I have moved eleven times since I graduated from high school in 1987. The first move was to college, so I’m not sure that counts. But since I never moved back home again, maybe it does. The first eight of those moves were progressively upward in a way. First, second, and third apartments, switching roommates a few times, moving in with my future ex-husband, buying our first house. The last three were a cascade of downsizing following the divorce from said ex-husband, selling said house, moving into a rental, then my best friend’s garage, and the (hopefully) final move into my partner’s lovely house in Long Beach where I hope and assume I will live out the rest of my days. But who knows. Maybe Ian and I will move to Bora Bora or France or Tulsa. Probably not Bora Bora if I’m being honest.

In each of these moves, I’ve had to make choices about what to keep and what to let go. And I’ve let go of a lot. So much so that I’ve been lovingly accused of being cold and heartless in my approach to “purging”. I am decidedly not a hoarder or a sentimentalist, and I’ve thrown out or given away things that my daughters are still probably mad about. Don’t get them started on the 501s from the 80s that I tossed long before they were born.

But back to the whole “life has passed me by” thing. What screams at me on those hopeless and despair-filled days is that I should have been or done more of something and anything, and that’s why I’m such an old loser and have nothing to show for my life. And by far, the biggest “should have” is that I should have written more. I have said or written that sentence in some form hundreds and hundreds of times. You know how I know this? Because, despite all the purging and donating and tossing over the course of eleven moves, I somehow kept all my journals. And there are a lot of them. And in every single one, since I was twelve years old, I write about how I don’t write enough. Even in my first journal, a little cloth book with blue flowers on the cover that I bought in Sturbridge Village during our two-day school trip in seventh grade, I wrote that I wasn’t enough of a writer. By twelve, I was already, according to myself, not enough.

I have always compared myself to other people. I remember being pregnant, sitting in front of my IBM laptop at the coffee shop near my house while my 18 month-old daughter was home for two hours with a sitter, just so I could carve out some time for myself. I remember writing that it was probably too late for me to make it big as an actor, and the only glimmer of hope I could find was that Elizabeth Montgomery, who had played the lead role in the 1960s sitcom “Bewitched”, was already 31 by the time she got that show. But I was already 32. I was already over the hill at 32. And looking back, I realize that I was, in my mind, over the hill even as a kid. I never didn’t want to be an actor. I recently noted that I’ve been a member of the SAG-Aftra union since 1976, when I was six years old. I acted in my first television commercial when I was four. I was a little kid who took the train by myself into the city so I could go to auditions with my mom. And yet, by the time I hit middle school, my “career” had ended. I had braces and my awkward still-growing face and body weren’t what ad agencies were looking for. Other pre-teen girls were acting on television, so clearly it was possible. Just not for me. And by twelve years old, I felt like a has-been, or even more accurately, a never-was.

I can take the “not enough” argument and apply it to anything. Here’s a small sample of my not enoughs.

1. I don’t write enough

2. I don't act enough

3. I don’t exercise enough

4. I don’t push through fear enough

5. I don’t have sex enough

6. I don’t say yes enough

7. I don't say no enough

8. I don’t participate in groups enough

9. I’m not disciplined enough

10. I don’t earn enough

11. I’m not talented enough

12. I’m not thin enough

13. I’m not pretty enough

14. I’m not lucky enough

And so on…

My daughters and I laugh about my “not enough” loop. Here’s an example. I’ve been knitting since I was ten years old. My grandmother taught me on a trip to Nova Scotia, and I got hooked. I didn’t knit just scarves and potholders. I knit a jacquard dress from a Vogue Knitting pattern when I was in fifth grade. I have knit intricate and complicated sweaters that would sell for a thousand bucks at Neiman Marcus. And yet…I have never learned how to create a knitting pattern. I can see a sweater I want, but I can’t convert it into a pattern. So in my mind, my knitting doesn’t count. I know how to follow a pattern (duh, who doesn’t?) but if I can’t create it from scratch like the birth of a fucking star, it doesn’t count. My particular “not enough” rabbit hole goes something like this. I didn’t create the pattern or spin the yarn, or raise the sheep that make the yarn, or carve my own knitting needles out of bamboo, or grow the bamboo forest that provides the wood for the needles. And thus and so, I am not a real knitter. AND, to top it all off, I don’t knit every single day, so it’s not a consistent habit, and that really cements the fact that I’m just an amateur, a hack, an unoriginal copy cat who doesn’t have the creativity to create her own vision. I can apply the same loop to writing, cooking, shopping, acting, cleaning, boating, skiing, decorating and so on and so on and so on.

And yet, here I sit, typing words into another laptop, because not doing it puts me right back in the loop. I am terrified to post this. As much as I’d like to be, I am not one of those post-menopausal women who has “no shits left to give”. I care way too much what other people think. And since I already know whatever I’m writing is not good enough, witty enough, smart enough, experienced enough, sharp enough, or original enough, posting this is like diving off a cliff with a blindfold.

But time will keep on ticking whether I write or not. And today is the youngest I will ever be. And I can’t go back and write what I didn’t write then. So I might as well just write today. And while I’m terrified that it’s too late, and that I will be exposed as a fraud and that everyone will think I’m a mediocre writer and a mediocre person, I’m just going to do it anyway.

July 21, 2026

In August of 2014, the day before I was supposed to drive back from my six-week vacation in Maine to Los Angeles with my two daughters, my dog, and my cat, I was moving a cooler filled with ten Budweisers to the shed behind my little house, and as I leaned over to drop it on the floor next to the folded-up slip and slide, I felt a snap in my back. I actually heard it before I felt it. There’s a split second when this happens when I believe I can intellectually prevent this instant from being as bad as it is. If I don’t move at all, if I stay perfectly in that position, if I pray, it won’t take me down. I had that split second. I did all those things. And twenty seconds later, my legs gave out and the pain shot through me like a bullet. And not the regular kind of bullet. The kind that explodes inside you to do the most damage. As the howl of agony spewed out of me, I distinctly remember a flock of birds suddenly fleeing from the safety of the branches in the beech trees above me.

It took me about twenty minutes to crawl out of the shed, down the tar paper covered lawnmower ramp, over the six feet of grass, up the makeshift granite kitchen doorstep, through the laundry room and into the living room of my little cottage. When my knees finally reached the jute rug on the living room floor, I couldn’t get up or down, so I just sort of let my arms collapse and tried to roll over on my back as quickly as I could. It felt like an ax across my lower torso. But once I was on my back, I was relatively pain free. As long as I didn’t move. It was in that first moment of relief that I realized I didn’t have my cell phone. Or any phone, for that matter. I looked at the underside of the coffee table. There was still a spot of red paint I hadn’t covered up with the blue. There were two down feathers and a hair band under the shitty ultra-suede couch. I looked at the ceiling. It wasn’t the right white and it needed to be repainted. I scanned the room from my dog’s perspective until I saw my phone lying on the table next to the television across the room. It might as well have been in Egypt. But to Egypt I would go, because I needed that phone. I managed to get myself sort of on my side with my arms. I felt like that Andrew Wyeth painting of the girl lying in the field. My legs moved, but the shock of pain that went through me every time I moved them forced me to drag myself across the rug with my arms like someone who fell out of a wheelchair. I was covered in dog hair and whatever other bits of peanut crumbs and dried salsa that had fallen onto the floor that summer. I made my way across the room: move my arms, pull, howl, move my arms, pull, howl. By the time I got to the table, my face was soaking wet with sweat. And then, I was there. I propped myself up on my left elbow and slapped my hand around the tabletop trying to reach the phone. I caught a piece of it and pulled it toward me with enough force to send it flying into my right cheek before it hit the floor. My cheek broke its fall but at least the phone didn’t shatter. I released my left arm and fell back to the floor. As I stared again at the ceiling I made a mental list. Call Jane and Ava and get them a ride home from the pool club. Call Margaret, my mother-in-law, and get her to come over. Call Graham, my husband, in Los Angeles and get him to do anything at all. I called my daughters, I called my mother-in-law, I called my husband. My daughters got themselves a ride, my mother-in-law jumped in her car to come over, and my husband didn’t pick up the phone. So I waited. For the girls to come home, for my mother-in-law to come over, for Graham to call me back. All in, I think I lay there for about 45 minutes. About twenty minutes into that 45 minutes, I realized that I really, REALLY had to pee. Jane and Ava pulled into the driveway just as Margaret, my mother-in-law, showed up with her husband Rich. And when they all walked into my dirty living room and found me on my back on the floor, half under the crappy TV table, they all just stood there over me. No one said anything for about thirty seconds, and then Ava covered her mouth to stifle a laugh. Margaret went into action. She asked if I could move. I said I couldn’t. She put ice packs under my lower back, offered me some grapes, and asked if she should call an ambulance. All I could think about was how much I had to pee. Keep in mind, I have the bladder of a camel. I can go pretty much all day without peeing, but when I finally do, it can take up to two minutes to let it all go. But I was reaching critical mass. I knew I didn’t have much more room in there. It began to hit me that not only wasn’t I driving 3,500 miles back to Los Angeles the next morning, but I was getting dangerously close to evacuating my bladder without the benefit of a toilet.

Jane and Ava, teenagers to their toes, got bored pretty quickly and went to their room to snapchat. That left Margaret and Rich and me. I’m pretty sure Rich was on the spectrum, so empathy was not his strong suit. Plus we don’t know each other that well, so that made the idea of pissing myself even more uncomfortable than it would normally

be. Margaret asked again if I wanted her to call an ambulance, but it felt ridiculous and dramatic. So with all the courage my upper body could muster, I crawled back across the floor and pulled the top half of myself up onto the army cot I had turned into a day bed. I was on my knees now, propped up on my hands on the day bed. I felt a keen sense of victory. I had moved. I was off my back. The problem was, I had nowhere to go from there. From my kneeling position, I couldn’t get up or down, and my arms were getting tired. And after about ten more minutes on my knees, my arms shaking like a gymnast on the rings, I accepted the fact that either I had to get in an ambulance, or I was going to release my bladder all over the jute rug.

When the ambulance arrived, two EMT’s came in and asked me if I could move on my own. I said no. Not even a little. They leaned over either side of me, and together, we lifted me up to sort of standing. I don’t know how, but with their assistance, we got out the front door, down the granite rocks that aren’t really steps, and down to the ambulance. They were completely holding me up. I think if I had tried to put any weight on my legs, I would have thrown up. They got me into the ambulance and laid me down on the built-in stretcher. The man who was helping me was about 60, had almost white hair, was handsome and seemed like a good husband. He told me he was a teacher mostly but was an EMT in his spare time. I secretly envied him his dedication. And his good use of spare time. He told me he was going to put something in my nostril. Fentanyl. He told me they used to inject it, but I was one of the first people to use this new inhalant form. I sniffed up the Fentanyl which looked like a suppository but felt like a line of coke. And then Jane and Ava climbed up into the ambulance. I asked the EMTs if they could ride along and he said yes. The Fentanyl was starting to kick in, and that, and the fact that I was strapped to a gurney in the back of an ambulance, became REALLY funny to my kids. They started to make fun of me as soon as they closed the door behind them.

“Hi Mommy, what’s goin’ on?” Ava asked as she held up her phone. It was clear she was asking for her snapchat story.

“Do you want me to smile or not smile?” I asked.

“It’s not a picture, it’s a video,” Ava said, because I’m a dumb old idiot.

I didn’t care. The fentanyl was kicking in and this whole thing was so ridiculous that I had to laugh anyway, so why not laugh with my kids while they laugh in my face in front of all their friends?

Every time I started to think it wasn’t as bad as I thought, we’d hit a bump and I was reminded that it was. But it felt fantastic to blow past the traffic at the stop light in Somesville. I had waited for hours at that light over the last ten summers, and now, that light was my bitch. The girls were having a ball, waving out the back window like beauty queens while the siren lazily blared, as if to say, “It’s KIND OF an emergency?”

The only thing that was causing me any distress, and quite a lot of it, was my bladder. When we pulled into the ambulance bay at Mt Desert Island Hospital, I was wacked out of my mind on Fentanyl, and pretty sure that I wasn’t going to make it to a toilet. They brought me to a bed, and I told the nurse I was about to pee in my pants. The girls pushed the curtain divider aside and entered my little cubby while the nurse went to get me a bed pan. Jane and Ava sat on the foot of my hospital bed. When the nurse brought in the one-liter bed pan, I was absolutely clear that I was going to fill that thing to overflowing. She looked doubtful, but she left to grab a bigger one. By the time she got back, I was trying to undo my pants as my daughters looked at me in horror. And as soon as the nurse put the pan under me, my pants around my ankles, I let go and let God. I’ve got to say, I have never, with the exception of when I was birthing my children, allowed myself to pee while lying on my back. Especially while two nurses and two teenagers watched. But I did it. And it was glorious. Until I felt the two-liter bed pan start to fill up and I knew I no longer had the bladder control to stop the flow.

“Wait. Are you actually peeing right now?” Ava asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Oh my God. Why am I standing here??” she replied with revulsion. “I’m gonna go find a vending machine.”

And with that, Ava threw the curtain aside and left. I was still peeing. Jane stood at the foot of my bed.

“I’ll stay with you,” she said. Nothing more dependable than the codependence of the older child.

“You don’t have to,” I said.

But that was mostly because I was pretty sure that bedpan was full and I still had more to go. The nurses looked on with wide eyes.

“You weren’t kidding,” one of them said.

“I tried to tell you,” I said.

She left to grab another bedpan. But then, just as I felt my own hot urine gently caressing my butt, I was empty. The bedpan was not. It was filled to capacity. I had to lift myself up so she could pull it out, and the pain was spectacular. She spilled a little as she grabbed it. The humiliation was nothing compared to the pain.

Eventually a doctor came in, prescribed me some pain meds, and told me I couldn’t drive on them. That settled that. I wasn’t going to LA the next day. Not even a little. After about an hour of filling out paperwork, they lifted me into a wheelchair rolled me down the hall and out the double doors and deposited me into Margaret’s Prius. We stopped at the Rite-Aid in downtown Bar Harbor, and I waited in the car while Margaret filled my prescriptions for Vicodin, Soma, Naproxen and something else I can’t remember. Margaret returned with a bag of drugs, ice packs, and Luden’s cough drops. Rich drove home at about 25 miles an hour while the girls checked their phones in the back seat. When we got back to the house, they basically carried me back up the granite steps that aren’t really steps, onto the threshold, into the living room, and onto a chair, so I could sit completely upright. They made sure there was nothing else they could do, and they left. And finally, when all was quiet, about an hour later, Graham finally called me back.

“Hey, sorry. I was in a meeting,” he said.

“That’s okay,” I said. “But we’re not gonna be able to leave tomorrow. I had to take an ambulance to the emergency room.” I started to cry. I just wanted to go home.

“That’s a bummer, Al,” he said. There was a long pause. That’s a bummer?!

“Yup,” I replied.

“Well…take your time getting back. I got everything covered here,” he said.

He had everything covered? What did he have to cover? I had his children, his dog, his cat, our family car. As far as I could tell, the only thing he had to cover was himself.

“I gotta jump. But feel better.”

“Yup,” I replied. His “feel better” didn’t make me feel better at all.

The next morning, Tuesday, the day we were supposed to leave, we didn’t leave. I sat in a black rattan Pottery Barn chair with big fat white cushions. I was able to get myself to the bathroom with assistance from Jane and Ava, so that was a relief. But mainly, I sat upright in my chair while the Waltons played in the background, and we planned how to get Jane back to L.A. for varsity tennis tryouts, which were starting the following Monday. The whole reason we were supposed to leave Tuesday was for tennis. Jane had been playing all summer at our little club in Southwest Harbor. She had played doubles in her first women’s tournament, and she was mighty. This was a girl whom I had forced into tennis from the age of three, and who had mostly resented it. But that summer, she found her mojo. She was on fire. She and her 13-year-old partner had taken the club by storm. They played epic matches. They didn’t win the championship in the end, but they were thirteen and fourteen and lost to two excessively competitive forty-year-old women. So, for the first time in her life, Jane actually wanted to be part of a team. And getting back home for tennis tryouts her freshman year was her main focus and mine.

As I sat in my chair, propped up with pillows and ice packs, a stream of friends and family stopped by to bring me food and moral support. It was like sitting Episcopalian shiva. My mom offered to fly out from Colorado. My sister offered the same. My father-in-law said he’d drive as far as Indiana, and Margaret offered to drive with me the whole way. My friends brought quinoa and herbal calms, said they’d pack the car, take the girls off my hands. By Tuesday afternoon, we had all decided that the best plan was to fly Jane home on Thursday, and Ava, Charlie the dog, Cornelius the cat and I would drive home when I was physically able. Everyone agreed. I breathed a sigh of relief. The pressure was off.

The only person I hadn’t talked to was Graham. He hadn’t called, and I hadn’t called him since I walked out of the emergency room the day before. So when we all made our decision, I told Jane to call him and tell him the plan. Graham’s best friend Fitz was sitting on the couch next to my chair as Jane dialed. He had been friends with Graham since they were babies, forced to go to Sunday school together while their parents were at Quaker meeting. Fitz and I had been friends for twenty years. He was Jane and Ava’s summer dad. He filled in for Graham when Graham wasn’t with us in Maine. Which was most of the time. And Fitz was invested in our marriage, I think almost more than we were. So when Jane dialed Graham’s cell phone, Fitz and I both fell silent. I think we were both marveling at the fact that not only hadn’t Graham offered to help us get back, he hadn’t called at all.

“Hi Dad.”

Pause while Graham said something.

“So, we’ve all come up with a plan.”

Pause while Graham said something.

“So, I’m going to fly home on Thursday and Mom and Ava will drive back when she can drive. If I come back Thursday, that gives me plenty of time to get ready for tennis on Monday, and they can take their time getting back.”

Pause while Graham said something. And said something more. And said something more.

And as he talked, her face started to change into something I couldn’t quite recognize.

“Yeah, I know, but I need to be there Monday,” she said.

Another pause. Her eyes got big, her mouth got small. Fitz squinted his eyes at me. I looked back at Jane.

“Right…but, I need to be there by Monday,” she said. I watched Jane’s body crumple. “No, I get it, but we’ve all kind of worked it out…” she said.

And as I watched her, focused on her face, trying to figure out what he was saying on the other end of the phone, her eyes bloomed with tears. Instantly. Like a cartoon. Both eyes. Brimming. I felt my chest go hot.

“But I don’t want to stay here by myself!” she said. I could hear the panic in her voice. “What is he saying to you??” I asked.

But ask is an understatement. I wanted to rip the phone from her hand, and I didn’t care if I broke her arm doing it. Fitz looked at me again and something passed between us. We both knew that something was happening that was foreign and weird and wrong and sad and we both wanted to save Jane and we both knew we couldn’t and we both knew that something was wrong with Graham and we both knew in our guts what it was. I grabbed the phone. I didn’t break her arm.

“What are you saying?” I barked at Graham, without bothering to say hello.

And from his very important reality show production office in Los Angeles, from his six weeks alone while his family was in Maine, in the town where he grew up, where his parents and stepparents and sisters and nieces and nephews and cousins and teachers and barbers and coaches and best friends and daughters and wife and dog and cat were, he said, in a giant run-on sentence:

“It just doesn’t make sense for her to come home she’ll be a latch key kid I’m working constantly I can’t take care of her she won’t be able to get anywhere I won’t be able to drive her I’ll be working the whole time I can’t take time off it doesn’t make sense.”

I held the phone to my ear. A slice of pain shot through my lower right back. I didn’t say anything. I listened to him rattle off reasons that she shouldn’t come home. He was frantic. Like a caged animal. I started to get tunnel vision. Like I was about to pass out. I looked up at Jane. I saw her moving through the same physical sensations I was moving through. And I wanted it to stop for her. I wanted to scoop up my fourteen-year-old daughter and cradle her like a baby. Everything closed in. My head felt like fudge without sugar. I actually told myself to breathe. I breathed. And I spoke.

“She’s fourteen years old, Graham. She won’t be a latch key kid. She doesn’t need a babysitter. She just needs to come home.”

I could hear my own voice. It sounded like a kidnapped teenager begging her kidnapper not to kill her. He was calm. He didn’t waver.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” he said.

He had said three times what I was thinking, but for different reasons. It doesn’t make sense. I felt a wave of fear, the kind of fear when you think you’ve lost your kid at a mall.

“If you can’t take her, she can stay with the Kirks,” I said. “But she needs to get home.”

I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of my mouth. I couldn’t look at Fitz. He couldn’t look at me. And then, Graham spoke.

“This is what I told Jane, so let’s do this,” he said, in his corporate-team-manager voice. “If you’re feeling good enough to drive on Thursday, you and Ava leave. Jane stays with my dad in Maine, and she flies back Sunday. That way, she doesn’t have to do the drive, and she gets to have a few extra days in Maine.”

This was the precise moment I knew that the man I’d been married to for almost twenty years was gone. I sat in my Pottery Barn chair with the phone in my hand, my heart beating, my back throbbing, my mind racing, and I knew my life as I knew it was over. I took a shallow, weak little breath, just enough to keep me from suffocating.

“Graham. Jane doesn’t want to stay here after we’ve left. She wants to come home.” There was another pause.

“Well, it just doesn’t make sense,” he said.

It was final. I knew it was final. She knew it too. I was filled with, surrounded by, drowning in, pain. Pain for my daughter, pain in my back, pain for my marriage.

“Fine,” I said. “Fine. We’ll figure it out,” I said.

“Just let me know what you decide,” he said.

“Yup,” I said, as if the decision was mine to make. And I hung up the phone.

I can’t imagine what someone would have seen if they had walked in the living room in my little house in Maine in that instant. It felt obscene. It was as if we had witnessed a fatal car accident and I didn’t cover Jane’s eyes in time. I couldn’t undo it. I couldn’t even get up to hold her. And I wouldn’t have if I could have, because it would have shined a spotlight on the massive pile of shame we felt. I have never, in my life, felt as much failure as I did in that moment.

“We’ll figure it out,” I finally said to Jane. I didn’t know what else to say. I was just trying to fill the gaping hole. She didn’t respond. So, I said it again.

“Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out.”

That night, when I limped into bed, careful not to wrinkle the sheets I had already washed because we were supposed to leave the next morning, I thought about the suitcases, packed and sitting by the front door. I thought about the empty fridge, the locked windows, the cleaned-out coffee maker, the barren dresser drawers. I laid there in the dark, a pillow under my knees, a liquid surge of fear running through me. I knew we wouldn’t be able to leave the next day. And I had never wanted to leave something, anything, more in my entire life. I have always had a near compulsion about being the last one anywhere. My friends call it my “fear of being left behind”. When it’s time to go, I’ve usually left an hour before. I guess what it really is, is that I don’t like endings. I don’t like knowing it’s all over but I still have to sit in it, surrounded by what I’m about to leave. The last moments of anything for me are cloying, claustrophobic. I just want to get out. But getting out of where I was when I woke up the next morning meant sitting in agony for 70 hours, and facing the man I’ve been married to for almost twenty years who had become a stranger to me. I was split open. I finally got myself up to sitting and used my hands and the wall next to my bed to pull myself up to standing. Well, not really standing, but my feet were on the floor. And I could tell already it was one of those Maine days that make you want to stay inside. Cold and muggy at the same time. I could smell the mildew coming up through the floor from the dirt basement. It was drizzling. The floor was sticky with damp, and I wanted to put socks on, but that task wouldn’t be possible for me for at least a few weeks and that pissed me off all over again. I limped into the bathroom, got to the toilet, used my arms to brace myself on the sink next to me, and fell onto the tacky seat. The tank was sweating. There was condensed water all over the wood floor under the toilet and I could see the black mildew growing. I thought about how much I wanted to spray it with Clorox and knew that was a pipe dream. And as much as I’d hoped I’d wake up on that Wednesday morning feeling better and ready to leave, I knew now that we weren’t going anywhere. We had no food in the house, but I couldn’t drive to get any. The girls came downstairs and I could see their disappointment when they saw me bent over the kitchen counter, holding myself up with my arms. I dragged myself into the living room to turn the Wi-Fi back on and plug the television back in.

“So we’re not leaving today?” Jane asked.

“Honey, I can’t move at all,” I answered.

And I had a surge of self-pity that they couldn’t see just how much pain I was in. I needed to be taken care of. And I had so much taking-care-of to do. I just wanted someone to bring me coffee and pills and let me sleep for a few days. About mid-day, it was so unbearably depressing in the dark, damp little house, that I decided to take the girls to Jordan Pond House. It’s a big tourist trap of a restaurant in the middle of Acadia National Park, about 15 minutes away. They serve popovers and jam, and you can sit outside at picnic tables and look at the Bubble Mountains. I made up my mind that we weren’t going to spend this last day trapped in the house, and we hadn’t made it to Jordan Pond House that summer, so I figured we might as well make a go of it. Jordan Pond House was a fucking disaster. They had changed owners that summer, and the popovers weren’t the same. The rain forced us to sit inside, and our food took forty-five minutes. Our waiter was a dick. My twenty-three-dollar bowl of lobster bisque was just a bowl of butter soup. By the time the ice cream came, our dirty lunch dishes still on the table, it had melted into a puddle. I called the manager over, he was an asshole, we didn’t get a discount, and we left. Even Jordan Pond House was over. It was all over. And so, recognizing that I could actually sit in a driver’s seat without passing out from pain, I made the decision to leave the next morning. My father-in-law came over to load the suitcase in the roof rack. We packed smaller bags to get us from motel to motel during the drive. I turned off the wifi, unplugged the TV, and texted Graham.

“I’m just going to power thru it and try to leave tomorrow. Jane will come with us,” I wrote.

His reply, about fifteen minutes later was simply this:

“God speed!”

God speed. I stared at those two words and their jolly little exclamation point until they got blurry. They felt as grossly inappropriate and misplaced as hearing “Good Luck!” on my way into the gas chamber. Those two words, as written by my husband, became my mantra of cynicism, my expression of fear, my acknowledgment of the power of denial. Those words together will always humble me. The next morning, Thursday, armed with my back girdle, my heating pad, my bottle of Advil, and the litter box, we locked up the house, got in the car, and never looked back. I would have to go through old credit card statements to try to piece together exactly where we stopped on our journey back home. I know we drove through upstate New York. And Indiana. I think. All I know is that we passed through eleven states in five days with two kids, a dog and a cat. Here’s the thing about driving across the country in August with two kids, a dog, a cat, and a ruptured disk. It sucks. It sucks partly because you can’t take the drugs you’d normally take to numb the mind-numbing pain that courses through your legs and back. And you can’t take said drugs because you’re driving across the country with two kids, a dog, and a cat. It also sucks because neither the two kids, nor the dog or cat can help with said driving. It also sucks when you’re in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and you realize that they don’t sell booze in regular stores, so you end up having to drive two miles from your Drury Inn Motel and Suites, to a Christian-regulated state liquor store/crack house that has exactly eleven bottles of wine for sale, the nicest of which is a Turning Leaf Chardonnay, and you buy it anyway, AND a corkscrew, because that’s how desperate you are to shut down any feeling of anything at all. It also sucks when you go to leave in the morning, hungover from the Turning Leaf, and your daughter lets the dog get out into the carpeted hallway of the Drury Inn Motel and Suites where the dog promptly unloads as much urine as I unloaded into the bed-pan, and about three pounds of steaming shit. And you have to hurry up and pick up the shit, and the litter box, and the bags, and the dog and the cat and the kids’ bags and your bag and get the hell out of there before the Drury Inn Motel and Suites realizes your dog has shit and pissed all over the carpet. And you can’t move fast enough because you are stooped over like a 95-year-old man while the dog, a pit-bull, pulls you as hard as she can, and with every pull, your legs feel like they’re going to disconnect from your torso. And then, after you’ve reorganized the car for the fourth morning in a row, and cleaned out the litter box, and dumped fifty pieces of nicotine gum and their wrappers, you get back in the car, and you get ready for another thirteen hours which, with any luck, will get you most of the way through New Mexico. The only time I heard from Graham the entire five days of driving was in a group text with his friends about the New England Patriots in which I was included. Because, as anyone who knows me knows, I ALWAYS want the latest updates and stats on NFL football? The rage I felt, primarily in my lower back, as it turned out, grew by the day. His entire family was limping its way across the country and he never thought to ask how it was going. He did, however, share a lot of concern about Tom Brady and whether they were going to pull this one out. On Sunday at 5:08pm, I texted him a simple message,

“We’ll be home tmrw.”

His response: “Yay! How is that even possible? I’m impressed.”

He was impressed. Fantastic. As Jane scanned her phone to find our fifth and final pet-friendly motel somewhere near Flagstaff, we saw a sign for Sedona. We were broke, broken, and exhausted, and I just couldn’t stay in another motel, carry another bag, pick up another pile of dog shit. So we drove an hour out of our way down the slow and winding road to Sedona. We stayed in a beautiful place. It rained. There was a great singer at the bar. The girls swam in the infinity pool as the sun went down. As I fell into my beautiful bed that night, I knew what was coming. I knew it, and that was all there was. I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t turn back, I had to drive straight into it. I needed that night’s sleep as much as I had ever needed anything in my life. And I got it. We woke up in the morning and got back in the car for our final eight-hour drive home. At some point on that last day, a Monday, Graham wanted the girls to let him have access to our navigation app so he could see how close we were to home. Of course he did. I told them not to. They didn’t. A few hours later, Jane said from the back seat,

“Dad wants to know what time we’ll be home.”

I bet he did. But what I really wanted to do was surprise him. Not a happy surprise, but a Pearl Harbor surprise. So I kept our estimated time of arrival to myself. As I should have guessed, when we finally fell in the door, my slow and hobbled sneak-attack successful, Graham, who had been so interested in our route and our estimated time of arrival, was not home. He was apparently caught up at work, doing work things, working. We had driven 3,417 miles in five days. Meaning I had driven 3,417 miles in five days. The pain was so a part of me, it had become almost a comfort, a reminder that I was still alive. But I could hear the death rattle of my life as I’d known it. It nipped at my heels. It was seeping into me, like the tide into the sand. I left my bags in and on top of the car, went inside, opened the fridge, and poured a giant glass of chardonnay. And so the end began.