not alone if you felt like you experienced a lot of pain and you felt like you failed.” When I hear this I put down the bowl I am scrubbing and brace myself on the sink and sob. I’m a little horrified by how much her words affect me and how much I needed to be forgiven by this woman I’ve never met for what I think of as my poor performance.
Then Ina tries to explain. “What if we just told people that it always really, really, really hurts?” she asks, and then she answers herself: “Well, that wouldn’t be very good, because you’d get everybody so frightened.”
What if, instead of worrying about scaring pregnant women, people told them the truth? What if pregnant women were treated like thinking adults? What if everyone worried less about giving women a bad impression of motherhood?
We learn that it’s better if Dustin does day-care drop-off in the morning—the baby is more even-keeled around him, more willing to separate from him, the person without breasts. I do pickup. Every afternoon the baby and I leave day care with a “report card,” a little half-sheet of paper that says when he pooped and how long he slept. For reasons I’m not totally conscious of, I always shove it into my pocket when they hand it to me, like it’s a love letter I should read in private. At the first red light I usually dig the paper out of my coat and spread it over the steering wheel.
The best part is always the fill-in-the-blank. I had fun: ____ [reading books, playing outside, going to the park, playing with blocks]. I can’t help but hang on every word, as if this little report promises to restore whatever his absence has temporarily displaced in me. (Authority? Intimacy? Control?) By the time we’re home and walking in the door, I’m his mother again.
I know there is more to his day than what is on the slip of paper, but I have the whole thing memorized anyway. I dole out the details of it to Dustin over the course of the evening, as if I am omniscient when it comes to the baby. Until so recently, it felt like I was.
Today I was playing on the couch with the baby, who is less and less of one every day. He was giggling and flinging his body around in a way that kept making my breath catch. Half joking, I patted the couch cushion, like Lie down, and he immediately did it. He fell flat on his stomach and, laughing, looked up at me. I laughed too, in awe and a little heartbroken that he’d learned some new trick that I hadn’t taught him.
When Dustin passed through the room I interrogated him: “Did you teach him to lie down?” I demonstrated the gesture. The baby did it again.
“I didn’t teach him that!”
It is the smallest thing but it made undeniable what just a few months before had seemed impossible: Our son has a life outside of us. Separate from us. He is his own person. On some days, this serves as the giant relief I’ve been waiting for, and other days, other hours, I feel an unforeseen pang of sadness in my solar plexus.
One day he will grow up and move away from us and we will miss him constantly. I’m still mad when he wakes me up with his screaming each morning. I still need time and space away from him, to think and read and work and feel like a person, even though I know that one day I will long for nothing but to hold him again.
“We just can’t do it; we can’t bear to hear him cry.” That’s what we’ve been saying to other parents for months when the subject of sleep training comes up. As if we’re just really big softies. As if some parents are unmoved by their babies’ crying.
I am to sleep downstairs in the guest room, per Dustin’s orders. “Oh! Okay,” I say, trying to mask my delight. I haven’t had an uninterrupted night’s sleep in almost a year, and part of me can’t believe my good fortune. I feel like we are taking control of our lives. I also feel somber, oddly parental.
After taking a warm bath, I spend a few hours watching Friends with noise-canceling headphones on, trying to pretend the whole thing isn’t happening. I think I hear crying a few times but it seems far off, someone else’s baby. But when I get up to pee, there it is: Wailing. Sustained screaming. My nipples immediately harden and my milk comes in. I try pacing around the house, getting a drink of water, checking the locks on the door. I feel like a caged animal, unable to do her animal job. I sit up in bed staring at the wall, trying to be still but fighting the urge to rush upstairs and scoop up the baby. Eventually I can’t stand it anymore, and I kick off the blankets and run upstairs to Dustin, who shoos me away without speaking.
“Let’s just stop,” I beg in a stage whisper.
“No!” he says. “Go back downstairs before he hears you.” I can hear the baby, my baby, whimpering to himself.
“Let’s just try it again in a few weeks. When he’s older.” I start crying. “I feel so bad. I don’t want to do this.” Hearing the baby cry and not comforting him feels like torture, like being starving with a meal in front of you that you’re not allowed to eat.
“We’re doing it,” Dustin says with finality. He goes in to pat the baby on his butt and tell him everything will be okay. “We’re right here.” Are we? I crawl back downstairs and, blessedly, fall asleep. After two more nights of hell, it is done and everything is better and we are left wondering why we didn’t do it sooner. The feeling that we have taken things into our own hands is intoxicating. What else can we do? What else haven’t we done?
I am not sure what to do with my newfound free time in the evenings. I hide out, paint my toenails, watch TV, think about how maybe there are just some people who are baby people and some people who aren’t, and I’m not.
I pick up a writer friend from her hotel downtown. Edan is here to give a reading. She published a bestselling novel last year and now it is out in paperback, and she is pregnant with her second child. While we’re in the car on the way to lunch, I fiddle with Google Maps and ask about her flight, her new book, her pregnancy.
“I mostly can’t wait to breastfeed again,” she tells me.
“What?” I say.
“Oh, yeah,” she says, “I loved it. That’s basically why I’m having another kid.”
“Wow,” I say. “Huh.” Wait, did I like it too?
With stuff this big, almost any way of looking at it can be true. We all talked like we were going to eventually reach some grand conclusion, some correct stance, but in fact it was different for everybody, impossible to pin down. Was childbirth traumatic or transcendent? Was pregnancy a time of wonder and awe or a kind of temporary disability? Were we supposed to fit our lives around our children or fit our children into our lives? My feelings changed every minute, depending on my mood and on the company I kept. It felt essential, though, to keep asking the questions.
I want the hormones out of me. I want to be my old self again, as if that were possible, and I fantasize that once my boobs dry up, everything will be back to normal. The all-consuming project of early motherhood will be completed. I’ll be out on parole.
I spend a week not really sitting down around the baby. Not holding him in my lap for too long. I disappear at bedtime and feel like I’ve forgotten something essential. Like I’ve left the house without locking the front door.
In a matter of weeks, breastfeeding becomes some faraway thing I did for a while. He seems to have forgotten it ever happened. It was once so important to me to make it to a year of breastfeeding, and now that I’ve done it, it feels like having really good SAT scores—no one cares once you get into college.
In any case, the baby has started to give more hugs and kiss me on the mouth. He says words. Something has shifted in me too. When he walks into the room, I slide onto the floor without thinking, reaching my arms out. I feel real joy at the sight of him, less fear. I laugh with him more easily. I dread leaving the house to go do work.
When the baby is fourteen months old, Dustin’s sister comes to visit. It is September, the two-year anniversary of our engagement. The idea of a wedding is still on the back burner but we decide to take advantage of having family in town to spend the night in a hotel.
I am nervous to spend the night with Dustin alone, uninterrupted. No excuses. But also giddy. On a friend’s advice, we fuck as soon as we check in to the hotel room. I am laughing at myself in my head but it’s fine; good, even. I feel we have overcome some mental trap, some pressure, as we glide into the hotel restaurant with tousled hair, easy smiles.
We spend too much money, buy a pack of cigarettes just because we can, get cocktails in a dark basement bar and then smoke under an awning, in the rain. The air is cool and we are a little drunk. I have never felt so free, so happy. It occurs to me I had a baby just to feel this free when I’m away from him.
Wait, I text to Danielle after telling her how much better things have been lately, how great the baby is, how I feel like I’m experiencing real joy for the first time in as long as I can remember. I think maybe I have been depressed this whole time? Like, postpartum depression?
It never occurred to me that you didn’t have PPD, she writes back. Danielle, my dearest godsend of a friend, who never knew me before I was a mother, never knew me not-depressed, and spent time with me anyway, for some reason.
I hate Dustin, I text her.
Why?
For not seeing it! I write. For not knowing!!! I think of all the times I felt like he was judging me for sleeping in, for snapping at him, for lying on the couch miserable instead of playing with the baby. It doesn’t occur to me to be mad at myself. Or sad. Or to simply be grateful that whatever it was is now lifting. Has lifted. Danielle tells me not to make it about him, not to make it about the blame. That we’ve both been overwhelmed. He has his own shit; we should just keep moving forward. I don’t quite agree with her. I’m not there yet, but I can see her point.
Just focus on the joy, she writes.
Ugh, fine.
When the women at day care tell me that he gives his pacifiers to the younger babies when they cry and kisses them on the nose, I know what they’re about to say.
“Yeah, he loves babies,” I say, chuckling as I put on his winter boots.
“You should give him a baby brother or sister!” There it is. Everyone knows you’re not supposed to say this sort of thing, but people can’t help themselves. Part of me wants to give in and play along, to submit to the natural way of things, to loosen my newfound grip and go flying off the side of the cliff again. Okay, fine, I’ll have another baby. Because you want me to. Because it would be really cute. To give up on the land of the living—the land of deadlines, of yoga classes, of happy hours—and dwell, again, in even more tenderness.
I just shake my head as I button up my son’s fleece coat, then stand up with the baby on my hip and smile at them. “We’ll see!” I always feel like such a mom at day-care pickup, waving good-bye to the women I pay to watch my kid so that I can write. These women who know nothing about me, have no idea how I feel about any of this. They want me to go back to the beginning. They want me to do it all again.
How to explain the strange arc of parenthood to new mothers? How to tell it so that they believe you? The way things start out hard and then ease up. It is like finding more hours in the day. It is like the end of the school year, that first day of summer. It’s like you moved to a new country, and it’s beautiful but there’s a war going on. But then the war ends and you begin reconstructing yourself.
My therapist calls it expansiveness. She makes a fist, then splays her fingers out into an open palm. You expand and retract. You are on defense, and then not. You are under siege and then not. You begin to open all on your own, to seek out other people. Seek out complexity of your own. You will lie on the couch during nap time and think about opening an old cookbook and making something complicated for dinner, just because. You will consider planting a vegetable garden this year. Or taking up running again. You will go to Target alone and leave with sunglasses, a new necklace. A set of cotton pajamas. Nothing for the baby at all.
The baby and I walk home from day care together as the sun is setting. “Crow!” he says to each crow. “Airpane!” to each airplane. We stop every few blocks so I can look at him and kiss him in the crease where his nose meets his cheek. His dad, I know, is home making dinner, and will gasp and then yell from the kitchen, “You’re home” as soon as we walk through the door. We will all stand there together in a hug. We are a family. Somehow it happened. Somehow I let it. Or else it happened despite me. In the end I find it doesn’t matter.