Have you ever sensed a divorce coming before the couple does?

You (and maybe a few of your friends) start connecting the dots behind the scenes, collecting data from social media like amateur detectives.

Small signs.

He stops liking her posts.

Even the ones where she’s showing more skin.

The ones everybody likes.

She starts posting quotes about the unseen labor of motherhood.

“Please see me,” she begs in social media speak.

“I don’t care,” he never answers.

Not even giving a single half-second heart.

My own divorce was a long time coming, with all the signs and expected accoutrement, but it still felt like being blindsided, like being T-boned by a semi-truck while on my way to the grocery store, getting ingredients for dinner.

“I want to be one family again, like Madison. She has her Mommy and Daddy in the same house,” my daughter tells me years later, snuggled up in my arms before bed.

“I know, sweetpea. I’m so sorry,” I tell her, thinking about how we were once one family too.

Maybe Madison’s mommy doesn’t know her daddy is cheating yet.

Maybe she’s not ready to see the signs.

We lived in the same house too. I’d post the same “The best Daddy in the world!” caption alongside a carefully selected picture on Father’s Day. Just like Madison’s mom does now.

“Happy Birthday to the love of my life! Can’t wait for a lifetime of more adventures together”

More bullshit.

Maybe sometimes you just can’t see the obvious because you have been covering it up the entire time.

I did a lot of that.

Other moments, your life is changed in a heartbeat and the truth rises to the surface, no longer fitting under the leather rug you both picked out.

It’s almost like you can’t see it.

The part of you that loves them won’t let you. Seeing it means feeling it, and feeling it hurts.

Lately, I have been reflecting on the third day of school, three years ago.

A day that may or may not have been the catalyst for the tumblefuck of a rollercoaster my life has been since then.

Our daughter was so excited to finally start preschool, and our son was entering kindergarten.

Monumental moments as a mother.

This was what I signed up for. Packing lunches with care, school pictures, chaperoning field trips.

But by the end of that school year, I wouldn’t be allowed within 1,000 feet of the school. Or my kids. Or my home.

By our son’s 7th birthday I would be in jail.

And I never saw it coming.

In the foothills, school starts when summer finally gives in. Community power outages that sprinkled the summer season shift to wildfires popping up in neighboring towns.

A few years after we moved here, my husband’s parents decided to sell their Santa Cruz estate to relocate even closer to their grandchildren.

They settled in another beautiful home with another stunning pool and garden, albeit further inland. I was grateful for the 38-minute distance between our homes.

I was also grateful for the pool. We all were.

So, on that day, like we often did, the four of us went for a swim after school, celebrating the start of a new year.

The kids took turns jumping from the side of the pool, a rock waterfall and lush landscaping surrounding them.

I sat on a lounge chair in the shade, rating their jumps on a 1–10 scale.

“9.56. Extra points for style.”

“A triple-spin pencil jump. I’ve never seen anything like it!”

My husband was handling a barrage of text messages about an audio project he had been working on. He’d occasionally step a few feet away to take a phone call, patiently explaining the different versions of a song he had just finished.

As the day wore on, the kids grew hungry, so we made a quick plan to grab a burger on the way home.

“I’m gonna take my bike back today,” my husband told me as we headed out.

“You guys can follow me.”

“Follow Daddy!” our daughter said.

“Yes, we will keep him safe!” I chimed in as we watched him start up the motorcycle, putting on his gloves and tightening his helmet.

“Keep Daddy safe!” she repeated.

“We sure will!” I added.

We ate dinner, and I took pictures of the kids against the white and red interior of In-N-Out. They were so happy just eating dinner.

Together.

After we finished, he told us he was going to take a longer route home to keep us off the highway.

“We’ll keep you safe, Daddy,” my daughter said again.

“Thank you, I will be safe.”

I never worried about my husband on the bike. He was careful with it, like he was with most things he valued.

I’d later learn the distinction over whether or not he valued something mattered.

I buckled the children into the backseat of our Chevy Volt, a great little all-electric car that I both loved and hated. Today, we didn’t have the juice for the AC, so I wasn’t as much of a fan.

We kept pace behind him as he led us down the winding mountain roads, studded by towering pine trees and golden grass, the dry summer heat flowing through our hair, music blasting to distract us.

The road switched back and forth, the motorcycle disappearing in and out of view.

“Bye Bye Miss American Pie, I drove the Chevy to the levy, but the levy was dry,” I sang back at my kids, who were too hot and tired to respond. I took my act up a notch, swaying from side to side.

“I know that you’re in love with him, when I saw you dancing in the gym.” I doubled down my vibrato.

They were unamused.

I see why he wanted to come down here. Such a beautiful drive.

As we made a turn, I noticed him speed up.

I pushed harder on the gas pedal to stay close.

And that’s when I spot her…

Not a big deer, but not a small deer.

Standing on the side of the road, eating grass, she stops to look up.

Time slows down.

“Don’t do it,” I say out loud.

“Don’t do it,” I repeat as she takes a step forward.

“What, Mom?” my son asks, worried by the sound of my voice.

“DON’T DO IT!” I scream as she leaps in front of the bike.

For a moment, the bike swerves.

He tried. As I’d tell a thousand times later, he really tried to avoid that deer.

But the trajectory of the deer and the trajectory of the motorcycle collide.

You can’t argue physics.

“NO NO NO NO. NO NO NO NO,” I say over and over again, watching him fly off the bike.

“NO NO NO NO NO NO,” I say again.

His body flew forward off the bike, rolling sideways several times down the empty road, over and over until he skids facedown to a slow stop.

The motorcycle, his beloved vintage Triumph, continues, driverless, like a headless horseman, until it crashes into a ditch on the opposite side of the road, making an obnoxiously loud noise, still running.

Otherwise, nothing.

No other movement.

No other cars.

I am the only adult in the room.

“What, Mommy? What?” the kids break the silence from the backseat, not understanding what just happened.

“Daddy got hurt,” I say, putting the car into park, already unbuckled.

“See, this is why we wear helmets,” I say, instantly cringing at myself for turning this into a teachable moment.

As it turns out, I didn’t know much about helmets back then.

“Did we keep Daddy safe?” my daughter asks, tears in her eyes.

I answer honestly.

“We tried.”

I opened the car door and surveyed the scene before me.

The deer is motionless, a large black tire track across her chest, lying still on the opposite side of the road.

A few feet in front of me, my husband lies just as still.

Otherwise, the road is empty.

I hear the bike screaming, and then I notice the flames licking up the body of the bike, eager to taste the golden August brush.

Fucking wildfire season. Here we go.

My phone is ringing.

He’s not moving.

If he’s dead, I’ll be fine, I think, surprising myself with the truth.

“Do you ever look back and think… if only?” people would later ask, half joking, half curious.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“My husband hit a deer on his motorcycle. He is lying facedown in a puddle of blood.”

“Do not roll him over,” the operator insists, even though every cell in my body is screaming to roll him over.

“Place your hand on his back and stay on the line with me,” she says. “Count every time he breathes.”

I place my hand on his back. I can vaguely feel the gurgling.

“One,” I finally say, after what feels like an eternity.

I wait.

I wait.

Fuck.

Finally. Bubbles in the blood.

“Two.”

I wait.

I wait.

I wait.

Is he dying right now? With my hand on his back? This cannot be real life.

Breathe already!

“Three.”

At some point, I must have made it to ten.

Cars.

In front of us. Behind us.

A man is beside me who seems to know what he is doing. My husband isn’t on his back anymore.

Who turned him over? Did I?

The man asks me his name. Starts talking to him. Saying his name over and over again.

I look over at the bike on fire in the ditch and notice a hose attached to a man in overalls, wetting the ground around the bike. He seems so calm. The motorcycle is still screaming.

No ambulance. No flashing lights.

More cars. Questions.

A woman asks for my keys.

“To move your car.”

“Huh?” I ask, confused.

Sirens in the distance.

“Your kids,” she says. “Is it okay if I move them away?”

My kids!

“Yes, please,” I tell her. “The keys are in the car. It’s almost out of electricity, so I can’t run the AC.”

She asks if she can take them for a walk.

Please.

Chaos swirls around me as paramedics and police arrive.

He’s talking now. Asking what happened.

“He hit a deer,” I say over and over.

They need to check my car. The front bumper. Just to be sure.

“You think I did all this?” I ask the officer, who is taking photos of the front of my car. “Like I hauled in a deer in the middle of the street and everything?”

“I’m not accusing you of anything, ma’am, but you would be surprised what some people are capable of doing to one another.”

I laugh, not understanding that within a year, I would understand with a bitter clarity I had not yet tasted.

“Is he going to be okay?” I ask every emergency worker on site.

“We can’t say,” they respond.

“But he’s talking, so he’s going to be okay, right?” I rephrase.

“We don’t know.”

He’s talking, so he’s okay. It’s not that serious, I answer myself.

Eventually, a Life Flight helicopter arrives.

Maybe it’s a little serious.

I see my kids each have a stuffed animal. It’s a moose wearing a red shirt that says TOMMY on it. They say the police officer gave it to them.

Poor Tommy, I think.

On the drive home, I arrange for a friend to stay the night with my kids, my head spinning.

Cancel the shows. Bring his glasses and contacts case. Clean boxers. Phone charger. This isn’t my first rodeo (or his first ICU stay).

Déjà vu all over again.

When I finally get through the extensive security at the ICU, to my surprise, my husband is awake. He tells me how much he hates the neck brace, the rigid, unforgiving plastic propping up his still bleeding face. The nurse tells him they will get him a more comfortable one eventually.

I repeat this many times.

He asks me what happened, confused.

And every time I explain that he hit a deer on his motorcycle, he asks me again what happened.

Five minutes later, he asks why he is in the hospital. Can I do something about the neck brace?

“He’ll probably never remember it. The helmet likely caused his brain injury,” a nurse eventually tells me while checking on the machines, motioning over to a small table that holds the helmet, boots and gloves.

“The helmet?” I ask.

“Half helmet.”

I look over at the banged-up helmet. It was dented along the front edge, paint scraped off and metal turned inward.

“What happened?” my husband asks again. “And why is this around my neck?”

After two nights at the hospital, he is discharged, to the surprise of the nurses.

“We’re on Medi-Cal,” I explain.

After discharge is when I first learn about the process of healing road rash, one that is gruesome and expensive in time and energy.

It started on the cheeks of his face, right where the helmet stopped.

His shoulders. Forearms. Lower back.

His knees were down to the bone.

Bandages needed to be changed at minimum twice a day, but at the beginning it was every three to four hours.

He never regained memory of the accident, living in a fog those weeks.

It seemed like he never quite woke up from the bad dream while I lived in the brutal aftermath of wounded flesh and memories.

“It looks so much better, babe,” I’d say, while he’d stare off into the distance, a pile of blood-soaked bandages stacked up beside me.

Each one would take a tiny piece of him with it, fusing itself to his flesh, trying to heal. The moment I would remove it, blood would begin pooling up in tiny dots, eventually running down his body as I stifled my horror.

He didn’t even seem to notice.

It was all I could see.

I quickly learned to buy the more (most) expensive, shiny bandages, but even those could not guarantee that I wouldn’t have my own personal gallery of gore multiple times a day.

Doing the wound care pained me in ways I couldn’t describe so I would cover it up with compliments.

“Wow, it’s like you got an amazing facial peel. You are going to be so rejuvenated after all this heals!”

Then I’d go to the bathroom and weep.

Meanwhile, school was off to the races, with theme days and events. I was doing my best to ask for help and do everything else that I could on my own, keeping the very worst of it to myself.

He refused the pain pills, opting for alcohol instead.

I had desperately hoped his mother, a retired nurse, would help me with his wound care. Instead, his parents would drop by for about twenty minutes, satisfying their own conscience, leaving some food and a few six-packs of IPA, his favorite, behind.

I would text articles to him and his parents, warning about the effects of TBI with drinking. Big things like seizures and death. Little things like how it thins the blood, further complicating my wound care routine.

No one ever texted back.

Blindness, it turns out, can be a choice for any of us.

And after about two weeks, he stopped asking what happened. He never remembered the deer or the accident, he just accepted it.

I wish I could say these were the hardest times of my life.

At the time, they were.

But not all accidents end at the scene.

Soon, small signs would start appearing, like those tiny droplets of blood.

Signs of deconstruction.

And since those dots only connect looking backward, I couldn’t see them at the time, even though they were right in front of me.

I was just so happy he was being encouraging of my hobby, roller skating.

But then I’d find my roller skates, clearly thrown from the car into the gravel outside, scattered and dirty, ten feet from the car.

“I took them out since I was using the car.”

“But why did you throw them?”

“I didn’t throw them.”

Once I came home from the roller rink smelling of cologne after skating with my dance partner, Derek, a gay 28-year-old man.

“You smell like another man,” he said.

“Oh, I’m not cheating, I promise,” I said, laughing.

“I wouldn’t mind if you did,” he responded, and my smile vanished.

He soon began casually telling me details about another mom.

Intimate details about her life. He didn’t seem to be aware he was showing his cards.

“How do you know so much about her?” I would ask.

“Oh, we just caught up the other day at school.”

“You sure seem to know a lot of details.”

He’d go on to tell me more.

One night, he had gone to bed early, and I couldn’t find my phone, which was likely stuck in a couch cushion or under some blankets or toys.

I grabbed his phone from the bedside table and found my name in the contacts, right above the CALL button, when he woke in a total panic.

“What are you doing?” he asked, lunging for the phone.

“Calling my phone,” I said, backing up. “I can’t find it.”

He jumped out of bed and ripped the phone out of my hands.

“Ask me before you use my phone!” he yelled, waking our kids.

“Geez. Can I use your phone to call my phone?” I asked.

“I’ll just do it. You need to keep better track of your stuff.”

Little things can say a lot if you’re listening.

About eight months after the accident, he started repeating, “Life is too short to be unhappy.” In ways that didn’t always line up with the conversation.

And eventually, it all came to a head one ordinary afternoon in late April.

“What do you want to do on our date day?” I ask him, referring to the upcoming Friday his parents planned to watch the kids.

“Do you want to clean the basement or the garage?” he asks.

“What?”

“The basement or the garage?” he asks again.

“Oh… I was thinking more like going to the river or out to dinner or something. Like a date.”

“So you don’t want to help me clean the basement and garage?” he asks, his words tinged with anger.

“Well, I’m willing to help you do those things, but I’d like to have an actual date on Friday.”

“It sounds like you don’t want to help me. Do you think I should have to just do it all by myself?”

“That’s not what I said,” I say, feeling the saying flush over me in a wave of familiarity that could quickly turn the conversation.

“You are never happy. You have wanted a divorce for years. I think we should just do that,” he says, like he’s finally picking out something for dinner.

I am stunned.

Yes, I had brought up divorce many times in the past, but not in the last six months. Not since our last big fight after the accident.

But he pushed on.

“We should just do it. Life is too short to be unhappy.”

And that phrase, “life is too short to be unhappy,” was something I was beginning to sense was a code for something he didn’t want to say.

It meant something more.

It meant life was too short to be married.

To me.

After a few days of bargaining, crying, reflecting, and ultimately getting some direct advice from an older couple, I filed for divorce.

I still don’t know if it was really my idea, but the papers say so.

I wish I could say it ended well.

But unfortunately, the person I married was not the same person I divorced.

Growing up in a middle-class Chicago suburb, square footage, tax brackets, and perfectly manicured lawns were quiet competitions.

Everyone wanted the greenest grass.

My family needed ours to be greener.

The nicest cars. The best clothes. The best vacations.

An arcade in the basement.

Perception was everything.

From the ou…

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“Do you believe in Jesus, Mom?” my four year old asks from the back seat as we wind our way home up the empty mountain road from my in laws.

The kids had spent the night after Easter so we could clean without them undoing it as we went. A small, impossible victory.

“What?” I ask, buying time.

“Do you believe in Jesus?”

“I do,” I say. “But I also believe in Buddha and Krishna. In all of them.”

I glance at my husband. His eyes stay on the road.

“But Jesus was the son of God,” he says.

“So are you, son.”

It comes out sharper than I mean it to.

“You have to pick Jesus,” he says. “Or you go to the fiery place.”

My husband shifts beside me.

“We won’t get to be together when you die if you don’t pick Jesus. You have to only pick Jesus.” I look back and see tears forming in his eyes.

“You know your cousins, they picked Buddha,” I say.

“Do they know about Jesus?”

I laugh without expecting to, turning to my husband, who then laughs as well.

How quickly he had been converted.

It doesn’t take long to trace it back.

My in laws raised my husband in churches where people spoke in tongues, where full grown adults hurled themselves on the ground, proclaiming Jesus had entered their bodies. “Holy Rollers,” my mom would call them.

They don’t attend those types of churches anymore, but some things don’t leave with the building.

They must have said something after we left.

Behind me, his tiny voice breaks, but pushes through:

“Please pick Jesus, Mom. You have to pick Jesus. He walked on water. He died for our sins. I want to be together after you die. I want you to go to heaven.”

I turn toward him, twisted in my seat, his small body held tight in the straps.

“I believe in Jesus,” I tell him, looking him square in the eyes. “And we will be together.”

That seems to be enough.

When I turn back, my husband shrugs.

Later, in the backyard I tell my father in law, “I respect your religion. I hope you can respect mine. I believe God is in everything.” I say looking up. “In the birds and the trees and in me and you and everything,” I say, starting to smile.

He looks back at me, blank, as if I’ve said nothing at all.

“Just please, no conversations about sex or religion with the kids.”

I don’t wait for an answer.

When I repeat the conversation back to my husband, he inhales sharply, as if I had said something wrong.

“What?” I ask.

“You can only pick Jesus,” he says.

“Well then they can pick Jesus,” I respond. “That was my whole point.”

He doesn’t answer.

The air turns stale.

It’s the first time I understand that what I believe isn’t just different. It’s unwelcome.

I am the kind of person who goes to the fiery place.

And suddenly, a few other moments make more sense.

The questions from our son stop after a while.

But something lingers.

It starts to surface at night.

Tucked under blankets, his head against my arm, he drifts back to it.

“I want to die,” he says.

“Why?” I ask.

“I want to die to go to heaven. You don’t have to clean up your toys there. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

I pull him closer.

“Heaven isn’t somewhere else,” I say.

“It’s right here.”

He fits against me, warm and heavy, already half asleep.

I couldn’t wait to show my mom.

I was so excited I felt like I was walking on air as I left the mall.

“I can’t wait to show my mom!” I told the saleswoman in the Marshall Field’s dress department as I stood before the mirror, twirling in what must be the most beautiful dress in the world.

I didn’t want to take it off.

I never felt pretty. Never tried to be. But at 16 I was starting to feel like maybe there was someone pretty hiding inside me. I needed to help her get out.

This school year felt different in that way. Most of my friends were older, not quite wiser, and when they graduated last spring I felt something open up. Being a junior without them there gave me space.

Mostly without Tara.

Tara was always a great friend to me, but part of me was glad she graduated. We met when we both ended up where we didn’t belong, Team Sports for our PE class. I was a freshman, she was a junior.

There were only a handful of girls. It was mostly teenage boys trying to get extra practice outside of junior or varsity teams, treating it more like a competition than a break from algebra and chemistry.

The first time I saw her, she was slumped against the gym wall, curly brown hair, taller than most of the boys, with lanky arms and legs. I’d see her like that again at parties months later, but that day she was alone, bored, annoyed, when a boy went flying across the gym, skidding face first across the floor.

Everyone stopped playing and stared at him.

Tara cackled from the sidelines, and the kid ran back over to her.

“Why would you do that?” he yelled, breathless.

“Do what?” she asked, now showing no emotion.

“Bitch.”

A few days later she walked up to me on the field while I lingered on the sidelines, trying not to get pulled into a soccer game.

“Your boyfriend is so hot,” she said.

And just like that, we were friends.

I didn’t have many friends, and after watching her trip a few more boys and launch spitballs across the lunchroom, I understood something.

It was better to be with her than against her.

“Give me your address, we’re hanging out today,” she said the first time we hung out.

My mom saw the car pull up from the sunroom, buried in a book, cigarette burning beside her.

“Who’s that?” she asked, squinting out the window.

“My friend Tara. We’re hanging out.”

“A Volvo is a really safe car,” she said, looking approvingly out at the driveway, as two loud honks cut through the house.

“See you later,” I said, pulling on a gigantic hoodie.

Tara drove me all over the suburbs, and later, to parties all over Chicago, at hours we had no business being out.

She blasted DJ Funk tapes, a local DJ her friend was sleeping with.

“Pop da pop da pop pop that pussy don’t stop get it get it better work your body baby,” the bass rattling the windows.

Toward the end of the day, the sun starting to drop, we pulled into a drive thru to order some food. The cashier was rude. Tara was worse.

We pulled up to the window. Tara handed me my drink, then stared at the girl inside.

“Hey cunt,” she said. “Fuck you.”

She threw her Coke, lid already off, straight through the window, drenching the cashier, and peeled out before we even got our food.

I had never seen anything like it.

“That’s what she gets,” Tara said, turning the music back up.

“There’s some hoes in this house…”

When she dropped me off, she grabbed my hand and looked straight at me.

“Thanks for hanging today. I like spending time with you. Let’s do it again.”

“Okay,” I said, my heart swelling.

I. like. spending time. with you.

Those words sank in deeper than anything. Someone older than me. Someone braver than me. Liked spending time with me. No one had ever made me feel this way.

I was her puppy after that.

And now that she’s left for college, there was more space to figuring out who I was without her. She was nice to me, most of the time, but really awful to everyone around us.

With the year 2000 approaching, I wanted to embrace the future version of myself.

One of the first things I did was start to change how I dressed. I still wore my phat pants, still listened to house music, but things were shifting. The city had cracked down on raves after the mayor’s nephew died, and everything that once felt endless suddenly felt fleeting.

My clothes didn’t fit my life anymore.

My pants could hide a small family. My hoodies swallowed me whole. In never ending Chicago storms, they turned into heavy, soaked weight I dragged around.

So I went to Contempo Casuals and bought something new.

Clothes that fit me for a change.

People noticed. At lunch, my friend Dan told me I looked like a slut.

I didn’t care. I felt pretty.

And this dress, the one from the mall, felt like the clearest version of that yet.

My cousin was getting married. He was one of my favorite people. Weddings were a very big deal in my family, and I wanted to look good.

My mom had taken me shopping the week before and nothing worked.

Today I went to the mall and I couldn’t believe it when I found it. I knew this would make her happy. A white wrap dress with bright red roses.

Timeless.

When I put it on, it hugged my waist and flared just right, the saleswoman complimenting me as I stood in the mirror, showing me how to adjust the waist with the ties, gushing over the fit on my tiny frame.

I felt beautiful.

“I can’t wait for my mom to see it,” I said.

When I got home, I rushed inside.

“Mom! Wait till you see the dress I got for the wedding!”

“Okay honey, let’s see it,” she said, putting out her cigarette.

“You’re going to love it.” I grabbed the bag and raced up to my bedroom.

She followed me upstairs and sat on my bed while I changed.

“It’s perfect,” I said from inside the closet. “I looked all day and then I saw it and I just knew.”

I tied the dress carefully, just like the saleswoman showed me. I adjusted the ruffles at the neckline, the bottom ruffles flowing back and forth like a salsa dancer when I moved.

I stepped out.

“TAA-DAA.”

I spun.

“Oh honey,” she said.

Her voice dropped.

“What?”

“We need to get you some boobs.”

Her eyes didn’t leave my chest.

I looked down. Then back at her.

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I’m not sure they’re going to grow,” she said.

“You’re going to have to do something about that.”

And little more than a year later, after graduating 5 months early and saving every penny working in restaurants, I did.

On the drive home from meeting with the surgeon, she made one thing clear, and repeated it for years to follow.

“This is your idea. Don’t you ever say I pushed you into this. You wanted a boob job.”

And I did.

But she signed.

Because I was under 18. She had to sign for it.

Old enough to believe her.

Not old enough to make the choice without her.

The day I lost my bloodline.

“I’m done,” she said.

And by then, at almost forty, I knew exactly what that meant.

She wasn’t done with the conversation. She wasn’t done with the visit.

She was done with me.

The way she’d been done with her brother in 1992. The way she’d been done with her sister-in-law a decade later. The way she cycled through friends like seasons that overstayed their welcome.

When Sue is done, she is done.

There’s a finality to it. You disappear, and she will feast on you. They will feast together.

She snapped at my dad to book the next flight home, her voice sharp like she was angry at the cashier. Then she turned to me, radiating rage, shaking with distain.

“YOU,” she said, pointing. “Call me an Uber.”

“There’s no Uber out here, Mom,” I told her, steady but tired. “Just take the truck. Leave it at the airport. Tony can grab it when he gets back.”

They had flown in from out of state less than twenty-four hours earlier.

The plan was simple: they’d watch the kids while I catered a wedding, cheer at my son’s first T-ball game, be present. That was the agreement. That was the hope.

But even before they arrived, the terms had already been… adjusted.

My mother had made it clear that my husband’s parents were not to attend the game.

“I just don’t want it to interfere with my time with the kids,” she’d said, breezy, casual.

But I heard what lived underneath it.

There is only one grandmother here. The rest are extras.

Still, I had made a promise to myself before they came:

Look for the love.

With my parents, love was rarely obvious. It didn’t look like warmth or softness or safety. It looked like paid dinners, expensive gifts or showing up at all. It looked like effort where instinct should’ve been.

So I decided I would look for it. Even if I had to squint.

Even if I had to translate.

I can’t eat around them. I never could. Sleep wasn’t a never thing for me either.

But at thirty-nine, I was determined to not trace every ailment back to them. I wanted to be someone who looked for the good. We find what we look for. And I want good.

So the night before, when they asked me if I was hiding money from my husband, I really tried.

“You should be squirreling cash away,” my dad said, clearing his throat like he needed to get the words out louder. “Hide what you can.”

“He told your Aunt Liz the same thing,” my mom added quickly.

That landed hard.

My mom hated Aunt Liz. She lived 45 minutes from me, the only family member for thousands of miles, and she was not allowed to come to the T-Ball game either.

“I appreciate your concern,” I said carefully. “I know you’re coming from a good place.”

And I tried to believe that as I said it.

“But I own half of our business. Half of our songs. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t take that from me. I don’t think he ever would.”

“I just worry,” my mom said, hands twisting together.

“I know,” I said. “But you don’t need to.”

My head spun anyway. Not just from what they were suggesting, but from the outright suggestion that I was not stable.

We had hard days. Everyone did. My parents sure did.

I stood up, smoothed my shirt, and said I was going to take out the trash, because sometimes you need a reason to leave a room where you suddenly feel so small.

When I came back, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.

My daughter, three years old, propped on my Dad’s lap. His laptop open. A thumb drive plugged in.

“Mommy stuck in the mud!” she squealed, pointing at the screen.

Across the room, my mom laughed from the couch, eyes glued to CNN as always.

“I told her not to go in the mud.”

I looked at the screen.

And there I was.

Seven years old. Crying so hard I was coughing.

My mother’s voice rang out from behind the camera, that same laugh stitched into it.

I told you not to go in the mud.

I hadn’t seen that video in twenty-five years.

And here it was.

On a thumb drive.

“That’s not funny,” I said, walking into the kitchen like I wasn’t suddenly gutted. Like something inside me hadn’t just shifted.

That video had always been a family favorite.

Or more accurately, my dad’s favorite.

He had a collection.

There was another one he loved even more: me at three or four, same age as my daughter, playing alone in the backyard, talking to myself. He sneaks up on me, something he did often enough and sometimes with malice, and scares me.

“Daddy, I gotta go poo-poo!” I shout, panicked.

He laughs. Chases me. Keeps filming as I run, repeating myself, laughing and then crying, all the way to the bathroom.

This was the era of Candid Camera and America’s Funniest Home Videos. Moments like that weren’t private, they were content. Submissions waiting to happen. My dad tried and tried.

But the mud video- that one had come back to me recently. Not through nostalgia, but through therapy.

IFS. Internal Family Systems.

The idea that we are made up of parts. Each one is holding onto a memory, a feeling, a moment where something got stuck.

We were asked to think of a recent trigger.

Mine was a fight with my husband about a gig I wanted to play.

Then: what was the core feeling?

Helpless.

And then: go back. Find the earliest moment you remember feeling that exact thing.

I didn’t expect the answer to come so quickly.

But it did.

April, 1990.

A wet spring in the Chicago suburbs. A half-built house. Mud everywhere.

My dad behind the camera.

“Celeste. Don’t step in the mud.”

I looked up, confused, wanting to do the right thing.

And then I stepped forward.

Straight into it.

My shoe sank. I pulled back too fast and lost it completely; shoe stuck, sock in the mud, balance gone, body overwhelmed.

And then the laughter.

My dad, loud and uncontained behind the camera. My mom in the background, her voice cutting through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

“I told you not to go in the mud.”

I cried. Then wailed. Then choked on it.

And it went on.

And on and on.

It wasn’t until I saw it again as an adult that I understood what I was looking at.

A child in distress, with no one helping. With someone filming. This will echo into adulthood. My marriage.

In the therapy exercise, we were asked to return to that moment and give ourselves what we needed.

So I did.

I walked back into the scene, not as the child, but as the adult I am now. I lifted her out of the mud. I dried her off. I told her she was okay.

No one had done that then.

In the ’90s, girls didn’t have sensory processing disorders. AFRID wasn’t a word anyone used.

We weren’t supported- we were labeled.

Dramatic. Sensitive. Too much. Too skinny.

I didn’t blame my parents.

But I had told them about that session.

Isn’t it wild, I’d said, how something we all laughed at can live in the body as pain? Isn’t it amazing that we can actually go back and heal it?

I thought they’d find it interesting.

Maybe IFS could help them too.

And yet… here it was again. For my kids.

I swallowed it.

I’m better at consuming feelings than food.

So when she said, “I’m done,” the next day, I couldn’t point to the moment that caused it.

She would want me to believe it was one thing. A breaking point.

But it never is.

It’s a pattern.

She never liked my light.

And when she’s done, she not the only one.

She takes the whole bloodline with her.

She always does.

Some families are built more like cults than communities.

I assumed that was the last time I would ever see her.

So imagine my surprise..

when a year later, she’s sitting behind my soon-to-be ex-husband

in a domestic violence trial

in our small, forgettable courthouse,

and she was bankrolling his lawyer.

I didn’t want to drink the red wine.

And more importantly, I didn’t drink the red wine.

Or smoke the communal joint being passed around in celebration after we wrapped our last shot.

We had filmed with this producer and director several times over the years. By now they were friends, so I wasn’t afraid to say it.

“Sorry, I can’t drink the wine. I think I might be pregnant.”

How pregnant?

“Barely pregnant. Just a few days, I think. I can’t test for another week or two, but I just kind of feel like I know.”

Congratulations.

It wasn’t until the next morning, on the drive home, in an old greasy spoon diner along the I-5, that what I’d said bit back at me, the way it often did once the crowds and crews had faded.

“Cake for breakfast?” he asked, incredulous. “You can’t be serious.”

I looked down at my short stack of blueberry pancakes and side of bacon. I had just poured the syrup. It hadn’t quite dissolved the whipped butter yet. A perfect bite was quickly fading.

My eyes narrowed at him.

“If you were really pregnant, there’s no way you’d eat cake for breakfast,” he said.

“Maybe you just needed the attention. I don’t think it’s okay to lie to people like that.”

My jaw tightened. Rage filled my veins. The urge to scream, defend myself, tell him how much he’d regret saying that if I really was pregnant.

But then I remembered everything I’d read about babies in utero.

They absorb everything the mother feels.

I didn’t imagine passing along generational trauma this soon.

So I picked up my fork and knife and focused on cutting the perfect bite. Butter runny but still holding its shape.

I swallowed my anger along with the pancake and pretended not to hear him.

My body screamed.

I didn’t listen.

Instead I asked myself:

Cake for breakfast?

Really, Celeste?

You’re like a child.

Cake.

For breakfast?

Eight and a half months later, our son was born.

I’ve never ordered pancakes again.

Read more

Most of the time the food just rots.

Today I finally cleared the kitchen table.

all of it.

My kids will be so happy when they come home.

When they were born I made a silent vow to myself:

No screens at the table. Dinner together every night.

Instead we’ve become refugees to piles upon piles of restraining orders, requests for order, motions to compel, thousands of pieces of paper, each taking up more and more space in our lives. Each matters more and less each day.

For a while I would push them to the side of the table till they started hanging off the edge like those coin pusher games in an arcade. Me, cautioning my two kids to keep their ketchup far from mommy’s important papers and stay in their designated area of the kitchen table. No room for mom to eat.

what am I even doing anymore?

When I worked cooking in restaurants we called it being in the weeds.

Lost in the back of a hot kitchen, tickets piling up, order after order, until you forgot where you stopped and have no idea where to start again.

Chef is yelling, servers are waiting, and your brain turns to total mush.

The overwhelm of hearing the printer fire up again, another order. It just keeps getting worse.

“Is the hard time over yet Mom?”

Almost honey. Almost.

“That’s what you always say.”

I feel like I am playing darts in the dark.

I cry so much more than I’d like to.

I ache.

Oh how I ache.

When it’s their weekend with their Dad, and I hear the dogs and wolves howling into the deep dark country, I step outside and join in.

I am more like them than the other mothers here, no girls nights for me.

I heard she’s a child abuser. Mentally ill. She was always different.

The aching has always been there. The aching never lets me breathe.

But I’ve been chipping away at the source.

I wasn’t born with the aching.

My mother gave it to me.

so I ran.

And then I found it again and tried to make it my home.

And after I realized what I had done, I had to pay for time served.

Leaving is the final act of defiance, one that will not be accepted.

Destabilization over dishonor.

With my eyes set on the horizon, they slipped a noose around my neck, called it a necklace, propped me up on a chair that looked like freedom, and pushed it out from under me, watching as I kick and scream, gasping for life, clawing at the rope restricting my life, dimming my light.

“WE HOPE YOU GET THE HELP YOU NEED,” they scream in delight.

Today I made banana bread.

And my kids will be so happy.