I turn 40 this week. It feels both precious and innocuous. A strange combination, but somewhat comfortable. A cocktail of emotions that settles just right on the palate.

These days, I like who I am.

This hasn’t always been the case. I spent the vast majority of my teens and twenties anxious and angling for acceptance and approval. While it took longer than I’d like, that spine my mom’s OB definitely saw on the ultrasound did, eventually, become a backbone.

And a damn strong one at that.

I’ve found causes I care about and leaned into my community in ways I wish I’d known to sooner. I’ve navigated chronic illness, generalized anxiety, major depression, postpartum depression (anyone who thought I was nuts was right!). I’ve lost people and found people. I’ve made some very good decisions and some more questionable ones. I’ve built a lot of things along the way—a career, a home, a body of work—but nothing I’m more proud of than my family.

We’ve got a good thing going, the four of us. It’s very much my “days are long, years are short” era. I know my daughter is too young to remember this milestone in her mother’s life; my son is only slightly more aware.

When my mom turned 40, I was eight. I chose an Over the Hill balloon for her. I thought she was OLD old.

While I’m glad society has eroded some of that framing, there’s something bittersweet about realizing my children won’t remember me at this age the way I remember her. By the time they’re old enough to really know me—to know me as a person, not just as Mom—I’ll be older still.

If I’m lucky, 40 is the halfway point for me. I’ve come to think of aging as a privilege, though—perhaps because my dad is forever 46. I think that’s part of what makes 40 feel precious.

I told myself I’d start writing again this year—for me—not for stakeholders and shareholders and customers and colleagues. That’s perhaps the greatest gift I’ve given myself in all four decades.

I plan to do more of that. Things for me, that is. Capacity is tight due to the full-court press of parenting small children, but I’d like to chip away at the weight of performing and producing for other people.

I don’t mean I’m entering my selfish era. I have two small children; I can barely enter the bathroom alone. I mean just settling into the me of it all.

A mentor once told me that our children don’t come from us, they come through us. They are fully formed, lovely individuals.

I’m trying to extend some of that same grace to myself.

As I make space for the uniqueness of my babies’ needs and interests—for the weird little people they already are—I’m learning to make a little more space for my own. To assume there are things I like simply because I like them. Things I want to do because I want to do them. Parts of myself that don’t need to be improved or monetized or made useful to anyone else.

Maybe this is the reparenting thing therapists are always preaching about.

If so, fine. I’m apparently finally old enough to listen.

Photographic evidence exists to suggest this wasn’t always the case, but these days, she’s part of the Talbots, J. Jill, Chico’s trifecta sported by women of a certain age. Punctuated by thrift scores and big-box finds, she’s got her style cornered.

Even if it wasn’t always the case, I know her to be a woman who prioritizes function far above fashion. Who likes feminine, but not too feminine (she’s never met a ruffle she didn’t hate).

As a teen, I didn’t realize any of this. I thought she had the time, interest, and income to keep up with trends and was willfully choosing otherwise. A mother myself, I now understand the absurdity of believing she had all three.

Back then, I dragged her for her monochrome sweatsuits, owned in both the concord grape AND banana yellow colorways. We called these her Grape Suit and her Banana Suit, respectively. Cinched ankles, crew necks—the purple was giving Veruca Salt; the yellow, a stick of butter. She definitely bought these at Costco while stocking up on toilet paper and frozen chicken.

It’s evident to me now that this was expert-level time management on her part. When the hell else was she going to shop for herself? My own wardrobe these days consists of things I heave into the cart on a Target run.

In those days, she rolled her eyes at the height of my heels and my silky-smooth shaved legs—all the way up the thigh! She’d long since abandoned both pursuits. At the time, I couldn’t fathom why. I’d be in four-inch heels until I was 80, smooth-shaved from toes to tailbone.

I must confess, neither of those things is currently true unless there’s an occasion that demands it. I’m wearing orthotic sandals and have shaved my legs precisely twice this summer: once for a friend’s wedding in May, and again for another friend’s wedding in July. Safe to say my husband feels secure that I’m not leaving him for anyone else.

On the eve of 40, I’m softer around every square inch of my body than I’ve ever been. My triceps ripple like a Shibumi Shade in a stiff breeze with every friendly hello from my porch. And I don’t mind one bit.

I did, however, mind that my mom’s triceps weren’t taut. Lying against her amid some innocuous conversation in my early teens, I batted at the soft skin beneath her arm and asked why her arms looked like bread dough.

I thought that insult was comedy gold. I was an asshole. In hindsight, she would’ve been squarely in the right to haul off and hit me. Instead, she told me I’d understand one day before shifting my weight off of her body and ending the conversation in favor of better company—likely the dog or the dishes.

Nothing escaped my judgment. Not even sun protection. Our summers were spent poolside, with the annual family beach trip bookending the season. If the sun was out, my mom’s hat was on. Could be the fuchsia one. Could be the navy one.

We called them her Idiot Hats. The implication here being that she looked absurd in this wide-brimmed take on a baseball cap, complete with a bow in the back. We teased her mercilessly.

What I wouldn’t give for that level of no-fuss SPF coverage these days. I’ve devoted more than a dozen Google searches to finding one for myself. But alas, now that I understand their value, the Idiot Hat has become my white whale. We’ve millennial-grayed the sun hat market. Neutral straw abounds. A fuchsia bow? Apparently a bridge too far.

Here I am, four decades into this life, finally beginning to understand my mom. Or at least her fashion priorities. I’ve still got questions. I think that’s healthy.

The things I once saw, at best, as apathy and, at worst, as willful rebellion against the expectations of womanhood—expectations I was, at the time, a STRONG proponent of—I now recognize for what they were: a mother doing her very damn best.

I’m figuring out what that looks like for me, too. Amid doctors’ appointments and diagnoses, deadlines and changing org structures, grocery runs and laundry piles, I’ve found there’s so much less time for “me” when there’s “we.”

I’m certain my own kids will have commentary on my choices. I can only hope they're a little more merciful than I was.

I hope they see that their mother in her monochrome sweats, bold hat, soft arms wrapped around them, feet comfortably supported, leg hair long enough to braid, is beautiful. I hope they understand that the things they might someday tease me for aren't evidence that I've stopped caring. That I’m cool as shit even when I don’t know what Aritzia sells or why my ankle socks are offensive.

And if they don't? That's okay. They will someday.

As I’ve started writing and sharing, a few have stopped me to tell me they’ve been enjoying the essays. That lights me up.

A few have also told me they’re sorry for everything I’ve been through.

That part is harder to hear. It’s not that the sentiment isn’t kind—it is. It’s just that sympathy has never been the point.

I don’t write to prove anything. I don’t write to invite pity. I write because the words are already there. They bounce around my head until they make their way down my arms, into my fingers, onto the keyboard, and eventually onto the page.

It’s less a decision than a compulsion.

For years, I’ve been quietly stockpiling language. Tucking away observations, oddities, and little scraps of perspective that only seem to make sense with enough distance. Experiences have a funny way of fermenting. Given enough time, even the hard ones can become stories.

That’s all I’m really trying to make.

Lately, I’ve been trying to think of what I’m doing as art. It helps me sidestep the particular ickiness of feeling like I’m oversharing.

Truthfully, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch. Maybe it’s no stretch at all.

I admire the watercolor paintings a high school acquaintance quietly shares online. She paints dead pets and new houses with the same tenderness. I'm in awe of a friend's quilting—the way scraps of fabric and simple shapes become recognizable images. I'm captivated by a best friend from college's photography. I can almost smell the lemons in the bowl on the counter and feel the chill of the lake as my toes graze the water.

It’s easy to recognize those things as art because we can see them.

Writing is trickier. It looks less like making and more like revealing. There’s so much more that’s glaringly personal about it. At least in the writing I do. Sure, in the abstract of poetry, and creativity of fiction, it’s more easily disguised in metaphors and pseudonyms. My writing lays it bare.

I invite you to see my work through that lens, though. That I'm an artist, and the written word is my medium.

I named my anxiety Doug.

Diagnosed at 19, but for sure anxious since birth, I needed a way to challenge my thought patterns a little more effectively.

The idea, courtesy of my therapist at the time, was that if I could attribute all those worries, fears, and worst-case scenarios to someone besides myself, I could poke holes in them a little easier. “Doug” became the scapegoat. The guy I could argue with, roll my eyes at, and laugh off with a clarity I couldn’t seem to muster when those thoughts belonged to me.

Anyway... how did I choose Doug?

Super easy.

I had a terrible boss named Doug.

This guy got under my skin like a splinter. Festering. Miserable. Thirty years or so older than me, and probably a million dollars richer, we had very little in common save our employer.

My job was a halfsie situation. Half comms and graphics for the team I was on, half Doug’s assistant. It wasn't long before that split became less clear, and I was spending a lot more time helping Doug with flights, expense reports, email replies, and lunch orders than I was doing the kind of work I loved.

These were all things Doug could do himself, but the hierarchy was hierarching—and before any executive assistants come for me: I know that’s a real job. A hard job. A necessary job. I was happy to do those things alongside writing, designing, editing, and creating.

The problem wasn’t the work. It was the ratio.

I was 23. Living in Washington, DC. Frontal lobe still loading. We were still crawling out of the Great Recession, and the prevailing wisdom for anyone my age was simple: be grateful you have a job.

I was. It still sucked.

Let’s get back to Doug, though, shall we? He had a habit of leaning over my shoulder. Peering at my work. Didn’t care for that.

Sure, I’d be happy to let you glance at what I was doing. Just let me close out GChat first. (Remember GChat?)

He also fancied himself an authority on my eating habits.

Salad for lunch?

“Trying to lose weight?”

Bacon, egg, and cheese after a night out?

“Kinda heavy, no?”

Looking back, Doug had been auditioning for the part of inner critic long before I cast him—his résumé was extensive.

He shared candidly about his sexual escapades, seemingly oblivious to—or unconcerned by—the fact that he was talking to a woman young enough to be his daughter. And that we were in the workplace. I’ve heard this called a walking HR violation.

He also had a set of rules for me, and a set of rules for other team members. They left the office for networking events and site visits, eagerly inviting me along with the intent to add context to my role and build my skills. But I belonged to Doug. So I stayed parked squarely at my desk.

There was reassurance in those colleagues, though. They experienced the same uncomfortable criticism, the same lack of trust, the same leering from Doug.

They just weren’t tethered to him all day. Their pity was palpable. Which kind of made it all worse.

I lasted in the role about two years. Classic millennial. When I handed Doug my resignation letter, he admitted he'd been preparing to fire me. It seems we’d both decided the relationship had run its course.

Being on the precipice of dismissal does something to a 23-year-old who thought she was doing a good job. Deliverables on time. Expenses filed. Ideas floated.

All Doug had to say on the matter was, “You don’t seem happy here.” I suppose that part was true. Years later, I learned my experience hadn't been unique.

In the wake of it all, actual Doug faded into the background. Inner critic Doug, on the other hand, was just getting started.

He was useful.

On days when I doubted my ability, questioned my weight, wondered my worth—you know, an average Tuesday—I had a simple response:

Shut up, Doug.

I wish I could’ve uttered those words safely while under his employ. Challenging the hypothetical version felt almost as satisfying.

Of all the coping mechanisms I’d accumulated over the years, Doug got the most mileage. My best friend adopted the same approach, naming her nagging anxiety after her own mediocre micromanager.

Eventually, about a decade in, my need for Doug receded. I wouldn’t say I conquered my anxiety. I certainly understood it better. A few years of trauma-informed therapy in your mid-thirties is a gift. I got married, moved away, worked for much better bosses, and became a mom.

Little did I know, Doug was primed for a comeback.

I was sitting front row the other night at a private concert my husband’s company was hosting at the amphitheater on the riverfront. Sounds idyllic, no? One of our favorite bands was playing, no less.

The evening was a celebration of the opening of the company’s brand-new campus—a gleaming Class A behemoth with every amenity you could imagine. Restaurants. Fitness center. Merch Store. River views. The kind of place designed to make you think, Yeah, I’d come into the office for this.

Before the concert, the CEO took the stage to thank everyone who’d made the project possible. Developers. Executives. Contractors.

Top of that list? Doug. My Doug. Fifteen years later and several exits down I-95, the CEO thanked him by name.

My breath caught as I explained to my husband that this Doug was that Doug. “Do you want to leave?” he asked sympathetically. “No,” I laughed.

I turned toward the applause, and there he was.

Same hunched posture. Same tan that could only be acquired somewhere requiring a passport. Somehow...smaller.

Could've been the years. Could've been the distance. Could've been the fact that the power he'd once held over me had quietly expired.

At 23, I probably would’ve been outraged that someone like Doug could end up here. At 40, I know better than to assume professional success is a referendum on kindness.

Now I’m a boss. Certainly not the same tax-bracket as Doug, but with people who report to me and rely on me for direction and coaching.

I will never let my team wonder whether I think they’re capable. They’ll never brace themselves before asking for help or worry that a passing comment about lunch is really about their body. Because I remember exactly what it felt like to work for someone who made me question myself.

Besides, I’d rather nobody name their anxiety after me.

That was us, only in a Volvo, with a ferocious tabby in tow and one child already earthside.

Lucky for us, there was room at the inn.

Specifically, the Residence Inn.

Where luck wasn’t on our side? Nary a wise man in sight. (You’ll recall the contractors…)

So there we were, occupying a room with two double beds—which, in fairness, is about the only acceptable sleeping arrangement when you're seven months pregnant.

As for Wes? He was sleeping in the hastily procured travel crib, complete with a SlumberPod stretched over the top.

We put it front and center in the living room. Options were limited, so we called this "making the most."

Now it wasn’t all doom and gloom at ye olde Res Inn. There was, after all, the continental breakfast—the inconsistency of which cannot be overstated.

In theory, it’s convenient to have a smorgasbord of breakfast options when you’ve got a picky toddler.

Also, you know, when you’re heavily pregnant.

In practice, it’s less so when your child’s dining habits are on full display for a room full of middle-aged men on work travel.

Those dudes were remarkably unfriendly.

And universally dressed in branded polos.

They were not interested in letting Wes press the elevator button, and even less accommodating of his need to inspect every Otis Spunkmeyer muffin.

I understand, I wasn’t either.

They'd probably left their wives and kids at home in pursuit of a few uninterrupted nights of sleep and a hotel breakfast they didn't have to share with anyone under three feet tall. A worthwhile trade-off for another day spent convincing someone to buy something profoundly uninteresting.

Instead, they got us.

A toddler loudly negotiating the merits of blueberry versus chocolate chip muffins. A pregnant woman openly weeping because the apple juice dispenser had run dry. A man pretending not to know them (I see you, Mark).

We were, in every sense, not the dining companions they had in mind.

Some days we'd skip breakfast downstairs and take the circus back to the room. But only when we felt emboldened enough to battle the pair of 60-inch TVs mounted to the walls, silently inviting Wesley to make increasingly unreasonable demands for screen time.

“More Dinosaur Train!”

Ever heard the theme song to that show? Catchy. Absurd. And burned into my brain that summer.

If we weren’t negotiating screen time, it was pool time. The only other amenity available was “parking lot time,” and believe me when I say the thought crossed our minds.

Yes, this Residence Inn boasted a pool of its own. Indoors and unheated for our collective discomfort. You'd find us there often, Wes being an enthusiastic Labrador in every sense of the word. The child has never met a body of water he didn't immediately trust with his whole heart.

Thus, our branded-polo brethren frequently found themselves sharing elevators with a half-clad family that had, by then, completely abandoned dignity.

Meanwhile, laundry day became a family excursion to the hotel's coin-operated laundry room, where the privilege of washing two loads cost sixteen dollars.

It turns out nearly every mundane task of family life assumes the existence of...well...a home.

A door you can throw open. A yard. A second bathroom. A place to put the litter box that isn’t also where you brush your teeth.

Back upstairs, we were sharing the only bathroom with the cat. A travel arrangement never intended to stretch into a month-long stay.

Now, on the topic of said cat...

He’s not nice.

Affectionate with us. Indifferent to Wes. Actively hostile toward everyone else.

One of the only silver linings our family and friends kept pointing out was housekeeping. A benefit nearly off the table thanks to his lack of hospitality.

This feels navigable for, say, a week. Tops. A month? You’re going to want your sheets changed.

Accomplishing that required requesting housekeeping during a very specific window, removing the cat from the premises, and hoping our request actually lined up with the staff’s schedule.

More than once, I found myself driving around aimlessly with an irate orange cat in the passenger seat while dialing into conference calls.

Then there were the parenting milestones.

Because, naturally, life doesn’t pause while your house is under construction.

We’d also reached potty-training season, which made wiping down every surface in our hotel room less of a preference and more of a necessity.

W’s class had collectively chosen the second week of August to make the leap to underwear. The theory was that a classroom-wide migration would harness the awesome power of toddler peer pressure, easing the burden on their teachers.

And for us, it did. We opted for the “three-day method,” which feels more doable from one’s primary abode. Not so much when you’re holed up like hostages in 300 square feet, trying to convince your kid to pee on sprinkles.

A break in the backyard? Not for us. We let him run up and down the hall, the furthest distance we could muster to ensure a swift return to the room should nature call.

In retrospect, the branded-polo bros may have been justified in scowling over their watery scrambled eggs. Belated apologies, gentlemen.

Both Mark’s birthday and mine fell during our stay. Lighting candles is very much prohibited on Marriott properties, but we took the risk. Seated at the kitchenette, three feet from Wes’s crib, we each welcomed another year.

I’m used to feeling refreshed when I check out of a hotel. This time, when we finally turned over our key cards—hurried along by the expiration of our insurance allowance—I felt anything but.

I do, however, think I saw the front desk attendants high-five as we schlepped out the door for the last time.

There was a summer we lived in a hotel for a month. Not the glamorous, all-inclusive kind. And certainly not the sort of leisurely August our European friends seem to have mastered.

Nope.

This was a seven-months-pregnant, two-and-a-half-year-old-in-tow, cat-in-a-carrier, off-the-highway Residence Inn kind of summer.

I cannot recommend the experience—or really, the inconvenience—of it all.

This wasn’t a choice we made. It wasn’t an idea sparked after bedtime, one of those “What if we...?” conversations that somehow snowballs into a family adventure.

This one was assigned to us.

By whom, you might ask?

Mmm...fate. Or more precisely, a lackluster insurance adjuster, a water remediation “expert,” and a contractor operating on a timeline known only to God. A trifecta, if you will.

It’s the week of Fourth of July 2024. My son’s daycare is closed for the week, and we’re attempting a stay in a little river town with friends from down the street.

The logistics alone were enough. Three kids under six, one heavily pregnant lady (it me), and the heat and humidity of an East Coast July.

We considered that plenty.

Then our travel companions’ kiddos came down with some miserable respiratory virus and packed up to head home early.

We figured that was the plot twist.

The rental settled into a quieter rhythm.

That’s when my husband Mark choked on a pita chip.

I had to perform the Heimlich, throwing my fists into his sternum while trying to balance my own center of gravity somewhere around my knees.

I’m not kidding when I say I genuinely thought: This is it. A pita chip.

From the other room came the only voice unaffected by the unfolding emergency.

“Daddy, shhhhh! I can’t hear the TV.”

In those two minutes, I’d already imagined the rescue squad clamoring up three flights of stairs to the rental. I’d pictured myself a grieving widow with an irrational grudge against Big Pita.

Thankfully, he recovered.

We made it home sunburnt, exhausted, and ready for the rhythm of a regular week.

Ha.

We were so cute.

You see, while we were dodging jellyfish, respiratory viruses, and death by pita chip, our house had sprung a leak.

Inside, a lightly saturated floor in the powder room greeted us. Outside, a streak of green algae creeping down the exterior wall assured us the problem wasn’t contained.

We called a plumber. As one does.

They were only marginally more helpful than ChatGPT.

“Yep. Something’s leaking.”

“Where?”

“No idea.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Not until someone opens up the wall.”

He, apparently, was not someone.

Neither was the next guy.

They had theories. Oh, did they have theories. But precious little in the way of action beyond, “You need to get a water remediation company in here.”

So we did.

And they were game.

Within minutes they were waving moisture meters around like ghost hunters on cable television.

“There’s water in the basement, too.”

“The basement?”

“Yep.”

“From the same leak?”

“Looks that way.”

“Where’s it coming from?”

They had no idea.

One thing, however, was clear: there was plenty of water to clean up while we figured out where it was coming from.

During this season, our son was on a heavy chicken nugget rotation. (Still is.) Which meant our Ninja air fryer was also in heavy rotation. (Also still is.)

I became convinced that little countertop appliance was generating so much heat it was buckling the hideous brown tile backsplash in our kitchen.

How is this related?

It wasn’t.

That wasn’t heat.

A few days later, our enthusiastic water remediation team finally found the source.

Our sewer stack had cracked.

A hundred-year-old cast iron pipe had been quietly dumping sewage into the walls of our house—soaking the plaster behind our kitchen, trickling into the powder room, draining into the basement, and making a leisurely escape down the exterior wall.

Turns out the backsplash wasn’t buckling.

The wall was melting.

With every flush from the upstairs bathroom, another little waterfall of wastewater poured out of the broken pipe.

Sweet.

Lucky for us, those water remediation guys were ready with sledgehammers, positively giddy to crack into our walls.

Before they got started, though, they gave us the standard rundown.

Old houses, they explained, have a knack for hiding lead and asbestos. Ours was a spritely ninety-seven years old.

They swabbed.

And wouldn’t you know it?

Everything came back negative.

We were thrilled.

Mostly because it wasn’t true.

Turns out they’d forgotten to run the lead test.

They realized that shortly after they’d already introduced our kitchen wall to a sledgehammer.

Without containment.

Because why stop the parade now?

By the time they realized their mistake, the damage was already done.

They’d broken into lead-contaminated walls. Hauled dust-covered cabinets across the first floor. Tracked debris from room to room before anyone thought to contain it.

Normally, that would’ve been unsettling enough.

Except we had a two-and-a-half-year-old with an oral sensory disorder. Everything passed through his hands eventually found its way to his mouth—licked, chewed, or enthusiastically tested with his teeth.

And I was busy growing another kid.

Which meant our home suddenly had two high-risk occupants in what we’d just learned was a lead-contaminated construction zone.

We were pissed.

Like PISSED pissed.

Throughout all of it, we left message after message for our insurance adjuster, hoping for an ounce of empathy, direction, or accountability.

After all, he was the one who’d recommended the provider.

We never heard from him.

Instead, we were reassigned to another adjuster. Apparently there is a threshold of voicemail intensity at which an insurance company simply decides, “Let’s give this one to Steve.”

My husband found that threshold.

“I’m going to find you.”

I’m almost positive those were his exact words. More than once.

Anyway, there we were: fighting for visibility with the folks over at USAA and accountability from their friends at Spartan Water Remediation.

(Man...this would’ve made one hell of a Better Business Bureau review.)

Then, an independent lead testing company showed up at our front door.

At this point, you’re probably wondering if we should’ve called a lawyer. Fear not, we called in a favor with my brother. He’s a fancypants lawyer with a Land Rover and a Labradoodle, which I assume is how that profession keeps score.

Alas, the remediation company agreed to leave without payment—but also without accountability.

I think that’s what they call a win-lose.

Anyway, our new adjuster agreed it probably wasn’t a good idea for us to keep living in the lead-and-sewage pit that had become our home.

They’d cover us for a month at a hotel.

So that’s where I’ll leave you.

On the threshold of a month that would somehow become its own story.

Mark wishing the pita chip had been more committed.

Wes about to tackle potty training in a hotel room.

Me wondering whether “Marriott” worked as a girl’s name.

The cat, ready to fight a housekeeper on sight.

And all of us blissfully unaware that the hardest part hadn’t happened yet.

Not to scapegoat the guy, but I have a sneaking suspicion Wesley’s diagnosis held up a mirror to decades of my own unfinished business.

The forgotten errands. The abandoned hobbies. The ideas that always outnumbered the follow-through.

I’d spent years avoiding that reflection.

When W’s diagnosis forced a glance, though, I finally let myself look closer.

Something about seeing my own face on that little blond boy navigating the same friction I’d spent years blaming myself for made self-compassion come easier.

Then, in short succession, the demands of modern work increased the magnification.

What I’d only just begun to see with kindness was suddenly illuminated like a stray chin hair in my mom’s 10x makeup mirror.

Let me be clear: there wasn’t any shame in looking away. I don’t think neurodivergence is a fad. Or an excuse. Or something you can strongarm your way through with enough discipline.

While I wasn’t volunteering that part of my story, I never doubted that ADHD deserved some credit for my favorite parts of myself.

The curiosity. The creativity. The instinct to make connections other people don’t see. The knack for finding the story hiding inside the noise.

For the better part of two decades, Adderall was a familiar companion. From the ages of fifteen to thirty, it was simply part of my life. I’d go off it here and there to “give my brain a break”—and then we’d pick back up, pals as though no time had passed. I stopped altogether before we started our family.

And truthfully?

I did pretty well with that cold-turkey farewell.

I built a career. I received awards. I became known as someone who could untangle complicated ideas and turn them into stories people understood.

I gravitated toward work that rewarded the very parts of my brain that ADHD supercharged: turning complexity into clarity, weaving together ideas that looked unrelated, and helping other people see the picture I already had in my head.

None of that was ever the problem. Medicated or not, those skills were the throughline.

It was the scaffolding around them—the spreadsheets, the task trackers, the timelines—that demanded the parts of my brain I’d spent years quietly compensating for.

Over time, I’d shored the whole thing up with workarounds, intuition, and sheer determination. It held for a surprisingly long time. Then the demands of my role gave it a good, hard shake.

And that’s how I found myself here.

In the drive-thru lane at CVS, handing over my ID and signing for a controlled substance.

There’s a version of this story where understanding fills the gap that shake exposed.

This isn’t that version.

So I filled the prescription instead.

Curb appeal is down for my cozy century-old Dutch Colonial.

The plastic kiddo crap and pool towels strewn on my porch make my skin crawl as I unload groceries or herd kids in and out of the car.

Not because I’m opposed to the magic of Little Tikes and Step2. Quite the opposite.

I’m just worried my neighbors are.

It looks like we run an underground daycare. (Which, to be fair, we did for two months. A tale for another time.)

The hydrangeas are limp. The garden border we bought a year and a half ago still sits partially installed at the edge of the lawn. The paint on the stairs is surrendering in in curls and scraps.

We cut down a tree we probably shouldn’t have. It was growing over the gas line, so now we’ve got a stump. Grinding wasn’t an option. (Same went for the bedroom before my hysterectomy.)

A patch of bare dirt surrounds it.

Aesthetic it is not.

This has been festering like a mid-June mosquito bite.

“Get it together,” says the little voice in my head.

“What’s wrong with you?” it asks.

Yesterday I had a breakthrough.

“Nothing.”

Nothing is wrong with me.

I don’t have an ugly yard because I suddenly became lazy.

I have an ugly yard because I’ve run out of wonder.

Not care.

Wonder.

Those aren’t the same thing.

I used to spend Saturday mornings wandering estate sales.

Saturday afternoons elbow-deep in a craft project I’d inevitably abandon halfway through.

I’d spend an hour researching something that didn’t matter simply because I wanted to know more.

I had room in my life for hobbies with no return on investment.

None of that was productive.

That’s precisely the point.

We tend to measure burnout by what people stop producing.

I’d argue we should measure it by what they stop wondering about.

Wonder, that glorious escape, requires cognitive surplus.

And cognitive surplus has become one of the rarest resources in my house.

Now my Saturdays look different.

They begin by helping one child whose brain never seems to stop moving navigate a world that asks him to slow down.

They continue by convincing my toddler that a ponytail is the right move for her mop top.

They involve redirecting impulses, narrating feelings, negotiating snacks, cleaning spills, preventing catastrophes, and reminding myself—for the fifteenth time—that none of this is anyone’s fault.

There’s wonder here, too.

It no longer wanders.

It watches.

It’s wonder in service of someone else.

The wonder has become work.

By the time the house is finally quiet enough to notice the hydrangeas...I’ve got nothing left to notice them with.

So they, along with the weeds, can wait.

The stump isn’t going anywhere.

And if we manage to finish the unfurling of the garden border, wonderful.

If not...come on over anyway.

Join the mess.

Just watch out for the Cozy Coupe on your way in.

I’m the youngest of three children. Six if you count stepsiblings, but that’s a different story.

My brother is 821 days older than me. My sister is 826 days older than him.

I love the specificity of it. The symmetry. The suggestion that someone, somewhere, had a plan.

Which is funny, because family lore has always maintained that I was “slightly less planned than the other two”—a story my sister delighted in sharing and my mother eventually confirmed.

Even so, there’s something comforting about those numbers. Eight hundred twenty-six days. Eight hundred twenty-one days. Close enough to make me wonder whether I was more expected than I realized.

But that’s about where the pattern ends, as both my siblings share T names, and here I am: Amy, the lone A. This has bothered me my entire life. Not enough to bring up in therapy or anything, but certainly enough to share anecdotally with strangers on the internet.

Our mom wanted to make sure we could spell our names, so she kept them all short and sweet. Four letters for my siblings, three for me. Perhaps she worried the slightly less planned child might need an extra accommodation. Jokes on her—I’m brilliant.

Her logic was that these names couldn’t really be shortened into nicknames. They were already as short as they could reasonably get. It’s hard to derive anything with staying power from a name that’s only three or four letters long.

What she couldn’t have predicted was that my short and simple name had impressive alliterative power. While not often shortened, it could certainly be paired with something that packed a punch.

Enter Angry Amy.

The moniker made its debut my junior year of high school, and I’m fairly certain a few friends from those years still have me saved in their contacts under it.

The early 2000s were a time, let’s be clear. Kindness wasn’t cool, and I wanted to be.

That is to say, I was both a perpetrator and a victim in it all. I am not without guilt in this equation.

So let’s be clear: the boys who coined Angry Amy weren’t entirely making it up.

If I had to guess, the name came from three places.

First, I was definitely a bitch.

Second, I had the resting face to support the allegation.

And third—and this is the one I understand better now—I was really fucking sad.

My dad had died four years earlier. The acute pain had settled into something quieter, but my siblings were away at college and my mom had moved us into my stepdad’s house. I was no longer in the neighborhood where I’d grown up. The people were different. The routines were different. The familiar landmarks of childhood were gone.

At the time, I didn’t connect any of those dots.

I just knew people called me Angry Amy, and I eventually stopped arguing with them.

Heck, I even leaned into it.

At some point I had “Angry Amy” printed on a swim cap.

It turns out the Virginia High School League took the branding more seriously than I did. I loaned the cap to a teammate at the state swim meet, and he was promptly disqualified because it constituted intimidation of other swimmers.

I was deeply offended.

In hindsight, the adults may have had a point.

You see, when enough people call you something, it starts to feel true. Not because you’ve evaluated the evidence and arrived at the conclusion yourself, but because names have a way of settling into the cracks of your identity.

Angry Amy.

It explained the eye rolls. The impatience. The sharp tongue. The tendency to keep people at arm’s length.

It never occurred to me to ask what those things might have been protecting.

At least not until I mentioned it as an aside in a therapy session. Ironically, the thing I’d joked wasn’t quite therapy-worthy turned out to snag my therapist like a fishing lure.

“Let’s stay with that for a minute,” she said. Or something to that effect.

And just like that, Angry Amy was no longer a punchline. She was a breadcrumb.

Did you know there are primary emotions?

I didn’t.

Did you know anger is one of them?

Therapy is wild.

Apparently anger isn’t always the thing. Sometimes it’s the messenger. Sometimes it’s the bodyguard standing in front of something far more vulnerable.

For me, that was grief.

Grieving Amy lacks the punch of Angry Amy, so I understand why that one never caught on.

Still, the rebrand has done wonders for my relationship with that teenage girl.

Especially when those emotions resurface. The quick-to-judge instincts, the perfectly pinched scowl, the biting wit—they still make appearances from time to time.

Like this weekend. Father’s Day.

Was I a little sharp with my family? There were instances. W and M (both blessed with adorably adjustable-length names) caught strays.

In between, I did something I didn’t let myself do a whole lot in my Angry Amy days: cry.

What a relief.

These days, I’m raising two kids of my own. They’re inconsistently spaced. Their names practically beg for nicknames. W and M can be stretched and shortened and reshaped a dozen different ways depending on the day.

The symmetry is gone.

The naming convention is gone.

The illusion that any of us know what we’re doing is certainly gone.

But I hope they’ll inherit something I learned far later than I should have: that emotions don’t become less real when we make room for them. That sadness doesn’t have to dress itself up as anger to be worthy of attention.

And if they do end up with alliterative alter egos, I hope they’re rooted in something truer than pain.

Wonderful Wes.

Magnificent Miri.

Names that tell them who they are, not what they’re hiding.

That meant I was prepared for some tears and a little bit of grief with the arrival of W, though. Seemed like it would come with the territory. I had my care team in place, we were R E A D Y.

Except we weren’t.

Despite medication and talk therapy, the waves of heartbreak and fear came anyway. And when they did, they pulled me under. I couldn’t logic my way out of the bleak, bare emotions that greeted me as I crossed the threshold into motherhood. My brain had become an unreliable narrator, and I didn’t have the wherewithal to challenge the stories I was telling myself.

I remember trying to find a way to describe what it felt like to step across that doorway into motherhood. The only image that came close was the ending of Thelma & Louise.

Not the freedom. Not the rebellion. The moment the car leaves the cliff.

Instead of two middle-aged women, it was me and W, suspended in midair for a split second before gravity remembered us. Then came the plunge. We hit the desert floor below crumpled and defeated, surrounded by the wreckage of every expectation I’d carried into motherhood.

Where was the cozy? Where was the magic everyone promised lived on the other side of sleepless nights and cluster feeds? Where were the quiet moments of awe, the overwhelming love, the sense that everything had changed for the better?

Did the matrescence fairy skip my house?

Maybe so. She might’ve had our address wrong considering we unwisely moved two weeks after W was born. (Don’t get me started on the 2021 housing market, though. That’s a whole other cup of PTSD.)

I beat myself up at every possible moment, convinced it was my own flaws that were making all of this so. damn. hard. Yes, I had a postpartum depression diagnosis, but surely there was some deficiency that belonged to me alone. Some character flaw. Some missing ingredient that made motherhood seem effortless for everyone else and impossible for me.

There were fixations and frustrations that occupied far too much of my gray matter at a time so precious. Take, for example, the amount of time I spent wondering how other mothers were finding time to dry their hair for newborn photos. It is, in retrospect, concerning.

I know of course that even those smiling images captured inside freshly wallpapered nurseries are not immune to the defeat of postpartum mental illness, but it all still felt uniquely personal. That is to say, there’s definitely a spectrum here. And the spot I occupied on that path was a decidedly dark hue.

On more than one occasion I locked myself in the bathroom of our four square and scream-cried wishing someone would come make the sadness stop. No, not silent tears, but fully unhinged shrieks. Meanwhile, my husband was on the other side of the door begging me to take deep breaths as I ignored phone calls from far-flung family members telling me to hang on.

I know intimately what it feels like to lie on 100-year-old hardwood floors, cheek pressed inches from a splinter, surrendering to the delusional certainty that someone was going to take my baby away.

Who?

I still couldn’t tell you.

But there were countless moments when I knew they were already on their way.

More than once, I buried the accelerator of my Mazda and drove aimlessly through Richmond, too afraid to ask for help and too exhausted to keep carrying the weight of it all.

I didn’t want to die. I desperately wanted something to interrupt the sadness, though.

There was no culminating moment that I overcame it all. I didn’t vanquish my PPD with a few extra milligrams of Zoloft and a nap. Nor did I find a support group that talked me back from the literal and metaphorical ledges I spent so much time peering over.

Sadly, those groups tend to meet at the most inconvenient times. And sometimes, as I discovered, not at all.

Nahhh, the only reason I’m still here is that I’m stubborn.

I refused to let the voice inside my head that loudly insisted my son and husband would be better off without me win. That wasn’t easy, though.

But it’s that dead dad thing, again.

I score pretty highly on the childhood ACE chart, which is generally not the sort of leaderboard you want to top. Yet somehow, in this one specific circumstance, it helped save my life.

You see, I knew what it felt like to grow up without a parent.

I knew what it felt like to spend decades carrying around questions with no answers. To wonder who you might have been with them. To ache for ordinary moments you’ll never get back.

There was no way I was willingly handing that burden to my son. Or creating another version of it for my husband.

Of course, my own father never had a choice. Brain tumors are notoriously indifferent to the wishes of twelve-year-old girls. But his absence still hurts like a bruise. Not every day. Not with the same intensity. Press on it in the wrong place, though, and there it is.

So I kept going. Not heroically. Not gracefully. I simply continued to exist.

And little by little, day by day, I chipped away at the sadness until I'd whittled it down to something I could carry. It's still with me today, but less as a threat and more as a souvenir from a place I hope never to visit again.

I share this because the advice we offer mothers in crisis is almost always the same: get help. And while that sounds simple enough, it assumes help is accessible, available, affordable, timely, and that a person drowning has the capacity to navigate finding it.

I couldn’t.

What saved me wasn’t a support group. It wasn’t a crisis line. It wasn’t even the excellent therapists and doctors who were doing their best to help me.

It was my dad.

Or more accurately, it was the gaping hole his absence left behind.

I knew what it felt like to grow up without a parent. I knew what it felt like to spend decades missing someone who never got the chance to stay. And when postpartum depression convinced me my husband and son would be better off without me, I had one advantage:

I knew it was lying.

Less Hashtag, More Pounds

I hate a lot of things on social media, but there’s one trope that reliably makes me cringe.

Ever seen a #9monthsin9monthsout post?

If you haven’t, I’d love to trade algorithms.

On its face, this is a seemingly innocent genre of content in which a woman presents photographic evidence that pregnancy briefly happened to her and has since been politely escorted from the premises. Nary a shred of proof left on her body. Tummy taut and tits alight.

But for those of us who have spent our entire lives occupying bodies that were never mistaken for “before” pictures, these posts hit a little differently. It’s hard not to notice that the celebration isn’t motherhood, or survival, or keeping a tiny human alive. It’s that her body managed to find its way back to an acceptable size.

Flightless Bird & The (Un)Pleasant Company

Let me take you back a few decades, to when I first got the sense that my body might be public property. That it could be fodder for commentary. That it might inform people’s opinions of my worth, my health, my discipline, and all the other things we’re apparently comfortable assigning to children based on the size of their waistbands.

I was probably eight or nine years old and already an established pool rat. Every summer day was spent on deck in a black one-piece unabashedly splashing through the hours.

I wasn’t thinking about the roundness of my belly or how it protruded in ways it didn’t for some of the other girls. I wasn’t cataloging the softness of my middle or wondering whether my thighs took up too much space as my legs dangled over the lip of the pool.

I was busy.

Busy practicing underwater gymnastics. Busy dominating Sharks and Minnows. Busy collecting blue ribbons at swim meets and shaving seconds off my butterfly time. Busy being a kid whose body was doing exactly what she needed it to do.

At that age, my body was still an instrument, not an ornament. I hadn’t yet learned that other people were looking at me differently.

That bubble burst pretty quickly when my sister—four years older and infinitely cooler—casually revealed that she and her gaggle of pool friends had a nickname for me: The Penguin.

Now, while I have never conducted a formal investigation into the origins of the moniker, I’m willing to make an educated guess. Danny DeVito’s turn as Oswald Cobblepot in that summer’s blockbuster Batman Returns had recently entered the cultural zeitgeist, and the nickname was practically served up on a silver platter.

To be fair, I don’t remember being devastated. What I remember is something quieter. Confusion. The sudden realization that while I had been busy diving for rings and setting pool records with my relay team, other people had apparently been studying my body. Assessing it. Comparing it. Assigning it characters.

For the first time, it occurred to me that I might be visible in a way I hadn’t intended. And once you become aware of that, it’s hard to unknow it. Suddenly, other things came into focus.

Like why my repeated requests for outfits from American Girl’s Dress Like Your Doll collection never seemed to materialize. Every birthday. Every Christmas. Every dog-eared catalog. I wanted the matching outfits. I wanted the experience every catalog promised—that magical little-girl fantasy where you and your doll looked exactly alike. Hard to come by when you’re shopping in the work separates section of Hecht’s.

And Boy Do I!

Thirty years later, the message has gotten louder, more sophisticated, and significantly better funded.

This summer, Ozempic ads seem to follow me everywhere. They appear between LinkedIn posts—which feels especially rude somehow. They interrupt episodes of The Pitt. They show up in my social feeds, my podcasts, and every corner of the internet that previously reserved its advertising space for mattresses and meal kits.

The message is no longer subtle.

You could be smaller.

You should want to be smaller.

And boy do I.

I’d be lying if I said I haven’t considered it. The only things standing between me and a GLP-1 prescription are a healthy fear of gastroparesis, anhedonia, and the nagging suspicion that the problem has never actually been my body.

That’s the uncomfortable part, isn’t it?

After thirty years of cultural conditioning, I don’t get to pretend I’m above it. The little girl who wanted to match her Kirsten doll wanted to be smaller. The pool rat who later dreaded swimsuit season wanted to be smaller. The woman scrolling LinkedIn between meetings wants to be smaller, too.

Not because I think smaller people are better. Not because I believe my worth is measured in pounds. But because I’ve spent a lifetime absorbing the message that life might be easier if I took up less space.

Letting Myself Go

“She bounced back!” they say about the women in those #9monthsin9monthsout post.

Not about me.

No, I didn’t bounce back.

And yes, I let go.

But only so I could hold on.

Sure, my body held on to wider hips, larger breasts, a broader rib cage (no one warned me about that last one). But if we’re keeping score, it has held on to other things, too.

It held on to the sting of being called The Penguin, the ache stronger than a sunburn.

It held on to every dog-eared American Girl catalog and every message—spoken and unspoken—about the amount of space a woman should occupy.

It held on through self-doubt, self-loathing, postpartum depression, and the exhausting mental arithmetic of being a woman in a body that has never quite matched the preferred template.

And, perhaps most importantly, it held on to my children.

Inheritance

Nine months in. Nine months out. Fine. It’s not lost on me, though, that in the arms of the mother in those photos is a child. A child too young to understand that the image is being celebrated, at least in part, because her mother’s body appears unchanged.

A child who, like all of us once did, believes her body exists to carry her through the world rather than be evaluated by it.

Maybe that’s what unsettles me most about #9monthsin9monthsout. Not the photos themselves. But the possibility that the little girl in the frame will spend decades learning the same lesson I did: that her body is something to be evaluated before it is appreciated.

I hope she never does.

I hope she’s too busy swimming.

You see, I’m one of those statistics — and in good company there, unfortunately — who has experienced miscarriage. There’s no silver lining to it. It is, quite simply, the worst. I’ve never fully processed it. Then again, does anyone ever? Who has the time? Certainly not me.

I was working with a homebirth midwife at the time. A witchy woman who performed check-ups from a bedroom in her home. This woman is THE homebirth queen — delivering babies in living rooms across my city for literal decades.

Now I had no business being there. I’d delivered W from the sterile comfort of a hospital room. I’d had Lovenox shots daily throughout that pregnancy, and when baby arrived, he was swiftly whisked away to the NICU. Yet I was still captivated by the cozy experiences of my crunchier friends. I wanted to birth my babe and promptly eat pancakes in my own bed while they nursed contentedly in the crook of my arm. You see the appeal, no?

It was week 10, and I was stopping by for my second appointment. The midwife couldn’t find a heartbeat but chalked it up to less-than-sensitive equipment and the extra weight I was carrying (still carry, and then some if I’m being honest) around my midsection.

Something in me knew that wasn’t it. That, instead, the little life inside of me had ceased to exist. She kindly booked me an ultrasound the next day with a midwife at a clinic. I was supposed to be travelling out of town that weekend for my best friend’s dad’s funeral, so things already felt sufficiently grim, but they were about to get dramatically worse.

My mom drove the hour down from her house to watch W for the morning. A Wednesday. Twenty months old and incapable of sitting still, he had his belated well-child appointment that afternoon — a phrase that felt almost absurd given the state of things.

Mark and I headed to the clinic: him cautiously optimistic, me certain — and yet still strangely detached from the pain of that reality.

We were met with warmth and kindness by the midwife as she set up the ultrasound equipment. Almost immediately, she paused and confirmed our loss. On the screen was the sweet little bean I’d seen weeks earlier, lying still where they’d previously flickered animatedly across the screen. The sobs came fast and hard. From me. From Mark. Wracked is the only word to describe the violence of those tears.

We made the two mile drive home, greeted on the sidewalk by my mom and W. I stepped out of the car, face stained with sadness, and simply nodded to confirm the tragedy. It gets blurry from there. I wish I could say we crawled into bed and held each other. I wish I’d begged my mom to take Wes while we navigated this fresh loss. But I did not.

Instead, she left. “You’d just have to entertain me if I stayed,” she said. So there we were. Me, with a dead baby in my belly, and both of us with a broken heart.

In between ferrying Wes to his appointment and trying to find any modicum of joy, I let work know I’d be out. I hadn’t yet shared I was pregnant with everyone there and found myself in the awkward spot of having to reveal and revoke. I informed my leaders that I’d be out and would let them know when to expect me back. With at least a month of PTO banked, I had no fear of time away.

That Friday evening I had a D&C. In the days in between, Mark and I bought a tree to plant in our backyard atop the small box we’d chosen for what remained of our baby after the procedure. Somehow, there was comfort in the morbidity.

My other best friend (I’m thick with ’em) drove up to watch W. She brought levity. Much-needed levity.

While she fed him yogurt and took him to the playground, we waited our turn inside the clinic. An abortion clinic, to be precise. And if that bothers you, trust me when I say none of us wanted to be there.

What a surreal experience to carry my much-wanted-already-gone baby amidst mothers making the gut-wrenching decision to terminate. I rubbed the back of one such mother as she cried in the waiting room. I think we both wanted to trade places.

They took me back alone. It was quick and painless. Afterward, a kind nurse brought me my baby’s tiny hand to see. How small. How perfect. How still. Proof that they had existed. Sometimes I still see those five fingers on the back of my eyelids. Feel them pressed against my heart.

We buried our baby the next day, with W and Mark’s sister with us. Planted the tree we’d selected atop their grave and took ourselves to the playground, again, in search of joy. I felt enormously sad and also that we would be okay.

Spurred by that emotion, I made the very Millennial decision to share about our loss on social media. It was Sunday. Five days since. The outpouring of understanding was immense. The validation and acknowledgement wrapped around me like a tight hug.

And then came a message from my boss. Slid into my DMs between condolences from friends and mindless cat memes. Polite. Well-intentioned. And still somehow crossing the invisible line between acknowledging my grief and reminding me of my utility.

She told me my post was lovely (of course it was…have you read my writing?) and that my “scope and knowledge” were missed. Big shoes to fill, she’d said. It was a kind message. I know that now. But grief has a way of translating even gentle reminders of your usefulness into obligation.

And as a woman especially, it can be difficult to distinguish between being loved and being relied upon. In that moment, when I so desperately needed to live squarely in the mother part of working mother, I was pulled fiercely back to the other half.

I think about that version of myself often. The one sitting in an abortion clinic carrying a wanted baby. The one taking her toddler to the playground the day after burial because motherhood doesn’t pause for grief. The one reading a kind message from her boss and somehow translating it into responsibility anyway.

Maybe that’s the real tragedy of modern womanhood: how quickly we learn that our value lives in what we carry, organize, absorb, and produce. Even in moments where we are barely surviving, we are still searching for ways to be useful.

I wonder what it would feel like to simply fall apart without worrying who might be inconvenienced by it.

Charming. Bright. Creative. That’s W.

If you met him, you’d be instantly won over. Hang around for 45 minutes, and you just might reconsider. Not because he isn’t those things — he is, to his core. Rather, he’s that and then some.

Loud. Easily frustrated. At times avoidant. Never met a toy he didn’t want to not put away.

For friends and family not exposed to the magic of this dichotomy, it can feel like too much. Hell, for those of us living it day in and day out, it can feel like too much.

Here’s the thing, though: I never want W to even consider that he is too much.

Part of that is because my husband and I have both held that belief about ourselves. Diagnosed with ADD at 16, I’ve spent years on and off stimulants attempting to manage executive function and my ability to locate literally anything. Meanwhile, my partner in all of this…also a confirmed ADHDer with a pile of clothes on the radiator to prove it.

Neither of us had a particularly empowering experience with our diagnoses. ADHD, at least in the early 2000s, often felt less like an explanation and more like a character indictment.

You were careless. Forgetful. Lazy. Too loud. Too messy. Not living up to your potential. The diagnosis explained the behavior, but it didn’t soften the shame around it.

I remember taking the SATs and absolutely crushing the verbal section (math…a humbling experience). I got the same overall score as a guy who had spent much of my childhood making me feel vaguely defective.

He could not believe it.

His immediate explanation was that I must’ve received extra time because of my ADD.

Reader, I did not.

Fortunately for Devin, life worked out fine, though. He works at Google now while I’ve spent the last fifteen years professionally reorganizing my LinkedIn profile.

And that’s kinda how it went. My intelligence minimized, my challenges magnified.

My mom never talked with me about my ADD, never helped me understand it beyond its inconveniences. Boy was that a missed opportunity. She did, however, have strong feelings about the monthly controlled substance pickup.

I want W to understand his brain, to embrace its quirks. We use language like “race track brain” and “slow your engine.” His teacher (another neurodivergent gem) sent home books for kids with ADHD. It feels like we’re making the right strides there.

There are still plenty of places where our confidence is about as flimsy as a WaterWipe. Honestly, our empathy for his experience may be the only category where we’re consistently posting winning numbers.

Once the kids are asleep and the Magna-Tiles are put away, our conversations drift into major self-doubt territory.

Do we have the right team in place?

Is a stimulant the right move for him?

And perhaps weighing most heavily…are we helping him, or just helping the world tolerate him better?

Because for parents like us, the goal is not simply raising a child who can function within the expectations of school and society. It’s raising one who never mistakes “hard to manage” for “hard to love.”

I sure wish I’d known that about myself.