I walked into the kids room, again, and asked them why they weren’t in their beds.

“How long will it take me to fall asleep, Mama?” George asked as he let me tuck him in. “What if I can’t?”

He sometimes got anxious when he couldn’t fall asleep, which is why he preferred to listen to stories on his new Yoto player, but it was already packed for the big travel day tomorrow. Layla, meanwhile, on the other side of the room, lined up a dozen stuffed animals near her make-shift bed on the floor and whispered directives at them. Although I wanted her in bed, I preferred this to her being scared.

Many nights this summer, I walked back and forth from my room to the kids’ room to check on Layla. Sometimes, Sam and George were already asleep, and she was scared that I would fall asleep soon and she’d be the only one awake. “But guess what?” I told her on all those nights. “You’ll never be the only one awake, because who’s always awake?”

“Grandma,” Layla answered. “But how do I know she’s awake?”

“Shh, sh, listen,” I continued. “Do you hear that? That’s the TV on. Oh, and did you just hear that? The refrigerator door just opened! Grandma’s probably getting some water.”

Jan was a night owl. She stayed up until close to midnight, catching up on her reading and her shows.

When I moved back to my room, leaving the door open just in case for middle of the night visitors, the warm glow from downstairs filled the upstairs hallway, and the distant sound of a muffled television show comforted me, too. I heard the familiar dinging of the old grandfather clock. It chimed every fifteen minutes, and on the hour it bellowed a soothing, repetitive gong that echoed through the house.

During our 5-week stay in Charlotte, George had become his Grandpa’s shadow, following him around the house and asking what he was doing. They spent hours playing chess games and chess puzzles. Sometimes they played indoor soccer up in the playroom. Grandma was often downstairs doing yet another craft with Layla or playing the longest game of War. She was the kind of grandmother who, when Layla asked if they could do a craft, always said yes. I don’t know how she always had spare crafts ready to go. At night, Hank and Jan cooked us delicious dinners, sometimes serving wine. Hank shared the story of the wine and the winery and the vintage, and Sam and I sent side eye glances to each other, a potentially not-so subtle message of, “We don’t care, Hank. Just pour the wine.”

When I left, abruptly, for two weeks, and my dad died, Sam and Hank and Jan continued their days as usual. The kids had a great summer. I don’t know how long they’ll remember this summer for, but I’m pretty sure they think their grandparents are two of the greatest people in the world.

On the early morning of our departure, we stood in the driveway while it was still pitch black outside, the temperature already warm and muggy. I didn’t know how to show my immense gratitude to Jan, but without thinking, when I hugged her, I said, “Thank you so much for everything. Love you and appreciate you.” When I pulled away we made eye contact and I saw her look of shock. She didn’t say anything back.

We had never said I love you before. They said it to the kids, I think, but never to me or Sam. It just wasn’t something they did.

My dad said I love you all the time—every time we talked, like he needed to make sure we knew he loved us. He didn’t start saying it until my mid 20s, when my aunt died of cancer much too young, in her 50s. He’d been very close with his sister. After that, it was constant I love yous. It was probably weird at first, and maybe we even groaned or teased him about it, but nothing stopped him from saying it, and then it became normal.

As we pulled out of the driveway the kids waved goodbye to the Charlotte house. We would miss this place. I would especially miss that grandfather clock, and the warm glow at bedtime.

—

Until next week,

Charlie

Pop-Pop died one week before your sixth birthday. You stood with me in the receiving line at the front of the funeral home and said hello to everyone who approached with a big smile on your face. You said, “Hi, I’m George! I’m going to be six in two days.” You said this with two missing bottom front teeth.

You lost your first tooth a week earlier in Charlotte. You were there with Papa and Grandma and Grandpa. It happened at the dinner table. The tooth fairy left you ten dollars because it was your first tooth. I was in New Jersey, watching my dad die. He’d been diagnosed with ALS in February. They said he had 2-5 years. We didn’t think it would happen so fast. But one day he told Grandma Jojo he wanted her to take him to the hospital because he couldn’t breathe. Things escalated quickly. A doctor told Grandma Jojo to call family members and tell them to come. “Like, right now??” she said.

We thought he was going to die that night. I booked my flight.

Early the next morning my sister drove me to the hospital. Pop-Pop was sitting up, fully alert, talking to Mom. He was surprised to see me, and surprised that my brother had come the day before. Aunt Stephanie told him that we thought he was going to die, that the doctor had told them to call family members.

“Really?!” Dad said, in only the way that he could, like the whole thing was truly wild and incredulous and fascinating. He sat up talking to us for almost five hours. I rubbed his feet and he groaned, the way he always did when anyone gave him even the inkling of a massage. I asked him what Billy Joel album he wanted to listen to, and he picked Live at Madison Square Garden. He fell asleep as it played from my phone.

The following days blurred together. Pop-Pop was in the hospital for five nights, and then the hospice center for three before he died.

I never worried about you and Layla. You were in the best possible care with Papa and your grandparents. I felt like I was in a different realm in New Jersey, only able to be present with my mom and dad and siblings.

The three of you came the day before the funeral. I had not seen you in twelve days, the longest I’ve ever gone without my kids. You lost your second tooth on the plane to New Jersey. Like really lost it. It might still be hidden somewhere on that plane. You and Papa wrote a brief note to the tooth fairy, and that night I put a five dollar bill under your pillow as you slept on the trundle bed at Grandma Jojo’s house.

On the morning of the funeral you did not want to go. You said it would be boring. Everyone was waiting on you to leave the house. No one expected you to stand with me at the front. You and Layla were with Papa, sitting in the front row, but once you saw all the people coming, and how they were waiting in line to talk to all of us, you came right up and stood with me.

I was in the middle of the line, and once Grandma Jojo saw what you were doing she laughed. “Can we move him to the front to be the greeter?” she joked. When I saw people I knew coming down the line, I said to you, “That’s Karen, she’s an old family friend.” Then Karen reached me and before she had a chance to say anything you blurted out, “Hi Karen!” and she said that you were the most adorable thing she’d ever seen.

Papa had wanted to shield you and Layla from death and funerals but I wasn’t too concerned. My Grandma died when I was in fifth grade. I wasn’t sad at the funeral. As a matter of fact my only memory is Pop-Pop and his brother hysterically laughing. They’d been crying, and had so many tissues in their hands, and they eyed each other from across the room and must have had the same thought… so many tissues, but where are the trash cans? And they completely lost it. All us kids lost it, too. My aunt had yelled at the pair of them.

Also, Pop-Pop was cremated, so there was no scary dead body in the room. Only pictures. Hundreds of pictures. We stayed up late all week making the collage boards. I recruited my high school girlfriends to help while we sat in the living room, reminiscing and laughing and drinking wine.

Mostly I wasn’t concerned about the funeral because you and Layla weren’t close with your Pop-Pop. He sat in the corner of the living room and didn’t engage too often with you. When he did, he gave you a kiss on the lips, and you ran over to me and said, “Mama, why are Pop-Pop’s kisses wet?” I just shook my head. His kisses were always wet, for my whole life.

During the service I stood at the front of the room and told a story about Pop-Pop. It was about the time Grandma Jojo and Pop-Pop came to visit when you were an infant. Pop-Pop had gone to bed while Papa, Grandma Jojo and I stayed up talking. We told her we were having a hard time. Colic, reflux, sleepless nights. Grandma Jojo nodded like she understood, but eventually she said, in so many words, that Papa and I were doing it wrong. That we were parenting wrong. Things escalated, and Papa got angry, and I didn’t know what to do. I just remember wanting the whole scene to be over and for everyone to be fine. But things weren’t fine.

The next morning, Papa told me he was still upset by what happened, but that he should never get angry like that, so he was going to apologize to Grandma Jojo. We were all in the kitchen toasting bagels for breakfast when Papa said, “Patricia, can I talk to you outside?”

Grandma Jojo said sure, and they went on the back porch and Sam shut the door.

That left me sitting at the kitchen table with Pop-Pop. It was silent for a few seconds and then he said, “So, wha’d I miss last night?”

I embarrassingly gave him the abbreviated version of the story. “It was bad,” I added. “It was just really bad.”

Then Pop-Pop looked at me, and perhaps for the first time in my life gave me advice.

“You take his side,” he said, “No matter what happens, you always take his side.”

It was a bit of a scary story to share in a room full of people, especially my mother, who I was certain would not like my story very much. But in Pop-Pop’s last week of life, I sat with him in the hospice center one day, holding his hand, and I told him I was thinking about telling this story at his funeral but that I didn’t think Mom would like it very much, so I decided I would just tell the story to him. Then I told him the story, and we both cried. As I was leaving the room, to get someone else to send in, Pop-Pop stopped me. “And you know what,” he said through that terrible mask on his face, muffling his speech, “you can go ahead and tell that story at the funeral. Doesn’t matter if Mom gets pissed.”

I ended by the telling the full room of people—so many people that they had to bring in all their extra chairs and some people still stood—I know that my dad loved all his children very much, but he loved my mom more than any person in the entire world, and I think that that is his legacy.

If Pop-Pop lived longer, another ten years even, you would be sixteen. By then he would have more of a relationship with you. He would ask you about sports and TV, and if you were still playing chess, he’d ask you about that. Maybe he would ask you about school or girls. He would want to know what music you were into. He was a big concert-goer. He and Grandma Jojo took me to my first concert in fourth grade—Billy Joel. Us kids were all promised our first concert with our parents, but I was the first to go, making it extra special because I went even before my older brother and older sister. I had loved Billy Joel immediately, blasting my Glass Houses cassette tape on repeat. My dad liked to blast music, too, which was something I inherited, and try to only do when your Papa isn’t home because he doesn’t like it so loud. After the concert, when it was nearly midnight, we waited in traffic in the parking lot, and my dad reached out the Buick window and bought me a concert T-shirt. It was extra large and fell past my shins, but I wore it to school the next day anyway, tucked into black jean shorts.

The best thing about your Pop-Pop was how funny and easy-going he was. Even in the last week of his life, when he was scared to die and not ready to go, he continuously made me laugh. Streams of doctors and nurses and professionals came into his room and spoke to him as if he was a child or they didn’t speak to him at all, looking at my mom and me or whichever one of us kids were at his bedside that hour. Finally, when we made the terrible decision to move to a hospice center, the woman who worked for hospice came in to speak to us. She was an older lady with a bright purple mohawk and big dangly cat earrings. I watched my dad’s face, hidden behind that monstrous breathing mask that pushed oxygen into his lungs so that it dried out his mouth and we couldn’t hear him speak, to get a read on him. I didn’t know how he was receiving the message from this lady who looked so unprofessional, but she told my dad that she wasn’t going to sugarcoat it. We were talking about end of life. Getting comfortable was mentioned; a morphine drip. When she left the room, I stared at my dad. What was he thinking? Did he like her? Did he hate her?

My sister, mom, and I got closer to him. We put a hand anywhere for contact—his leg, an arm, a hand. We strained to hear him over the deafening noise of the oxygen machine, but couldn’t. So we removed the mask ourselves. We had to hear what he was saying.

“She was great,” my dad said as the mask released from his face, and I could see his relief to be told the truth plainly, even as the tear streamed down from the corner of his eye. “Purple hair and all!”

—

Love you, my big 6-year-old. Happy birthday.

Love,

Mama

It was three rings before the call connected. Then a few more seconds before I heard his voice.

“Hello?” he said. There was something in his voice that took me by surprise. It was gravelly, distant, different. Was it a bad connection? I said happy birthday and he said thanks but with no cheer. He was 69. Would he make it to 70?

I’d started calling him once a week or once every two weeks since the diagnosis. It used to be that I never called my dad unless I couldn’t get through to my mom. Being far away from him all the time, this was the only thing I felt I could do. Every time I was about to call I wondered what we would say. Would the conversation be awkward? Sad? What should I tell him about? Will he want to get off the call?

I asked him how Aruba was. He’d gone with my mom and twin sisters. The four of them still lived together and always went on vacation together. This one, though, we were all a little worried about. Dad had been getting worse. What would the flight be like? Would they even have fun? But they were able to get a wheelchair, and because of that, he said it was really nice. No issues with the flight.

I couldn’t hear him anymore. “Hello?” I said. “I’m going to call you back.”

I called again and this time it went to voicemail. His voice sounded strong, clear, him. This was my dad’s voice. I would never hear this voice in real time again.

I called again. “How was the Christmas party?” I asked.

They’d hosted a big Christmas in July party the week after they’d gotten home from Aruba. Fifty adults and twenty kids attended. Mom made too much food. She always does. Watermelon slices in the shape of Christmas trees, boozy pina colada bites, Thai spaghetti salad, Tortellini caesar salad, roast beef sandwiches, pulled pork, brats, baked beans, buffalo chicken egg rolls. Goodie bags for all the kids. Dad’s family came, too. His older sister and brother and their partners. His niece and nephew.

“It was great,” he said. “Really nice. Aunt Sue was the big hit of the party.”

“Oh yea, I heard about the white elephant exchange,” I said. My sister had mentioned it in our family text thread, which I thought my dad never read. Aunt Sue stole a bottle of vodka and when anyone tried to steal it back she wrapped her arms around it and gave them evil stares to deter them.

“Yea,” Dad scoffed, “Merry Christmas. Sheesh!”

His humor, which I used to roll my eyes at, made me happier than anything else. A sliver of light, of joy, when he spoke, even if it was sarcastic.

“Where are you right now?” he asked.

This question would have bothered me in the past. He never knew, never cared, never paid attention. But now I thought that it was difficult to keep up with all our travel, and anyway he was just making conversation. I told him we were in Charlotte, at Sam’s parents’ house.

“And then where?”

“I’m coming to Jersey by myself on the ninth, then we go to California on the 25th for a week, then we’re off to Japan.”

“Why isn’t Sam coming?”

It had been ten years since I’d visited home by myself. Ten years since I’d met Sam. He was always with me. I thought it would be nice to come alone.

“That’s what happens when you get married,” Dad agreed. “I never went back home without Patricia once we were married.”

It was a small thing, calling my mom by her first name. It was also the second time he did it in this conversation. He never called her Patricia. It was always “Mom” or “your mother.” What did it mean that he was referring to her in a formal way? Were things tense between them? Were they distant? Was this something that happened as you got closer to death?

We were nearing the last part of the conversation. My final question. The answer to the final question seemed to get worse every time. How are you feeling?

“Horrible,” he said. The defeat in his voice was enough to make me curl up in my bed and stay there the rest of the night. “I haven’t eaten anything today. And I’m not hungry.”

It was after 4:00.

He’d gone to the doctor’s office that morning, and he asked the nurse if she ever knew anyone with ALS. She said yes, her sister.

“And how long did she live after the diagnosis?” my dad asked.

“Three months.”

“Do you think you’re going to die soon?” I asked. I wondered if I was being too blunt, but I also felt like he invited the question. Maybe it was better to speak about it plainly.

“Not tomorrow,” he said.

This is what he always said when I asked how much time he had, if he knew anything more, if the doctors could give him any sort of timeline—but usually his voice went up at the end, like he could still joke about it. This time it felt heavier, like maybe death was closer than he thought.

“They all sang me happy birthday at the doctor’s office, as I was leaving.”

“They did?” I said.

“Yea, I said how’d you know?? They said it’s all over your paperwork.”

I laughed. “Well that’s nice.”

“Yea, it was nice” my dad said, a little chipperness in his tone. He always loved to be recognized, appreciated. When he cooked dinner for everyone you could see him sitting at the head of the table, waiting for people to tell him it was delicious. Is it good? Do you like it? My sisters and mom were often annoyed at his questions. Yes Dad, they groaned. The people in that office probably didn’t know that they’d made his day.

“Well I’m looking forward to seeing you in a couple weeks,” Dad said, bringing the conversation to a close, “and I really appreciate you calling.”

—

Until next week,

Charlie

We were out to breakfast when Sam broke the news to George that he’d be moving up to the 6-7-year-old class in Japan this fall.

That’s what he was meant to do since he’d be turning six in August, but after much deliberation in Uruguay, we had decided to keep him back in the 4-5 class with Layla. We heard the jump from the 4-5 class to the 6-7 class was a big one. Kids went from choosing their own activities and getting tons of outdoor play, to writing long sentences and sitting at their desks for more intense lessons in math.

George had thrived in Uruguay. You’d never know he had a speech delay with how articulate he was. He was an eager student, we were told, always raising his hand and volunteering to go first and lead the class. He loved school, loved his teachers, and was social with his classmates. He was a voracious reader, listening to me read him stories for an hour most nights and he always wanted more. His listening comprehension was most impressive—he sometimes stopped me to ask a question or make a comment on what he’d just heard. We were once reading book 2 of The Wild Robot series, and the farmer asked Roz the Robot if she’d ever used a computer before. I thought it was silly to ask a robot if it ever used a computer before when George laughed and said, “She is a computer! Of course she knows how to use one!”

My favorite recent development of George’s was the way he became obsessed with things. Besides reading, it was chess and soccer. He could sit for two hours playing and learning about chess, and he was constantly asking for one more game of indoor soccer with a little blow-up ball. But handwriting was not something he wanted to practice. Math didn’t seem to be his favorite either. He had less interest in those things. In the 4-5 class, he had more agency over choosing what he wanted to do. In the 6-7 class, he’d have to sit through learning about something he might not want to learn about. We didn’t want to squash his confidence and love of learning. I had long conversations with his teacher in Uruguay. She was very supportive either way. But she said if it was her, she’d keep him back, not because he couldn’t handle it, but because what’s the harm in keeping them young and happy and confident in a foreign place for just three more months? Japan was going to be a huge adjustment already. When we went to Spain in January, he could move up to the 6-7 class then. There was also his literal size. George was smaller than the kids his age. He would fit right in with the 4-5-year-olds. I wasn’t sure how he’d feel potentially being the smallest kid in the class.

Sam hadn’t told me he was going to tell him at breakfast, on our last morning in Park City, when we’d woken the kids up early after a late night, and George had refused to get out of bed, wouldn’t let us take off his jammies so we could pack them, and cried and whined and eventually screamed at me for being mean to him. Traveling this much did not allow for routine. I was supposed to have grace for my kids on these mornings. I didn’t.

We’d ordered our breakfast—an egg sandwich for me and Sam, two flat whites, a side of scrambled eggs and bacon for the kids, a cinnamon roll, and a blueberry muffin. George had just said he was hungry and thirsty, and there was no food or water in front of him yet. He’d been a part of the decision back in Uruguay. He did a test run one day in the 6-7 class, to see how he’d feel up there. He told me later, “It was a little fun, but a little boring.” I believe they were doing a lesson on shapes. When we asked him what he preferred, he said he wanted to stay back in the Explorers class.

But while we were in Park City, I’d heard from the head of the Education Program in Japan. I’d reached out to her with our thoughts, not wanting to make the decision without their support. She replied that she’d spoken with George’s previous teacher in Greece and with the School Support Head, and they believed that George would thrive in the 6-7 class. She also assured me that he would not be the youngest one in the class. They would monitor his transition, and if it was too overwhelming he could move back down after a week or two.

Sam at least waited until the cinnamon roll was cut into fours and George had taken a bite. I searched his face, wondering what he thought about this turn of events. George does better when there’s a plan, when he knows what to expect, and we’d just changed the plan. When he didn’t say anything, Sam asked, “How do you feel about that?”

George looked down. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Papa?” Layla interjected. The four of us were sitting close together in a corner booth. I hadn’t been thinking about her, and now I wondered what she had to offer her brother about the news. “Can you tell George not to take the bacon off my plate today?”

The morning before, we’d come to the same restaurant for breakfast, and George had eaten the last piece of bacon off her plate. She’d been distraught and angry with him, and she clenched her teeth and got her face really close to his face—which was something she did whenever she was mad at one of us. I always told her not to do that, not only because it was intimidating but because she really grinded her teeth and I was worried she was going to chip them. Afterwards, on our walk back to the hotel, she said, “George? I’m sorry I yelled at you, but next time can you please not take the bacon off my plate?”

He’d said okay, and the argument was resolved, and I’d told her how proud I was of her for saying sorry and communicating so well.

“Layla, you know this concerns you too, right?” I said. She looked up at me with her doe-brown eyes and chunky cheeks. She hadn’t been listening to a word we’d said. “George is going up to the 6-7 class. That means he won’t be in your class in Japan.”

I saw the news sink in, the despair on her face—just like when George took the bacon off her plate. “I want George to be in my class!” she wailed, and threw her head into my lap.

A half-smile crept onto George’s lips.

“You must be a pretty great brother to have in class,” Sam said and put his arm around him.

“Yea,” said George. My confident, almost-6-year-old.

—

Until next week,

Charlie

My husband wants to know if I’ve forgotten that we live out of suitcases. He wants to know why I went to TJMaxx three times during our two weeks in New York City to get clothes for me and the kids, and why I then didn’t get rid of any other clothes to make room for the new ones. He would like me to know, at 9:00pm on the night before we leave, that he was up at 3:30am this morning and he wanted to be in bed at 8, and mostly, he would like me to know that I have “effed us.”

I would like to remind my husband that we came from winter in Uruguay to summer in New York. Our wardrobes didn’t make sense. I needed clothes. The kids needed clothes. I would also like to remind my husband that I went shopping at a discount store and bought myself pants for $20. Don’t even get me started on the deals for the kids’ outfits, which he, by the way, said were adorable for our nice dinners out in the city. I would furthermore like to remind my husband that he married me, and we said vows, and he should find me charming rather than annoying. Mostly, I would like him to stop cursing.

The kids were asleep as we laid open the empty suitcases and stared at all the many piles of clothes and electronics and random shit, it seemed, that somehow needed to fit inside them. Our toiletry bags would go in this suitcase, in the morning, but he needed something to fit in this spot here, and something else for this teeny tiny spot right here. I went into the bathroom and retrieved my make-up bag and another small bag with travel shampoo and razors and hand lotion. Perfect fits.

“Do you have any more electronics?” Sam asked.

“Ummmm,” I said, scanning the room. I didn’t think so. He had my laptop, laptop charger, keyboard, and video camera. “I think that’s it.”

He zipped up the suitcase.

“Oh,” I said, spotting my other electronic case with my USB connector and mouse. “And this.”

Sam gave me the same look he’d been giving me all night, sort of like a death stare, one that got more and more incredulous and fed up as the night went on. I knew what he was going to say next, because he’d been saying it to me for approximately seven years.

“Babe,” he said, letting the term of endearment—which no longer felt like one—hang. “You need a better system. Don’t you think you could have given me that before I zipped up the suitcase?”

“Well I don’t know why you zipped it up so fast.”

“You just said, can we at least get one of these suitcases zipped up?!”

It went on like this for two hours, until finally, magically, we were all packed, each suitcase stuffed to the max, and two extra bags—a tote and a backpack—filled as well, that we’d have to carry on, and would make the travel day a little bit harder.

“I’ll purge in Park City,” I promised. “I’ll do better next time.”

I told Sam to go to bed. I would wash the dishes, put shows on the kids’ iPads, and return the kid books to the little free library in the basement of the apartment building.

Sam walked out of the bedroom as I was standing at the sink.

“Babe,” he said, his feet stomping toward me. I looked over my shoulder at him, all his anger back in a flash. “Why is your toiletry bag in the bathroom?”

“Because you said we were packing them in the morning!”

“But then you gave me two toiletry bags!”

“Those weren’t toiletry bags! That was my makeup bag, and just, another small bag. Of other toiletries…. You don’t know what my toiletry bag looks like?!”

“FUCK!” Sam whisper-yelled.

“It’s fine!” I said. “I’ll just put it in the diaper bag.”

Anything that didn’t have a home always went in the diaper bag. I tried to leave room every time, and every time I could barely zip it.

I brought the toiletry bag out, refilling the diaper bag to make sure it worked. Sam stood over me as I slowly, barely zipped the bag shut.

“See?” I said, “Perfect.”

Sam went to bed. I finished the dishes and the iPad shows and returned the library books. I paused to look through the kids shelf downstairs, to see if there was anything new. There was a book with a soccer player on the cover. George had recently become obsessed with the sport, playing every day in the apartment with a little blow-up ball and watching World Cup games. It was a chapter book—just the kind of length George liked. I didn’t recognize the player, Luis Suarez, but I read the back and it said he was one of the best players in the world, and he was from Uruguay.

I excitedly ran into the bedroom to tell Sam, who was laying down with his eyes closed, listening to a podcast.

“Babe look at this!” I said, showing him the cover and reading him the back.

“We have to bring it,” Sam said.

“Definitely,” I said. “I’ll put it in the diaper bag.”

—

Until next week,

Charlie

It was our kids’ first sushi experience. We’d just arrived in New York City for two weeks, and my in-laws took us out for Omakase, where you sit at the counter at a Japanese restaurant and the chef places sushi in front of you, one piece at a time.

We’d been on the go ever since we left Uruguay, first spending three nights in New Jersey with my family before riding the train into the city this morning. Our excessive luggage had proved a problem, with me and Sam each pushing two suitcases forward a few feet, then moving backwards to retrieve another, while a line of people behind us stood eager to sit, and the train had already started moving.

This was our new life. We’d be living out of suitcases all summer long, until our next three-month stint in Japan. When I’d started packing up at my parents’ house the night before, my mom made multiple comments like, “I could never live like that,” always with a chuckle, as if to be a joke, her real feelings about our nomadic lifestyle just barely beneath the surface of her words.

Up until this point George and Layla had been traveling champs. They always seemed ready for the next leg, the next adventure. If dinner was a disaster—if they were too hungry and too tired to try anything new—maybe we could just order a side of rice and some kind of chicken.

When we entered the restaurant—the same place my in-laws had taken me many times before, only one block from their apartment, where we all knew the chef by name—the host sat us at our usual spot at the low L-shaped counter. We gave the kids the best seats, directly in front of Chef Hojo, and put Grandpa between them. In the nearly ten times I’d eaten here, I’d never seen children sit in these seats. I was relieved that Hojo and the other two chefs behind the counter were smiling so affectionately at the kids.

They started with a shared bowl of miso soup, happily slurping the broth with tofu bits. When the first piece of sushi was placed in front of them—seared tuna on a rice cake with a cucumber slice—my first thought, besides how delicious it was going to taste, was that it was way too big to fit in their mouths, and it would be too difficult to eat in small bites. I sat on the other side of Layla and ate my piece first so she could see, then I offered to hold hers for her but she said, “No I got it,” and went in for a bite. And then another, and another, until it was gone.

Piece after piece was placed in front of the kids, and they tried all of it—George even ate uni, which I won’t go near because of its mushy texture and weird umami flavor. With each piece they ate, Layla gave us her little thumbs up, which, to an onlooker, just looks like a closed palm with the thumb resting on the side. When we asked if they wanted a spicy tuna handroll to end the meal, I watched Layla chomp on the seaweed roll in her hand, eating more than half of it.

On Monday, the kids started summer camp in the city, eight blocks from the apartment. We dropped them off in their separate classrooms with their new camp counselors and new campmates. George smiled and waved goodbye to us, while Layla clung to me a little longer, as she typically does in a school setting. I finally told the teacher that Layla might do well if the teacher started an activity with her, and when the teacher asked if she wanted to draw a picture with her, Layla said yes and let go of my hand.

For the rest of the week, when the kids weren’t at day camp, the four of us rode the bus and subway and walked the city streets together. We ate at restaurants where the kids were accustomed to waiting a long time for food, and if they whined or spoke too loudly, we reminded them that we were going to Japan soon—where the culture values quiet—and it was important to keep the harmony. At one upscale restaurant we ordered donuts for dessert. I cut George’s into four small pieces, and when he dropped one on the floor I could see that he was about to burst into tears. He started to cry and I tried to silent him. Then Layla took a donut from her plate and put it on his.

“Thanks, Layla,” George whimpered, relieved, and Layla said to all of us, “Me and George look out for each other.”

When I was at my parents’ house, my sister asked how long we were planning to travel like this, if there was an ending to it. My mom sat next to her, listening.

There’s something about these questions that never sit well with me. There were few questions about our travels to Uruguay. Anything I told them came from me offering it, not because they asked.

I wanted to tell her, We’ll travel as long as it continues to be amazing. But they don’t see what’s so amazing about it. They see suitcases and chaos and us running from one place to the next. After New York, we’ll go to Park City, Utah for a week with Sam’s family, then spend the month of August in Charlotte at his parents’ house, then a week in northern California before the big trip to Japan in September for three months. After that, Spain, Montenegro, Italy, potentially France.

I tell my sister that as long as the kids are thriving, and we’re all thriving, we’ll do it for as long as we can.

My version of thriving is unsettling to my sister and my mom. The kids need roots, routine, the same teacher for a whole year, the same core group of friends, probably a sports team, right? What kind of life is it for a child who doesn’t play a sport five days a week?

But I want my kids to see the world, learn a different language, look people in the eyes when they speak to them, and feel comfortable talking to adults. I want them to try new foods, try new things, meet people who are different from them. And I want them to have each other’s backs, because they will know each other longer than they will know anyone else in this life.

After living in our big house in the suburbs for five years, it still looked as if we had just moved in. The repose gray walls were empty of pictures or art. The rooms were too big to fill, and furniture and all those things that you need to fill a room are expensive. I didn’t know what I wanted so I did nothing. I felt like a bad homeowner.

Living in this way, for three months at a time in different parts of the world, is the first thing that feels completely invigorating, exciting, and right.

—

Until next week,

Charlie

When we arrived in New Jersey after three months in Uruguay, I saw how much my dad’s ALS had progressed. His legs, which were always skinny, were now dangerously so. We had called him chicken legs for years but now when I looked at him I thought of toothpicks. His right hand and arm, which were mostly useless, limped against the side of his body so that he didn’t look proportionate. What I noticed most, though, were his eyes. They looked gray and glassy, slightly off.

The next day, Sam and I took the kids to my friend’s house to go swimming. My three oldest friends were there, whom I’d known since grade school. Last year we took a girls trip to New York City with just the four of us. While the kids played with the other kids, I asked my girlfriends for advice. They knew my dad as well as I did, and they had all lost loved ones in their lives, while I had lost no one except my aunt, who I only saw once or twice a year when she was alive. I wanted to have a conversation with my dad but I didn’t know how to navigate it.

“What do you want out of it?” Lonnie asked. Her aunt recently died of brain cancer and she was with her until the end. Her dad died years ago and while she was very close with him there were times she was also frustrated by him. “Like what do you need from him? What do you want him to know?”

Lonnie sat in a chair by the pool while I stood, getting ready to leave. A massive umbrella shaded us from the Jersey summer sun. The day was beautiful. The heat wave wouldn’t hit until tomorrow, and I didn’t know the answers to any of her questions.

The next day, I strapped George and Layla in the car and said goodbye to them and my mom. She was taking them to my sister’s house for a few hours so they could play with their cousin. I knew this time had been carved out for me when my sister suggested it yesterday adding, “so you can spend some quality time with dad.”

Spending quality time with Dad meant sitting in the same room as him watching TV, or eating dinner, or drinking cocktails. Conversation was typically light: sports or pop culture or random gossip. When I lived in LA for six years, if I ever saw a famous person, my dad was the first person I called. Orlando Bloom once sat in my section when I was waiting tables. “What did he order?” my dad wanted to know. Herbal tea and a cheese board. He ate all the cheese and none of the bread. He was very polite and every time I came to the table he said, “Thanks, Love.” Dad especially loved stories of people making fools of themselves or getting physically hurt. As long as they survived it was almost always funny.

I sat in the living room next to my dad. I wondered why initiating a real conversation with a family member always felt like I was eight years old jumping off the high dive for the first time. A part of me wanted to change my mind and descend the ladder. I could put off the jump until another time, until I was ready. But I rarely came home to visit. And I didn’t know how much longer my dad had.

The night before, as Sam and I laid in bed, he told me that the most important question would be the first one, because it would be an opening for my dad to talk about the rest. It had to be open-ended enough for him to say more. He was changing the channel on the TV until he landed on Deal or No Deal.

“So how are you feeling about everything, Dad?”

The question felt wrong but I was nervous and needed to start somewhere. My dad’s eyes flickered away from the TV.

“I try not to think about it,” he said.

“Like what are you thinking about every day? What’s going through your head when you wake up?”

He looked straight into my eyes and said, “I hope I can still stand.” For the rest of my life, the thing I will remember from this conversation was the eye contact, how long he held it.

When I first found out my dad had ALS I’d been holding a lot of anger towards him. I felt like he didn’t know me and never cared to ask about my writing. Lonnie wanted to know if that was something I wanted to talk to him about but I didn’t think so anymore. His diagnosis suddenly made it all seem different. I knew my dad loved me. I had always known he loved me in the way he looked at me. His eyes smiled. It was that simple. I’d wanted more from him, much more, but I’d never told him that.

“What do you want out of the end of your life?” I asked. “What do you want it to look like?”

“I want to not be a burden.”

It seemed like no one he lived with was asking him what he wanted. My mom and youngest sister were being the hardest on him, pushing him to try harder and do more. I had no business coming in with my infrequent visits to tell everyone to take it easier on him. They were with him every day. Mom was responsible for everything with the house, and soon she would be responsible for taking care of him, too. She didn’t want to do it sooner than she had to.

At some point I started crying. “Well I don’t like that,” my dad said. His eyes watered but he didn’t cry. “I’ve had time to reflect on my life and I feel like I had a good life,” he said, looking off into space. “I have five great kids, four grandkids… had a good job for forty-three years, a house, …”

He continued staring in the distance. Or was he watching the television?

“And??” I said after a minute.

He pulled out of his trance and looked at me. “And?” he said with a chuckle. “What was the last thing I said?” I repeated back his list, the one he’d just told me about kids and grandkids, job and house.

“And, that’s all.”

When my dad turned fifty we threw him a birthday party and he told every person he spoke to, “It’s all downhill from here.” He’d made comments about getting old for most of my life, and now those comments were stuck in my head. “If I ever get that old, just kill me,” he said more than once, always with a laugh, as if the possibility was so far away, maybe even impossible.

“Is there anything you look forward to besides the end of the day?” I said. I knew he was drinking more than usual. The last time I was home he’d said it was all he looked forward to anymore.

“Watching the Phillies,” he said.

My mom had been saying recently, quite often, that my dad was a quitter. He was always a quitter and he never had any ambition. I knew that, but hearing my mom say it was surprising. It was the way he had always been and she didn’t seem to mind so much before, but now she was saying it all the time. Watching baseball did not seem like a good enough reason to live. Was my dad ready to die? Was my mom mad at him for it?

The next morning I hugged him goodbye, and he hugged me longer than usual. When he pulled away he said, “So, do I look better or worse than you thought?”

He said it with a smile. All weekend long I noticed his physical decline but I was relieved that his mind was all there, that he still made jokes and I could laugh at him. He always said that the best reason to have kids was that they made you laugh.

After all my hangups and disappointments about my dad, it’s the same thing I say about him.

—

Until next week,

Charlie

On George’s last day of surfing, when temperatures were in the high 40s and the water was ice cold and he wore two wetsuits, his board flipped over and he went underneath it. When he emerged, he stood crying and walked out of the ocean. Sam met him at the waters’ edge, and through tears George said, “They’re too big!”

“It’s okay bud,” Sam said, “you don’t have to go again.” At this point most of the kids in his class were playing in the sand, refusing to go in the water.

There was a pause and George sniffled, then he said, “I want to,” and he went out for one more cold surf.

~

After school one day on the playground, one of the teachers told me a story about Layla.

She’d been sitting with a group of boys at lunch every day, but for the past two days, one of the little boys who’d been traveling for two weeks was back, and with him at the table Layla was no longer invited to sit with them. She walked up to the table and asked the boys why they wouldn’t let her sit with them. They replied something like, “Well, Kenny’s back.”

The teacher watched as Layla articulated to them that they had all played together when Kenny wasn’t at school, so why couldn’t they all sit together now?

She didn’t go to the teacher, she didn’t avoid the boys, and she didn’t tell me or Sam what had been happening at school. When she felt left out by her friends she spoke to them directly, and when they didn’t have a great reason for leaving her out, she sat with a group of girls instead.

~

I went to cheer on Sam in the big padel tournament. It was a popular sport, sort of like pickleball. I hadn’t participated all cohort-long, but today a court opened up and someone asked if I wanted to play. No, no, I said, I can’t.

My neck pain was intense when I arrived in La Barra. Through a connection with one of the moms, I met a physiotherapist and later a cranial sacral therapist, both who helped me immensely over the course of three months. I was feeling much better than I had in a long time. So the second time I was asked to play, even though it felt risky, I stepped onto the court. It was my first time participating in a real physical activity in two years, and the adrenaline followed me for three hours.

The next day I spoke to my physiotherapist. I was feeling high from the previous day’s activity and I told him my new goal was not just to run three miles—as I’d told him the week before—it was to play padel weekly, six months from now, when we’d be spending three months in Spain. I was motivated to be an athlete again.

~

The last week of the cohort brings lots of feelings and reactions, and I notice some within my family.

George often named his feelings. On the last day of school he told his teacher, “I’m sad and happy.”

Why are you sad?

“To say goodbye.”

Why are you happy?

“Because we’re leaving.”

On our last night, before we embarked on our long travel back to the states, I was helping George out of his pajamas—because the last week is when both kids want me to dress and undress them and help them put on their shoes and lay with them until they fall asleep, just as they did in Syros—and he said, “Tomorrow is going to be fun and tired and hard.”

Layla, in two final group celebration/goodbye moments, clung to me and then became so overcome with tiredness that she fell asleep in my arms. Once home with just the four of us, she sprang back to life.

Sam oscillated between constant reflection of the cohort (So, what are your big takeaways? How are you feeling about the cohort? How are you feeling about Uruguay?) and constant planning for the next adventure, sending me screenshots of messages in Slack on the Japan channel and telling me, on our drive to the airport on our last day, “We need a plan for January ‘28.”

Honestly he does this all the time so maybe it’s not an end of cohort thing.

As for me, I pulled out my travel speaker, which hadn’t gotten too much use in three months, and blasted pop music in the house while I washed dishes and vacuumed.

~

I’m not that sad to leave Uruguay. La Barra did not speak to my soul in the way Syros did. I loved the Boundless team, and speaking broken Spanish with the locals at my favorite coffee shop, and our two estancia stays were my favorite family trips we’ve ever taken, but I hated all the driving, and how walking didn’t always feel safe on the dirt roads, and how if I didn’t speak Spanish or attempt to speak Spanish, sometimes it made me feel less welcome.

Something I hope for in each cohort is that Sam and I will meet a family that we’ll want to do life with. It hasn’t happened yet—that perfect alignment where the whole package of husband and wife and kids all sync up in perfect harmony. Does such a thing exist? When it doesn’t happen, I feel deflated by the 3-month experience even when there is so much else that makes me want to keep traveling the world with my family in this way.

~

I will miss the black dog who always stood in the middle of our street and wagged his tail when we passed him on the way to school, I will miss the kids’ teacher, Maya, who always had a mate in her hand and looked frazzled and happy at the end of the day, I will miss my Spanish teacher and speaking a different language. And oh, how I will miss the bidet.

—

Until next week,

Charlie

As in Greece, I had not made too many friends in Uruguay.

I find that I make snap judgments about people early on. Some of them are small things, that on their own aren’t terrible, but add up as strikes against their character, like the mom who repeatedly, almost comically stormed into conversations and interrupted who was speaking, or the other mom who spoke for forty-five minutes straight at the women’s circle when everyone else only spoke for five. Some things felt more like red flags, like the dad who said he doesn’t learn any of the kids’ names, or once, when George beat an older kid in a game of chess, and the older kid moved George’s pieces to end the game even sooner and left George in tears, and the boy’s mom responded with, “Let’s just call this a practice game.”

As the cohort went on, I wondered about the difference between being judgmental and being discerning. I had one friend, Tina, who I told would make a great politician. She befriended everyone, did not speak unkindly of anyone. Part of me thought I should be more like Tina. Another part of me called bullshit. Her friendliness to everyone could not be completely authentic. So where did that leave me?

And then, coincidentally or cosmically, Sam told me he had an idea to host a game night with the parents. The game was Mafia, a parlour game that had become popular in Silicon Valley—it had been produced into three episodes on YouTube. I watched the first episode, transfixed, and told Sam he definitely had to do it.

On the night of, while our kids were being babysat by Tina’s kids, we sat around the long wooden table at the hub with twelve of us. It was a mix of people I liked and didn’t. I worried about how things would go, and then the game began.

I’d told Sam in the weeks leading up to the game that I just really, really did not want to be Mafia. As a Townsperson, I could be innocent and try to figure out who the Mafia was, but as Mafia, I had to play a game of deception and convince everyone in the group that I was a Townsperson, like them. I flipped over my card for the first game. A Jack. I was Mafia. There were three of us on a team, against the rest of the group.

Sitting across from me was Elisa, one person in the cohort that I did not like. I’d learned early on that she was a writer, and I’d hoped to befriend her, but in our first conversation I did not like the way she spoke to me. It wasn’t much more than a feeling. There was an air of condescension in her voice as she explained to me how dictating works, and when I told her I could never dictate because I needed to physically type to think, she said, “It just takes practice.” Then she hosted a Writing Sprint for a group of us, and when she pressed the timer for us to start, she blasted what sounded like heavy metal music into her headphones and typed aggressively on her keyboard and I could barely think.

Elisa was the first person who confirmed her attendance for Mafia Night and the first person to arrive at the hub that evening. When it was time to deliberate, she was vocal, loud, and opinionated, doling out observations and accusations. This made her an excellent player. Without Elisa at the table the game might have fizzled. She took the whole thing seriously in a way that made me, for a moment, fucking love her. I, too, was vocal, loud, and opinionated, (though a bit more reserved in my role as Mafia so as not to draw attention to myself!) and it was nice to have someone else at the table with a competitive edge. She came to play and she came to win, and in Round 2, when Sam told the Mafia to wake up, I slowly looked up and locked eyes with Elisa. We were in it, together, and it was go-time.

With Elisa on my team I knew we could win, and when we did, we stood and cheered and hugged a real hug, our first of the cohort. All my strikes against her had not disappeared, but there was more to her than just those things. I had not been open to it before then, so I couldn’t see it, but it was there all along.

—

Until next week,

Charlie

P.S. If you look forward to reading Call Me Charlie and care to reply to this email with 1-3 sentences about your thoughts on it, I’d be grateful. I’m revamping my website with a few fresh testimonials.

It was Thursday morning and I made my way to Borneo Coffee—my normal routine before Spanish class.

Borneo has the best chipas, chocolate croissants, chocolate chip cookies, and coffee, but what I really love about the place is that when I walk through the door I can practice my Spanish. The baristas smile at me and let me take my time and lightly correct my verb conjugations when I speak of anyone but myself.

I had no interest in learning Spanish when I arrived in La Barra. Sam was the one who’d been practicing with Duolingo for the year leading up to our trip. More power to him, I thought. The only language I had any interest in learning was French, because that was the language I learned in middle and high school. I’d always loved the French language, how I could read a full page of text out loud, and though I might not know what it meant and could never master the guttural, back-of-the-throat “r” sound, I loved the nasally vowels, the rhythm of the words as they blended together, how I had a knack for knowing which letters were silent.

After two weeks of living in Uruguay, when I felt a longing to connect with the locals and couldn’t, it only re-affirmed my desire to learn French—not Spanish. I wouldn’t be able to communicate with the people here for three whole months, but somewhere down the road we’d probably spend time in a French-speaking country, and that’s what I would optimize for. When I signed up for the group Spanish lessons—a last-minute decision, two days before they started—it was to learn the bare minimum so I wouldn’t look like a total idiot in public, so that I could at least communicate a little, just enough to get by without Sam by my side.

At the market I went to each week I befriended Paco, who spoke no English. Most days I said the same things: Quiero juevos grande, por favor. Quiero bolsa, por favor, but in the last few weeks, because I’d been learning bit by bit in class, I thought of things I could say in the moment before I said them. “Aqui una mas mesa,” I said one day, trying to say, “Here one more month,” but as he looked at me with a slightly confused expression I remembered that mesa was table. I tapped the counter to show I knew I got it wrong. “Not mesa,” I said.

“Si, mes!” he said.

The sentence was pathetic—caveman speak—it should have been “un” instead of “una,” and it should have been “mes mas” instead of “mas mes,” but Paco understood. We were together, on the same planet, in his world of Spanish—I was a member of his community.

Every Thursday, I attended class with five other parents for an hour and forty-five minutes. We met at the hub with our teacher, Pietro, a young 20-something teddy bear of a man who was sweet and smiley and stylish and reminded us that Spanish was hard and it takes time and we were all doing great, but also kept us in line when too many people were talking at once, or we had gotten off track, and he fully expected our attendance and for us to complete our homework. One week he overloaded us with twelve pages of a written assignment. It took me three days and approximately six hours to finish it. Instead of my usual writing in the early morning hours, I did Spanish homework. “This is ridiculous!” I said to Sam one morning.

“I thought you wanted to learn Spanish,” Sam said, sipping his coffee. “This is good.”

At some point during the cohort, my feelings about learning Spanish had shifted. The more I understood the more I wanted to understand. The more I spoke the more I wanted to speak. Sam walked over and looked over my shoulder, staring at the sentences. I could see him coming up with the answers in his head.

“Man, this is hard!” he said.

I hadn’t been in school for eighteen years. The sensation of cramming was uncomfortable. My classmates were already giving up or flat-out refusing to finish the homework, but I knew the kind of student I was, that I could not show up to class with an unfinished assignment. Instead of looking up the answers in the back of a textbook, I consulted Google Translate and ChatGPT. Was this cheating? It had to be cheating, which was not the kind of student I’d been in school. But in my school days I also never cared about learning the material. I only cared about the grade. Here, at 41 years old, living in South America, I wanted to speak and understand Spanish. I trusted that the overload of new vocabulary and writing of sentences would somehow stay with me, and by the end of the packet, there were words and phrases stuck in my head that I didn’t know before I started. Siempre, nunca, a veces. Juntos. Esta nublado. Las luces, trabajar. Todos los dias, esposo, en serio. So much of it didn’t sink in but some of it did. After six hours of homework I had a small arsenal of new vocabulary.

I walked to Borneo later that morning, my completed homework stapled together and tucked into the folder in my backpack. After I ordered an iced latte and two chocolate croissants, I did something I’d never done before. I went off script. I told the two baristas behind the counter that I was learning Spanish, and I loved it, and it was the highlight of my trip. I didn’t know how to say “highlight”, but everything else I searched for in my head and found the Spanish words I wanted to say. The young man and woman, who also liked to practice their English, nodded at me and smiled and the woman put a hand to her chest and said that that made her so happy. “Your Spanish is very good,” she added. “Most Americans who come in here don’t even try.”

—

Until next week,

Charlie

I’d been entrusted with a secret I never wanted to know, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it.

One week earlier, 12-year-old Eva had asked Sam if he would be a contestant in her competition—a recreation of the reality television show, The Mole. This was Eva’s Boundless Project, a staple of Boundless Life in which the older kids work all cohort-long on a project of their choosing and present it to everyone at the Final Celebration on the last day of school.

I knew, because I’d befriended Eva’s parents, that this was Eva’s second go at recreating The Mole, a show in which contestants work together to solve problems in order to win a grand prize, but the hitch is that there’s a mole among them, trying to sabotage their winning. Eva did the same project in her first cohort in Greece. Things had not gone so well then because the mole, who is supposed to keep it a secret until the very end when Eva reveals who they are, told all the contestants she was the mole before the contest had even begun. Eva announced to everyone that she had to change the mole right before the competition, and the whole exchange created tension between her and the girl who’d blabbed. In a final twist, Eva kept the mole the same person.

For this cohort, Eva wanted another chance to do it better. She wasn’t going to tell anyone who the mole was—not even her mom—and she would choose a person she could trust. So when 12-year-old Cary approached me on the playground after school, five days before the competition, and asked if I wanted to know a secret, the answer was a hard no but I gave her a shoulder-shrug sure.

“I’m the mole,” she said, her eyes wide. I had felt she was going to say it but hearing the words still surprised me.

On my walk home from school I texted Eva’s mom, Tina:

Soooo saw Cary on the playground and she was like can I tell you a secret? And I said sure even tho I REALLY didn’t want to know… she told me she’s the mole. I hate having this information! Should I tell Eva? Who else has Cary told? Who else is she going to tell? Nooooo!

For the next two days, Tina and I sent secretive voice notes to each other—whenever I was far from Sam—about what we should do. The real kicker was that Eva and Cary had become close friends. They held hands as they walked to school. Tina and I concluded that this couldn’t be malicious—Cary was a sweet girl. But still, we had to do something. I volunteered to tell Eva, but logistically it was difficult to find an inconspicuous moment to pull her aside. There was also Cary to consider. How would she feel when Eva let her know that I’d ratted her out? Maybe we should sit them down together. Should we involve Cary’s mom, too?

I wondered if I was making too big a deal of this, especially since neither girl was my daughter. I thought of my experiences in two Boundless cohorts, and how in both I’d been drawn to the 12-year-old girls, like I saw myself in them, like twelve years old was the year right before everything changed, before I became obsessed with boys and self-conscious about my body. There is something so innocent and real about that age, and I want them to know how amazing they are right now, and I want to instill in them some kind of confidence and knowing that they don’t need to change or be any different than the person they are, and they should dream big and follow their interests even if they’re not practical. And perhaps, more than anything else, they should value authentic and open communication, because if they don’t, they will become bitter and angry and they’ll hold all of it inside until it manifests into anxiety, and the anxiety will turn into real physical pain, and nothing will improve until they learn how to communicate in healthy, transparent ways. This was bigger than Eva’s Boundless project. This was about two friends working together through a conflict. It was nothing I had any history of doing successfully but I wanted it desperately for the two of them.

Three days before the competition, Tina told Eva the news by showing her the first text I’d sent. They were walking to school, and met up with Cary on the way. Eva asked her if she told me she was the mole. Cary said yes. Eva asked her if she told anyone else. Cary said no. The girls linked arms and continued on their way to school, and once there, Eva chose someone new to be the mole. Tina reported back that everything was great, and everybody was fine.

On Friday, two days before the competition, I threw an arm around Cary’s shoulder as we both walked onto the playground. “Hey!” I said cheerfully. “Can I talk to you?”

“Sure,” she said, and then, looking up at me with skepticism, as kids do, “What’s up?”

“I just wanted to make sure you were okay,” I said. “I didn’t want you to feel like I ratted you out.”

Cary looked at me blankly.

“About the mole,” I whispered.

“Ohhhhh,” she said, “Yea, it’s fine, Eva picked someone else.”

“Right,” I said. “I just didn’t know if you knew everything that had happened in Greece when Eva did this the first time, and how she picked a mole and then that person told everyone she was the mole and then there was all this drama. So I just didn’t want that to happen again.”

“Oh, no I didn’t know that,” Cary said, “but she picked someone else, so it’s all good. Right Eva?”

Eva was nearby, and having heard her name, came over to us.

“You picked someone else to be the mole, right?”

“Yea, I picked someone else. We’re good,” Eva said, and the two girls went off to their classroom together.

On the day of the competition, I watched as Eva hosted The Mole with confidence and enthusiasm. And at the very end, when there were only three people left, she announced Cary as the mole.

—

Until next week,

Charlie

How do we write about our parents in memoir?

In earlier drafts of my manuscript I mostly left them out. They were mentioned briefly, peripherally. I reasoned that my memoir spanned ten years of my life when I was far from home. Why distract readers with stories about my parents and upbringing?

In later drafts, after the story was fully on the page, I let myself sit with how my parents had impacted me in ways that had to do with one of the main themes of the book—my relationship with my body image. The details, while not flattering to them, were true and I wanted to include them. But it felt like a takedown, like I was blaming my parents for my own insecurities, and that didn’t feel right either.

Hester Kaplan, the author of Twice Born, wrote an entire memoir about her father. Justin Kaplan (who went by Joe, even to his three children) was the literary biographer of Mark Twain’s biography, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1967. Hester had grievances about her dad—things he’d said and did or didn’t do that had hurt her.

In the following passage, Hester writes about her father when she was a young girl:

“There was almost nothing and no one deemed by my father too sacred to be poked fun of. This extended to children, especially his own, and teasing was a way to bypass the stickier parts of parenting. My disappointment could be turned into a frowning face he drew on the shell of my hard-boiled egg at breakfast. An extended joke that my real mother was a Pakistani woman who’d abandoned me at birth … became a kind of shorthand for my sensitivity, with echoes of his own absent mother. He convinced a friend of mine—we were about twelve years old—that there were traffic lights in the ocean so passing ships didn’t run into each other. It sounded entirely plausible to me, but unlike my friend, I knew better than to admit this and had already learned to take the safer cynical stance. Her gullibility delighted my father, or maybe his delight was in how he could fire up the engines of her imagination, but in either case he didn’t disabuse her of this idea that the vast sea had road rules.

“When the young son of some friends, riding in the back seat of the car, asked my father why he held on to the handle above the door frame, Joe said it was to keep the roof from blowing off. He colored the white spots on the beagle with Magic Markers so the dog might wander the neighborhood in vivid green and pink, and when asked about it, he could tell people that she had been born like that.”

The beginning part of this passage highlights a few parenting flaws of her dad: he was dismissive of her feelings, he turned her disappointment into a joke, he teased that she was adopted. This is reminiscent of the types of things I wrote about my own parents—details that I’m sure they wouldn’t be too thrilled to read, that maybe they weren’t even aware that they had done or that they’d had so much negative impact on me. But what struck me most about this passage was how I felt at the end, which was completely endeared by her father. He was funny and silly and even though he had flaws he was still quite lovable.

When I asked Hester how she approached writing about her dad, and how she thought about sequencing these details, she said,

“The first part of that paragraph is really about me, and my relationship with my father, and then the second part is really about viewing my father as he relates to the world.”

I had been writing my memoir through two lenses—me at the desk and me in the story. Both lenses were through my eyes, whether it was the present day writer, with knowledge and hindsight and empathy, or the character in my past, full of emotion and naïveté. But I had not included this third perspective, which had nothing to do with me and everything to do with how the rest of the world views and observes the characters in my story. What was it like for my friends who came to the house? How did they interact with my mom and dad? What stories did they remember when they thought of my parents?

There was so much more I learned from my conversation with Hester, including the circular nature of writing a book, deciding which details and anecdotes are relevant to the bigger story, what to do with memories that keep surfacing, the inclusion of fiction in memoir, and differences between memoir and biography.

Listen to the episode here.

—

Until next week,

Charlie

George was riding a horse by himself, holding the reins and trotting, going faster than I would ever dare. Sam was on another horse, nearby, and Theresa, who owned the estancia, was on another.

I was back at the house, in the cozy bedroom we were staying in for one night, finding Waldo in a big book with Layla. It was probably for the best that I didn’t see my 5-year-old by himself on the back of a horse, galloping along. My one responsibility, above all else, is to keep my kids alive. I am already risk-averse in my own life, and doubly so with my children.

This was our second weekend at an estancia, and George had quickly fallen in love with riding horses. It was a first for both of us. It’s not that I’ve avoided them my whole life; I was just never drawn to horses and there was never an opportunity. When the four of us had been out earlier, my horse looked at me with what I was sure was a side-eye stare of distrust. I was told the horse senses how you feel, so I said hello and stroked the side of his neck and told him I was new at this. As I sat on top of him, feeling very high up and like I was on some sort of amusement park ride, I thought of Shirlee.

We were in grade school together. She was the tallest in our class with long dark, curly hair, and from the moment I met her in second grade I knew she loved horses. She had horse notebooks and horse T-shirts and horse jewelry. Her love for horses never wavered, following her into middle and high school. I’d never seen or known someone who loved something so much; had such a long-lasting passion and obsession for one thing. I was in college or had recently graduated when I heard the news. Shirlee had gone riding on her horse one late afternoon, after work. The horse got spooked and threw her head-first into a tree and she died instantly.

It is all I can think of when I think of horses. Horses and Shirlee, Shirlee and horses. When I looked at George earlier, when I was still out with them, and he was riding Pompa, I could see that George was not thinking of Shirlee. He did not hold the same stories in his head, the same fears.

Shirlee’s story had always greatly saddened me. But as I watched George light up on the horse, grab the reins by himself, and kick his tiny little heels on the sides so that I wondered if the horse could even feel it, I thought of how lucky Shirlee was to find that one thing she loved more than anything so early on. And another voice inside me, albeit fainter, told me that, yes, I need to keep him alive, but it’s even more important that I let him live.

When it was time to leave and drive the hour back to La Barra, Theresa suggested we say goodbye to the horses. Once outside by the pen, the only horse around was the one that Sam and Layla had been riding together. When Vasca saw us she took off running. She thinks we want to ride again, Theresa told us, and she doesn’t want to. She’s tired. George’s horse was nowhere to be seen. We walked further, out into the plain, and Theresa finally spotted Pompa. She was the furthest horse away. George and I called her but horses don’t respond the way dogs do. Pompa didn’t move. I told George we would just have to say goodbye from here. He told me, with fire in his delivery, that he was not leaving until he saw Pompa.

We’re going, Theresa announced. Let’s go find Pompa.

It was a little hike, over rocks and tiny streams, until she was there before us. I hung back, my fear of spooking a horse always present. Theresa walked slowly, in a roundabout way towards Pompa’s face. George took a straight line to her middle, and Layla followed. The closer we got to Pompa the larger and stronger she seemed. “Hey, guys, you go with Theresa toward the front, never the back.” I imagined Pompa suddenly kicking George with her hind leg. I thought of the damage that kick could do to a 5-year-old.

George was not scared. He kept walking. I told him to go slower.

Pompa seemed distracted, eating grass. When George was close enough he stroked the side of her neck twice. Layla copied him. Then George got right next to her and leaned his whole body against her front leg, and closed his eyes, still stroking her fur.

—

Until next week,

Charlie

Sam knew that if it were up to me we wouldn’t have made this trip. We would have stayed in La Barra during the kids’ week-long mid-cohort break from school. Still, it was beautiful where I stood, on top of a massive waterfall. The current was fast but peaceful, the water trickling over the rocks, and at its edge, the water plummeted straight down to depths I couldn’t see. Mist lightly coated my face and the sound of rushing water was all I could hear. The view felt like it was meant for the fish and the birds and bears who could stand on those rocks and withstand the strong current; not for people, not for me.

“Babe, you’re in the way,” Sam said.

I pulled out of my trance and moved to the side to let a swarm of people pass. Others stood next to me and posed for selfies. The steel bridge walkway went on for miles and miles over the Iguazu Falls in Argentina, the largest waterfall system in the world. I sighed. Even though we were surrounded by expansive nature I felt suffocated. I hated feeling rushed, feeling like I was in the way. This was why we avoided major tourist attractions.

We were in the middle of a jungle. The trees were lush and green against clear dark waters and light blue sky. Bright pink, and yellow, and orange butterflies landed on the railings as we passed. I almost felt like I was in line for a Disney ride. I imagined the team of builders who constructed these bridges, who did the work of placing them so close to dangerous, deathly drops. I kept stopping and saying, with palms facing up to the sky, “How in the world did they make this?!”

On our flight back to Uruguay, after spending three nights in Buenos Aires and two in Iguazu Falls, Sam and I discussed the trip. The flights, the hotels, the Ubers, the stress, the experience. We asked ourselves, Was it worth it?

Once back in La Barra, we half-emptied our suitcases and did four loads of laundry. We were leaving the next day for a weekend at an estancia, a large private estate with horses and cows and sheep, where you stay with a host family who cooks you meals and takes you on different excursions on the property. These are very common in Uruguay. Like everything else, Sam had booked it months in advance. On the morning of our departure, I raced through the house trying to get everything repacked. I made another round of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the road. I yelled at Layla for wiping her greasy potato chip hands on her shirt AGAIN instead of using a napkin. I yelled at George during our quick walk to the market because he kept drifting into the middle of the road over and over and over. “Why is this so hard?!” I said for the fourth time. “I don’t understand. STAY ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD.” I sighed loudly when we got on the road for a three-hour drive and I had just finally taken a breath and Sam asked me to read him all the directions to the estancia. The whole week had been one big rush. I wanted to be home. I wanted to do my breathing exercises and my work. And now we were off again for another trip.

We drove along bumpy dirt roads for thirty miles before we turned onto the property. We were greeted by Jaime, one of the owners and also the chef. He took us for a quick walk around the grounds. Layla immediately noticed the trampoline, swings, and trees for climbing. George spotted the soccer ball and foosball table. There were chickens, horses, and a gray sheep dog named Juno with one blue eye and one brown. Our room was the coziest place I’d ever seen and I wanted to stay there forever. There was a queen bed in the corner and two little twin beds on opposite walls. The room was lit by two small desk lamps and the orange glow of a fireplace, which we would be in charge of keeping lit during the cold weekend.

We were the only family there. A couple of French college kids would arrive later that night, and a Uruguayan family with three teenagers were coming tomorrow. In the meantime, Jaime asked, would we like to take a ride to see the waterfalls?

The kids jumped up and down, ready for an adventure. Jaimie had an old pickup truck and we all climbed into the back. Makeshift benches had been hammered down for us to sit on. We grabbed hold of the sides of the truck and the kids and he took off. Leading us was Juno, sprinting ahead of the truck, knowing, it seemed, exactly where we were going.

Through massive lush green properties we rode, passing cows and sheep and horses, the kids bouncing up and down and laughing and constantly yelling, “Where’s Juno?? There’s Juno!”

We moved away from the open plains and into a more wooded area, bending our heads to avoid being hit by branches. Jaime parked and we all got out and followed him and Juno. It was a very narrow path, surrounded completely by trees, sometimes creating a canopy that felt very Secret Garden-like.

Suddenly Jaimie stopped. He put a hand to his ear. “Do you hear that?” he said. George and Layla stopped running. They listened. “Water!” they yelled. We were close.

We kept going until we descended over rocky terrain, careful not to slip. Sam carried Layla. And then we were there, on top of a waterfall. There were big, dry rocks where we could safely stand. The waterfall slowly descended, so that if a kid slipped and fell in they could easily be pulled out. The sun was just beginning to set, and was hitting the dark gray rocks with its warm golden light.

Sam and I looked at each other. It was just the four of us here, with Jaime and Juno. We had the waterfall to ourselves, and we could stay as long as we liked.

—

Until next week,

Charlie

I thought I was being honest in my writing until I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.

When he was 21 years old, Dave’s parents died within months of each other and he was left to care for his 7-year-old brother. At his mother’s funeral, after his father had already died, he stands to speak, and when he looks over the podium, he writes:

“Where were the people? It was not a crowd. It was a scattered thing, a few here, a few there. Everyone loved her, where were they?... This could not be, would not do, a life and then this, this forty people. ... Where is her family? Where are her sisters? There is only Uncle Dan, who has come, he says, ‘to represent the family.’ ... Where are the people from town? Where are the parents of her former students? My friends? ... All she put in, all she gave for you people and this is— She fought for so long for all you people, she fought every day, she fought everything, fought for every breath until the last, sucking everything she could out of the air in that brown living room, gasped again and again, it was unbelievable, yes, she grabbed at the air, grabbed for us and for you, and where were you?

Where are you motherfucking assholes?”

That’s how the chapter ends. He does not write about any of the forty people who were there, the people he was grateful for, the people he appreciated and who said kind things. Of course those people were there, and of course, I imagine, he also felt those things.

Every day I think dark, mean, judgmental, self-righteous thoughts, and then my rational brain swoops in and corrects me. When the mother of the young girl at school offered to walk my daughter to class I looked at her and thought, You’re ruining this. Of course, it was so nice of her to offer, and she had no idea that Layla only wanted to walk in with the girl and not a parent. Of course.

When I read the chapter that ended with, “Where are you motherfucking assholes?” I thought, man he’s angry. And he’s grieving. And he just lost both his parents. And now he’s responsible for his little brother. “Where are you motherfucking assholes” is a thought he had when he was 21 years old at his mother’s funeral. Is that shocking or completely reasonable? To all the people who didn’t show up to his mother’s funeral, who might read the book—what will they think? Will they be appalled by what he’s written? Should he rewrite that part so as not to offend? I’m reminded of a line from a Taylor Swift song: A friend to all is a friend to none. When you try to appease and please anyone, even just one person, you write something that resonates with no one.

Later, when he’s living with just his brother, he goes out one night and leaves Toph with a babysitter. Dave is riddled with guilt and fear about what might happen while he’s gone—the babysitter is surely going to molest and kill his brother. Then while out at the bar, a friend asks him where Toph is, and all Dave can imagine is his brother’s morbid murder right at that very moment. He writes,

“These questions. These people should know better. Are all my friends morons?”

These lines aren’t couched with caveats about how his friends of course have the best intentions and he doesn’t really think they’re morons, or gosh, that’s nice not a nice thing to say and I know that but I’m so worried about my brother and I wish he hadn’t just said that to me. It’s as if Dave the writer has decided to trust me the reader with his story. He’s telling it to me the same way he would a trusted friend. He doesn’t need to apologize or explain or backpedal because he knows I won’t judge him and I’m just there for him. He’s allowed to vent.

In another scene, Dave’s friend has threatened to commit suicide, and Dave shows up at his apartment.

“I go to the bathroom, open the medicine cabinet, dumping everything, more recklessly than I need to, throwing things. I knock over stuff in the shower even. It’s kind of fun. I come up with two prescription-looking bottles. Evidence! I stomp out and hover over him.”

This was not a funny moment. His friend ends up in the hospital. The fact that he had the thought, “It’s kind of fun,” is completely inappropriate. It’s one of those kinds of thoughts that I’ve had and immediately following it I think, That’s a terrible thought, I shouldn’t have thought that.

How many thoughts do we have like this?

In another scene, Dave is at Toph’s school, standing outside with the other parents, waiting for the kids to get out, and he overhears a mom talking about her son.

“‘I figure if he’s gonna smoke, he’s gonna smoke.’ She shrugs elaborately. ‘So I let him fire up at home. At least I know where he is, what he’s doing, that he’s not driving around or something.’

Though she is talking to another parent, she is glancing my way. I have the feeling she expects me, because I am closer to her high schooler’s age than she is, and, because I have creative facial hair, to be sympathetic to her point of view.

But I’m too stunned to speak. She should be jailed. And I should raise her children. Maybe I’m the only one qualified to raise all these kids—so many of these parents are too old, dusty. Worse are those like her, who dress like their children and use their expressions. But ‘fire up’? Who says ‘fire up’?”

Recently I’ve been sending voice notes to my girlfriends in the states. I send these when I’m walking along the dirt roads of Uruguay, and before I press record, I look to my left and right, and then behind me, to make sure none of the parents in my cohort are around, because I’m about to let rip. I’m going to say things I’m not supposed to say, and would be horrified if anyone but my friends heard. I say these things to my friends because it is safe, and I know they will not think I’m a terrible person because I’ve said them, and they will remind me that I’m human, and these thoughts are not all of me, and it’s okay to have them. It’s okay to have dark thoughts without also sharing the immediately rational after-thoughts.

So writing honestly is not enough. Or rather, it’s too much—it’s too much to include the devil on your shoulder followed by the angel. A friend to all is a friend to none. Do you dare share only your devilish side, knowing that you absolutely will, by some people—potentially many people—be judged for it?

—

Until next week,

Charlie

Fiona was late for school. I needed 8-year-old Fiona to arrive because I needed her to walk Layla to her classroom, otherwise Layla would cling to me and refuse to go in.

The same thing happened in Greece, and Sam and I didn’t know what to do to make school dropoff easier, until one morning on the playground Rory approached. She was in the 10-12-year-old class and both our kids adored her. She bent down and looked Layla in the eyes. “Layla, can I walk you in?” Layla nodded, let go of my hand and grabbed Rory’s and didn’t look back. From then on, Rory, or any of the many older girls who knew Layla, seamlessly walked her into school without tears or hesitation.

In La Barra I started scouting the older girls. Who could walk my daughter into class? Then I saw it. Over the weekend, Layla said hi to Fiona at the family hub, and Fiona, a friendly, outgoing girl, approached and said hi and picked her right up like a baby doll. She was the one.

Usually, or at least for the past three days, Fiona was early to school. Observing her from afar Sam concluded that Fiona liked to be early, to be on time, and if she was going to walk Layla to her classroom then we also needed to be on time. We could not hold Fiona up.

Sam walked George in, and more and more families walked past me and Layla. Some started to ask if Layla was going to school. I told them we were waiting for Fiona. We waited and waited. Then Eva walked up. Another young girl in the 10-12 class. I said good morning and gave her a quick hug. She was not close with Layla, but after she walked past, onto the playground, and there was still no sign of Fiona, I bent down and asked Layla if she would want Eva to walk her in, since Fiona wasn’t here. She gave me a single nod.

“Okay let’s go,” I said, grabbing her hand and walking through the gate and onto the playground. No sign of Eva. We missed our chance. Dammit. It was nearly 9:00 and Layla would have to go in soon. I spotted another young girl, who had never interacted with Layla but seemed nice. “What about Rayna?” I asked Layla. “Would you be okay with her walking you in?” She hesitated, then nodded. Rayna was talking with her mom. I approached and interrupted without saying excuse me, getting down on my knee to bypass her mother and speak directly to Rayna.

“Hey Rayna, can I ask you a favor?” This is the second time I’ve asked a kid I barely know for a favor—the first being Fiona—and both times the look I got back was full of skepticism and distrust. I needed to lead with a better question. I was practically a stranger to this girl. We did play a card game together once, at the hub, a big group of us, and she sat across from me, and I offered her a piece of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and she said no. “Do you think you could walk Layla into her class?”

“Okay,” she said, looking towards the classroom door only a few feet away, but then I told her that in the mornings they have to walk around to the back of the school. “Oh,” she said, clearly regretting her decision, “I don’t know where to go…”

Her mom, a very nice woman, interjected. “Rayna, I bet Layla could show you where her classroom is.” Rayna didn’t immediately respond so her mother continued, “C’mon, let’s go. Layla, can you show us where your classroom is? We can all go together.”

Rayna’s mother, although well-intentioned, was ruining this. Layla did not want to walk in with a parent. She wanted to walk in with a kid—a kid who wanted to walk in with her. The opportunity was dead. It was over. Couldn’t she see that? I thanked them, anyway, mad at the pair of them, and pulled out my phone. Good morning! I texted Fiona’s mother at 8:59am. Just wanted to see if Fiona was coming to school today.

No response. No three dots to let me know she was typing. She knew how important this was, how much of a struggle it’s been dropping off Layla. A little heads up would have been nice. How hard is it to send a text, let me know they’re late today? I should have stopped Eva when I had the chance. Fiona likes to be early. We can’t be late, Sam said. Early my ass. He cares so much about putting people out. What about people putting us out?

It’s after 9:00 and I have to walk Layla in. I get down at eye level. I apologize to her. I’m mad at her, too. She loves school, always so smiley when I pick her up. She never even sees me when I arrive to pick them up after school because she’s too busy waiting in line with her friends to climb the outdoor rock wall. Why can’t she just go in? I tell her we have to go. I ask her if we can have a good dropoff. She nods. The kids have already sat down for Circle Time. We’re late, interrupting the morning routine. Layla does not go easily. Her teacher gets up, full of cheer as she greets Layla, coaxing her with exciting plans for the day that I am not listening to. Layla is off my leg and as soon as our bodies are separated, I bolt. She reaches for me but I leave and it’s quiet. No crying. She will be okay. She’s sad but she’ll be okay.

I speed walk to the school entrance and there is Fiona’s mother. She is blase in her greeting. Apologetic sort of but it feels more like a, “Sorry not sorry.” They had to move out of their apartment yesterday because of a mold problem, so I guess my daughter’s well-being was not important to her. I laugh and say it’s okay, it’s no problem. I’m always laughing. I laugh when I feel uncomfortable, I laugh when I didn’t hear what you said, I laugh when you said something funny, I laugh when you didn’t say something funny but you think you did, I laugh when I’m confused, I laugh when I like you, I laugh when I don’t like you. Fiona’s mother is on a bicycle, also headed to our Spanish lesson, and she rides off, leaving me in her dust. I am walking.

This was supposed to be a calm, peaceful walk. It was homework from my breathing coach, to get my body moving outside in the mornings. I am striding my legs longer, pumping my arms, feeling anything but peaceful and calm. I hate being late. I hate rushing. It’s beautiful, sunny, and getting warmer by the minute. I take off my light jacket and tie it around my waist. Should I skip the cafe and go straight to my Spanish lesson? No. I need a snack. And I need coffee. Fine, I don’t need coffee. I want coffee. I don’t care if coffee is the reason I can’t catch my breath. I want it. I have an hour and 45-minute Spanish lesson. I am a student again and I deserve coffee.

I can’t catch my breath. I can’t walk into this class late without telling everyone what I’ve been through, and everyone should know about the morning I’ve had. It’s the only way to dissipate the anxiety—is to tell everyone. Both mothers of the young girls I tried to recruit to walk Layla into school will be in my class. How do I tell the story without blaming them? Probably by laughing a lot. Is that passive aggressive? Or just aggressive? Or something else?

I have an idea. I’ll buy snacks for everyone. Borneo Coffee is supposed to have great pastries. I’ll get a whole spread. You can be late if you bring treats. I’m feeling better now. Breathing easier. How do you say, “I am late,” in Spanish? Yo soy… no that’s wrong. It’s not permanent. Yo estoy…. late. I have no idea how to say late so I’ll just say Yo estoy late. And then my teacher will correct me but he’ll be so thrilled that I’m trying to speak to him in Spanish, and he’ll see that I have lemon cake and date balls and chocolate chip cookies and medialunas, for everyone, and everyone will love me.

—

Until next week,

Charlie

I parked my car in front of a rickety old gate. Behind it was a long dirt road that curved out of sight, and on either side was land as far as the eyes could see. A weird location, I thought, for a sports medicine doctor. He’d messaged me on WhatsApp with instructions to make sure I closed the gate behind me.

Once back in my rental car I drove along the road, looking left and right at sheep and horses and donkeys grazing on either side of me. I kept driving and driving, wondering how long this dirt road went and if there was really a sports medicine office in the middle of a farm. If he hadn’t been recommended to me by one of the moms in Boundless I might have been a little freaked out. After two minutes of driving I saw a parked car, and behind it a little cottage, or a little shack more like it. When I slowed, Ben emerged and waved. I parked and got out of my car laughing. “Well this was not what I was expecting,” I said, and immediately regretted it when he said, “No? What were you expecting?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “like, a building?”

He turned and gestured to his office with a smile. “We have a building.”

He was of average height, strong, his gaze intense, with a shaved head, dark eyebrows and a dark goatee. His presence was warm and serious. What I most noticed about him was his accent. He was from Belgium and sounded British. If I ever engaged with ChatGPT with more than text, I would most certainly choose a man with a British accent.

Once inside, I sat down next to Ben on a low, wide couch and he asked me to tell him more about my neck pain. I had a stress fracture two years ago, at least that’s what my physical therapist in North Carolina assured me—I never had an X-ray taken because he told me there was nothing I could do except wait for it to heal. There was pain long before that, though, ever since college. I remember being in my early twenties, and one of my best friends from home commenting on this “thing I always did with my neck.” I was constantly twisting and turning it—these exaggerated motions to stretch it, I suppose, to relieve the pain. I was embarrassed when my friend pointed it out, that anyone noticed what I’d been doing.

The pain got worse when I was living in Greece. I went to a healer on the island and she referred me to Giorgio. He will heal you, she said, just as he had healed her. He will heal you, said Maria from the Boundless team—her husband was struck by lightning and Giorgio completely fixed his arm. He will heal you, said the Boundless cab driver—his mother went to him for back pain and now she didn’t have any back pain. At my first appointment Giorgio did acupuncture. It happened quickly—he put the needles in my body and left the room. I felt the familiar sense of panic that happens most times I’ve done acupuncture. I laid there on my stomach, trying to talk myself down. Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic. And then, as though against my will I let out a strangled, “Help!”

No one heard me, and then I did talk myself down, mortified at my desperate yelp.

When I came back two days later everyone in the office seemed disappointed and surprised when I told them I didn’t feel better. I hadn’t even told them I felt worse. Then Giorgio turned on some kind of electrical device and moved it over my shoulders and it crackled and suddenly I thought I was going to throw up. He had me lay down on my back.

“What is wrong with you?” he said. “Why are you so stressed? You are in Syros. It is beautiful here, no?”

I went five more times, twenty minutes across the island, seventy dollars for each session, twenty dollars for the cab ride, and the pain never improved. I finally wondered about my mental health, and soon after began taking Lexapro because I could get it over the counter in Syros. After I got back to North Carolina, my doctor laughed when I shyly asked him if it was okay that I had started taking it without consulting with him first.

“Charlie, do you know how many prescriptions I’ve written for Lexapro?” he said. “Probably 10,000. Of course you should be taking it. Should Sam be on it? Heck, I should probably be on it.”

The drugs seemed to help momentarily but after a few weeks the pain came back. Not all the time but easily triggered—by bending over moving boxes and filling them for an hour, or a five minute game of indoor basketball with the kids, or pushing myself a touch too hard on an exercise during a workout with my trainer. I would feel the familiar tightening in my neck and know I’d be paying for it for the next week or two or month.

After I stood and Ben looked at me from front, back, and side, he explained that our rib cages are shaped like a barrel—or that they should be. The front side of the barrel—my chest—was good, but my back was concave. He gave me some breathing exercises to breathe more into my back to expand it, then he did some manual work on my neck, and then even more massage on my upper back.

Ninety minutes later Ben asked, “What was your pain level at when you came in today, on a scale of 1 to 10?”

I’ve recently wondered how anyone knows how high or low their pain tolerance really is. I assumed mine was high because I’m a former athlete and I gave birth to my son without an epidural, but last year my trainer held a theragun to the back of my knee and I was certain he was going to shatter it, that what he was doing back there—pressing the vibrating ball into the muscle behind my knee—was close to inhumane. I cried out and gripped the sides of the flat bed, immediately sweating at my forehead. He finally stopped, as calm as if he were giving me a soothing massage, and when I asked if the pain was normal he nodded and said, “You’re a little sensitive.”

“A six,” I told Ben definitively (which was realistically what, a three??).

“Wow,” he said, and I wished I’d said something lower. “What’s it at now?”

“A two,” I said, knowing I felt better but having no confidence in this numbers game.

The next time I saw Ben I mentioned that I’d just started working with a breathing coach and he asked why. I told him that initially it was to help with my sleep, but now I was hoping it would help with my neck pain.

“What’s wrong with your sleep?”

“I toss and turn because I can’t get comfortable, and because I have bad dreams.”

Ben was curious about the dreams. “I’m not a dream expert so we won’t get into it, but it’s worth analyzing, because our dreams are our subconscious sending us important messages.”

When I got home I told Sam.

“So what are you supposed to do with that?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I need to look up a dream expert.”

“So you had a healer in Greece, a sports medicine doctor in Urugugay… maybe you’ll find a dream expert in Japan.”

—

Until next week,

Charlie

I didn’t know what to expect when George tried surfing. There was much excitement from him in the days, weeks, and months, leading up to it—he was going to ride on top of waves!—but I didn’t know if he’d given any thought to what it would be like to sink beneath those waves.

It wasn’t until he was walking on the beach in his little wetsuit, his instructor carrying the large white surfboard that was connected to George’s ankle with velcro, that I felt for the first time in my body what my son must be feeling, too. The excitement, the adrenaline, the fear. Maybe that’s not what he was feeling but it felt like I was going out in the ocean with him, as him, through his 5-year-old eyes.

George has always been risk-averse and cautious, and on beach trips, when parents asked if we got nervous with him playing so close to the ocean, we answered no because you can’t get swept away in a current if you don’t go in past your ankles. I’m not sure where his excitement for surfing came from. Maybe it was a TV show or a book—we do all love when Pete the Cat goes surfing the first time—but when we asked George about which extra curricular activities he wanted to do after school he said, “I want to do all of them, but definitely surfing.”

I was surprised again when he volunteered to go out with the first group of kids, and held my breath when the first wave crashed over him, and again when it looked like the board hit him in the face. Each time I saw no reaction as he and his instructor moved further out, past more waves, until the instructor turned around and, keeping a hold of the tail-end of the board, followed George in on a wave. George stood up and put his arms out, looking like a real little surfer. I continued to watch them move out together and ride waves in, until one time, the instructor let go of the board, pushing George away from him, and George surfed until he fell off the board and disappeared beneath the water. He popped up, his eyes huge, coughing, and fairly quickly went back out again.

By the end I could see him getting tired, slower, and after a good final surf he stood on the shore pulling at the velcro on his ankle. His instructor approached, placing his hands on his knees and getting eye level with George. From far away I could tell he was asking, “One more?”

George stood up, panting, his little chest heaving, and nodded.

“I can’t believe they’re going out again,” I said to Sam. We were on the sand, taking videos and a million pictures, occasionally throwing a panicked glance over our shoulders to make sure Layla was still playing in the sand with her friend from school.

George was coming in, riding his last wave, his instructor far behind him. He was close enough to shore when he fell off his board but his legs were wobbly and he went under. His instructor caught up to him as he emerged, looking shocked and with a sour look on his face that told me salt water had gone up his nose, but he did not cry, and while his instructor carried the board they walked side-by-side out of the ocean.

As soon as George got near us, after the velcro was removed from his ankle, his face scrunched up into the silent before-cry and then he was sobbing and shivering. Sam and I wrapped him in his little blue Mickey Mouse towel and words of praise. “Buddy! You were amazing out there! We are so, so proud of you! Are you okay??” He answered with sobs and a few words to indicate that he swallowed salt water. I wondered if that last go was one too many, if he pushed too hard, if now, instead of loving surfing, he was traumatized by it. He kept crying and his teeth were chattering and I realized in that moment that my son had never really experienced being cold. I was always there after the shower, or the pool, or the beach, ready to wipe him down with a dry towel and put on clean, warm clothes, like his own personal pitstop team in a Nascar race to comfort.

I wanted George to do something hard and go beyond his comfort level but as he continued to cry I wondered if it was too much. I rubbed the towel on his shoulders and he caught his breath. “I want to do it again next week,” he said, and I bent down to see the tiniest smile on his face. Sam and I cheered and all the celebration that happened when George first came out of the water repeated itself, only this time George’s blue lips were smiling with ours.

—

Until next week,

Charlie

It is my first venture out to a market, alone, in Uruguay.

Up until this point I have done all errands with Sam and he has communicated with the locals in broken Spanish while I have stood beside him and smiled and said gracias. I pick out four red apples at the outside stand, then move inside the market and grab two ripe avocados. I avoid eye contact with the man working so I don’t have to embarrass myself by not speaking the language. Then I realize how rude that is, and look at him and say, “Buenes.”

I learned yesterday at the Boundless Destination Discovery meeting—that I attended with all the parents while the kids were at school—that they don’t really say hola here in La Barra—they say buenes. They don’t say adios either, and of course as I write this I can’t remember what they do say for goodbye.

Staring into the large refrigerators I finally pick out a large bag of chives, some muddy spinach leaves, and a red bell pepper. I place the produce in a basket by the register, as I saw Sam do the other day, and wait to be helped. The man who works here approaches and says something in Spanish, probably asking me if I’m ready.

“Ah, no hablo espanol,” I say. I notice how I often say “Ah,” in a foreign country whereas in the states I say “Um.” He nods, as if this wasn’t painfully obvious already. I point to the paper towels behind the register and try to read the label.

“Ahhhh, toallas de papel?”

He grabs me a roll. Then I type into Google translate: Do you have dishwasher detergent? I hold the phone out to him and he says no.

I continue to scan the items behind the counter.

“Huevos?” I say, not because I remember how to say eggs but because there’s a sign.

He asks me a question, maybe how many, but I have no idea what to say so I just say, “Ahhhhh…” and he holds up two thin clear plastic bags full of eggs, one more full than the other. How can they possibly be stored like that without breaking? I point to the smaller bag. The eggs here are not refrigerated, and every morning I rinse the remnants of dirt and sometimes feathers off each one before cracking them into a bowl.

He finishes ringing me up and asks another question. When I stare at him blankly he holds up the avocado and points outside the store and then inside the store.

“Ah,” I say, and point to the avocados located inside the store. He asks another question in Spanish and I stare at him blankly, again, and he holds up a bag.

“Ah, yes, si! How do you say bag?”

“Bolsa.”

I make a mental note to ask Sam how to say, “How do you say…?”

“Bolsa,” I repeat. “Si, bolsa, por favor.”

He smiles, and I pay with my card, and I say gracias about seven times before I walk out without saying bye because I don’t know how to.

It is our third day living in La Barra, Uruguay, and I am reminded of the way I felt in my first days living in Greece. There is the similar feeling of overwhelm—what with not knowing my way around, or how to speak the language, or who any of these other parents are and wondering if I’ll connect with even a single person, and trying to keep up with all the events as there seems to be something to attend every day in the first week, and wondering when I’ll finally have time to sit and write and work, and screaming at George over and over because he refuses to stay on the side of the dirt road and definitely refuses to hold my hand until I grab him and drag him across the street and tell him there will be consequences, but I can think of no other consequence than taking away TV so that is what I do, and he cries, “Mama, please can I have one more chance?!” and that makes me even angrier because he has no remorse for the danger he puts himself in, so I crouch down at eye level and tell him that he could “literally die” and he cries some more about the TV being taken away—but now that I’ve experienced this once, I know this is all normal and part of it of it, and that the first two weeks in Boundless require a grace period. So while it is overwhelming, it is less so, which I suppose comes with doing anything a second time.

Later that night, when Sam and I are laying in bed after a long, two-hour bedtime, we stare at the ceiling, sometimes saying out loud what we thought about the day that has just occurred. Then Sam puts on his headphones to listen to a podcast and I open my book to read. Sam pulls the white airpods from his ears and says, “Oh by the way, George kept asking me about the bidet and what it’s for, so I was sitting on the toilet, and I just wanted to see what happened when I turned it on, like what direction it would come out and how fast it would come...”

Bidets had been in every hotel bathroom upon our arrival in South America. In our house, both bathrooms had bidets. I knew you used them to wash your butt instead of using toilet paper, but how did it work? Did you sit on it or squat over it? Did the water come out like a drinking water fountain? I had no idea. I figured it would sit untouched for the next three months.

“So I just went to like, barely turn on it, just to see…”

I am shocked that Sam tested this out and the anticipation of his story is making me giggly.

“...The water hit the ceiling.”

I close my book and let out a loud laugh, imagining the look on Sam’s face as his eyes followed the stream up to the ceiling.

“So then I was like, alright well let me just try it, so I get over it, and I try to line it up, but I’m a little off, and the water sprays all up my back. Then it’s dripping down my legs and all over my feet.”

“I can’t believe you’re just telling me this now!” I practically yell, unable to stop laughing. “So what happened next?”

“I just wiped it all with toilet paper but I’m like, how do people use this every time? You get so wet. And I didn’t even know which direction to go over it, like if I was facing the wrong way…”

“I was wondering the same thing! You should’ve watched a Youtube video.”

“I thought about that but I was just like, I don’t want Claude to know I’m doing this.”

The next day we do watch a YouTube video, and I do ask ChatGPT, and it seems that both sources indicate it was not, in fact, normal for the water to shoot up to the ceiling. I continue to look at the fixture next to the toilet that looks like a toilet-sink-urinal, wondering if it’s broken, if I should try it, if it will “change my life” as some of the people in the YouTube videos stated.

It’s too much change too soon, at least in the first week in a new country, so instead I only consider small changes, like replacing my morning cup of coffee with a pumpkin gourd of yerba mate.

—

Until next week,

Charlie

March 26

We walked through every room in the house, hugged the garbage truck driver and our neighbors across the street, and filled every crevice of our Kia Telluride with stuff. We’d already sold, donated, or trashed so much of it. We’d already sent one moving truck of boxes and furniture to the storage unit in Charlotte. We’d already shipped another seven boxes to my in-laws’ house. Still, somehow, we barely fit the rest. There was a glass coffee pot, nut milk maker, suitcases weighing 49.7 pounds, two travel car seats, two moon pals, a weighted vest and coloring books shoved under my seat. Pillows, blankets, jackets, shoes, pull-ups.

With the car feeling heavier and lower to the ground, we pulled out of our driveway for the last time. Sam cheered. He asked if I was sad. Only a little, I said.

March 27

We sold our car. On the way back to my in-laws house, Sam and I screamed over each other because I was supposed to tell him where to turn but I didn’t because I thought he heard the GPS lady tell him to turn left, and he had also asked me to text his mom, and he should know by now that multi-tasking is not a skill I possess.

As we sat in silence I imagined myself being interviewed, and the interviewer asking me to describe my husband. Ambitious, practical, neurotic. I needed better words than that for my life partner. I tried to think of more. What did I love about my husband? Encouraging, supportive, curious; always growing, trying, learning. We resolved the argument before we got back to the house. He never lets us stay mad for long. I do love that about him.

March 28

I finished reading Part 2 of Jonathan Livingston Seagull to George. In the story, a seagull becomes enamored with learning to fly fast and is outcast by the flock for going against the normal way seagulls live. When they decide his fate to send him away, Jonathan tries to tell them about the joy and freedom of flying, how much they are missing out on in their existence as birds who only eat to live and stay on the sand.

After reading, we listened to the Pinocchio Tonie and I laid down next to George in his little make-shift bed on the floor at Grandma’s house. Ten minutes later, he was looking up at the ceiling and said, “They didn’t even listen to him, they didn’t give him a chance to explain.”

March 29

We bought seven storage bins at Target and filled them with stuff: bath towels, books, stuffed animals, free weights, clothes, the kids’ elephant and dinosaur banks, old notes I’d saved from middle school that my girlfriends had passed to me in the hallway between classes, dinner plates I insisted on saving that Sam questioned so often that I finally said we didn’t have to keep them and he assured me over and over that we should. I labeled each bin with painters tape—on the top and the side so we could find them in the sea of boxes if we ever needed to-—and brought them to the storage unit.

March 30

I sent Sam a draft of my newsletter, as I always do before publishing. “Eh, I didn’t love it,” he said, and suggested I punt it another week. Don’t rush it. I frantically made a note in my phone of potential things I could write about. None of it interested me. I sent Emma four panicked texts. She read my newsletter, sent me a voice note and talked me down. When Sam caught me hiding in the dining room on my laptop he said, “Uh, you need to not be doing that right now. You need to pack. You’ll have time at the airport.” I finished packing our suitcases and shoved everything not coming with us into a bedroom closet in the guest room.

March 31

The kids said goodbye to their grandparents. “Take lots of pictures!” Grandma said as she hugged George. “That’s what everyone says,” George said with a laugh.

“You must be tired,” my mother in law said to me. I was up late the night before, finishing my newsletter and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the flight. “At least you’re going on vacation.”

“Jan, we’re not going on vacation,” I said. “We’re going on life.”

April 1

Tears streamed down George’s face when we told him it was really time to go to breakfast. We told him he was hungry, he would feel better when he ate, but he kept demanding six more minutes to play with his magnetic people in the hotel room. Once settled in the booth at Pura Vida in Ft. Lauderdale, Layla cried because she didn’t like her seat, even though she chose her seat. We told her she was hungry, she would feel better when she ate.

As the kids quietly ate their scrambled egg wrap, strawberries, blueberries, oatmeal and avocado toast, we reminded them of the challenges of traveling and keeping their emotions in check. They glanced at us without comment.

Two hours later, while the kids sat on the bed watching Xavier Riddle together, and Sam and I repacked all the suitcases so that none of them exceeded the weight limit, we were notified that we closed on our house. We were officially no longer homeowners.

April 2

George would not agree, once again, to leave the hotel room for breakfast. I reminded him, once again, how hunger worked.

The young woman taking our order at the cafe did not understand English and had to ask her manager to translate for us when we asked for a bagel with butter for the kids. Our food took a little long, and George laid on the ground doing some combination of whining and crying and saying, “I’m hungry! I’m hungry right now!” We had arrived in Montevideo, Uruguay early that morning after an overnight flight from Bogota, Colombia and none of us had slept much.

The food arrived and we ate the best breakfast burrito we’d ever tasted—thinly smoked ham and leafy greens and pico and freshness wrapped in a thin warm tortilla with a crispy bite. The water came in glass Coke bottles. My iced latte was strong and smooth.

We walked back to the hotel on big sidewalks, the kids skipping along with full bellies as we passed local shops and eateries. I placed a hand on Sam’s back, the warm sun on my face and Jonathan Livington Seagull on my mind. “I think we might need to move out of the country for good,” I said.

—

Until next week,

Charlie