August always makes me restless. Another summer, almost slipped by.

After last week’s thunderstorms, I felt a tiny chill in the air for the first time in months. When I stopped at the market for berries, I was greeted instead by pumpkin-scented candles and bags of Halloween candy.

Fall is coming.

I hate it because it means my children are heading back to college soon. In fact, my daughter gleefully announced yesterday that she will be back on campus with her friends in 19 days.

My son is a senior and talks about living and working in New York City after graduation, returning to the city where we began and still love so much. His sister, just one year behind him, wants to do the same.

I’m so proud of them. But I feel restless.

I start thinking about getting the house in order, clearing things out.

It will do us all good, I think.

I don’t dwell on how my father cleared out an entire five-bedroom home filled with 42 years of “things” when my mother began her remarkable decline into vascular dementia. By the end of his purge, we couldn’t find a spatula, an extra towel, a pillow, or a steak knife in our childhood home. He threw away nearly everything that wasn’t nailed down, and to this day we have no idea where it all went.

Sometimes I think about some of those missing things and wish we still had them.

But in my family, we don’t always learn our lessons quickly or easily, so when it comes to clearing things out of a home, I assume things will be different for me.

I start in my son’s room. I sort through dozens and dozens of T-shirts dating back to elementary school—shirts from lacrosse tournaments, Yankees jerseys, a red-white-and-blue polo from Nantucket covered with ships, and one sweet little red T-shirt from his elementary school.

I hug the little red shirt, burrowing my face in it for just a moment.

It’s impossibly small compared to my son now, six-foot-two and 21 years old. I think about that little boy many years ago wearing that little shirt and running to my car every day after school to hug me and tell me all about his day.

I put the shirt back in his drawer. Someday he might miss that shirt. He might miss those days.

Well, I miss those days; that’s all I know.

At this point I give up. I don’t really want to throw away anything that belongs to my kids. I am too soft, too sentimental for a proper purge, at least for now.

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Today I spotted a headline. Moms Are at War Over Sleep Training: Some say letting your baby “cry it out” is emotional neglect. Others say it’s the way to preserve sanity.

Oh boy.

I start laughing.

I call a friend and read her the headline. She starts laughing too.

We don’t mean to be insensitive. I promise. For the record, I am probably not the person to settle the sleep-training debate.

My son cried for six straight hours when we tried to let him cry it out. Six. It was distressing. My mother and I were both teary ourselves by the end of it, and eventually, we gave up.

My son never really slept. In fact, he’s 21 years old now and just checked the sleep data on his Apple Watch.

The verdict?

Still not sleeping.

Between us, my friend and I have five kids in college right now—five tuitions, five young adults to worry about, and five good kids who occasionally make questionable decisions.

The Mommy Wars seem very long ago and very insignificant because through the years, we’ve learned (sometimes the hard way) that when you criticize other people’s parenting, karma has a way of finding you.

You start wondering out loud why someone’s toddler is screaming and kicking every time his mom tells him it’s time to leave the park and go home for dinner.

OH! Don’t do that.

Because sure enough, your normally placid toddler will pull the exact same stunt within a week. You’ll find yourself cajoling and begging this formerly obedient child while getting kicked in the shin in front of everyone in the neighborhood.

My friend and I start reminiscing.

Remember the stay-at-home-mom versus working-mom wars?

She does. But interestingly, neither of us really entered those wars because we’d lived both sides. She stayed home before entering intensive consulting work. I stayed home until my divorce forced me back into the workforce full-time. Around that same time, she stepped away from consulting and stayed home.

It was personal. What worked for one family at one moment didn’t necessarily work for another, and we figured that out pretty quickly.

What we remember most, however, is that while stay-at-home moms and working moms lined up on opposite sides of the battlefield, everyone was trying their best.

Meanwhile, the most privileged moms in our playgroup had trust funds, live-in nannies, and cushy jobs in lobbying or law that allowed them to dabble in everything all at once, effortlessly, gliding into school assemblies and field trips with perfectly coiffed hair and chic linen suits.

They unapologetically stepped out when their clients called, nodding at their nannies to take over, their high heels clicking across the gym floor.

The rest of us were left in the scrum. Stay-at-home moms shuffled debt across credit cards. Working moms cried over missed soccer games and school plays. Both sides were convinced that the enemy was each other.

Isn’t that always the way?

The funny thing is that the issues become more complicated as your children get older—and somehow the certainty disappears.

Before sleep training, it was natural childbirth versus c-sections, breastfeeding versus bottle feeding. After that came vaccines, potty training battles, gentle parenting and free-range parenting, public versus private school, sugar and organic food, red-shirting, screen time, tracking your kids, sleepovers, sports specialization, AP classes, IB tracks, dating rules, parties, letting teenagers drink. The list goes on and on.

One day you’re worried about the sugar in organic chocolate milk. The next thing you know, your son is home from college drinking a gallon of it a day and leaving the empty container in the refrigerator. Worse, he might walk by you casually carrying a beer instead of that chocolate milk.

One day you’re debating whether your child should have a phone. Then it happens—your daughter is stranded at a party because she refuses to get into a car with friends who have been drinking. She calls you instead. Suddenly you’re grateful she has the phone. You’re turning on location sharing and jumping in the car to bring her home.

One day you’re debating Montessori versus Reggio Emilia. The next, you’re trying to figure out how you’ll pay for college and survive when your babies move across the country—or across the world.

Like my dad once famously said: “The hardest time of my life was when you and your brother were in college. If you got into trouble, I wouldn’t be there to help you.”

At the time, I didn’t understand what he meant. Now I do.

Along the way, every kid makes mistakes. All of them: Some small. Some medium-sized. Some memorable. It’s part of growing up.

Perhaps a child studying abroad leaves early for a summer internship and forgets to check out of the dorm, resulting in an extraordinarily large emergency bill months later. (Not naming names!)

Other kids get into trouble drinking. Some struggle with anxiety. Some struggle with loneliness. Some struggle with things they never tell their parents about. And every parent eventually discovers there are burdens they can’t lift for their children, no matter how badly they want to. At some point, every parent who cares about their kids will be brought to their knees.

By the time our children are grown, we will have lived through things that make the sleep-training wars seem very small.

If I could go back, I wouldn’t spend so much time worrying about whether I was doing everything right. I wouldn’t care if my daughter slept 16 hours a day and my son slept three. I certainly wouldn’t waste a moment worrying about how other moms handled these decisions.

Because it all goes by in the blink of an eye, and suddenly you are sitting where I am, happy, but looking back too much. My son may be spending his last summer with me because he will be moving to New York City after graduation. His sister, just one year younger, will probably do the same.

I would do anything to go back to those infant and toddler days when they didn’t sleep enough, but they slept next to me. And they wrapped those pudgy little arms and legs around me and smelled so sweet and said, “I love you mommy. To the moon and back!”

XX,

PattyBee

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My father has dementia.

At 88, there are many things he no longer remembers. Sometimes he gets confused about where he is, telling me that he’s in a hospital when he’s in his home. He calls me to ask where my mom is, even though she died in 2024. He can’t tell you what he’s eaten five minutes ago. When my son was studying in Australia last semester, his brain could not retain this fact.

Every other day when I called him, it was a fresh adventure:

“Remember? Your grandson is in Australia, dad!”

“What!? He’s in Australia? Wow! Really? What is he doing there?”

“He is studying at Uni Melbourne, dad.”

“Really? Wow. That is amazing, Patty. That is absolutely incredible.”

“Yes, yes it is, dad.”

Two days later, we would have this exact same conversation again as if we were living in the movie Groundhog Day .

This weekend in New York, his caregiver was helping him get ready for bed when he suddenly asked where I was.

“Patty already left,” she told him, trying to keep him focused on bedtime.

From the other room, I heard his response.

“NO! Patty wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye.” He was upset. Loud.

I rushed into the bedroom. “I’m right here, Dad.”

I gave him a hug and told him that of course I hadn’t left. I would never leave without saying goodbye.

“I knew it,” he said.

And my heart melted.

People often talk about dementia as a memory thief. And it is. It steals names, dates, places, and entire chapters of a life. And then worse.

But every once in a while, it remembers something important.

He wasn’t certain where I was, or what exactly was happening. But he was certain of one thing: I would not suddenly leave him without saying goodbye. I would not abandon him.

Dementia has not taken that yet.

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I wrote this piece in response to a prompt from , a little piece about preparing myself for what’s to come.

Dear Patty Bee,

For the first four decades of your life, your parents will be there for you whenever you need them. You will take this for granted. And that’s okay.

When you get into college, they will be there, paying your tuition and taking your friends out to dinner. They will look at you a bit wistfully because they attended local colleges at night and never had the opportunity to go away to a real university.

When you get married, they will be there, even though they hate your fiancé. At your reception they will splurge on wine and a huge wall of shrimp for your friends. You and your father will dance to Fly Me to the Moon, and for a few hours, you will be a fairy princess.

When your babies are born, they will be there—waiting to meet them, falling instantly in love. When your son cries for 20 hours a day with colic, your mother will practically move into a hotel near you to help. Seventeen months later, she will do it again for two grandchildren under two.

And when things get really bad, they will be there.

You will call your mother and say your marriage is over, that you asked your husband to move out. She will tell you that your dad is throwing clothes into suitcases and that they will be in Washington, DC, in four hours.

And when the divorce turns into a circus—a dangerous one at that—they will be there for three long years. And when one night when your ex-husband locks you and your daughter out of the house, your father will drive over and sit with you until your ex leaves. And even then, he will spend the night in his car outside your home.

Just in case.

And when this divorce is over, they will still be there. They will plan family vacations so your children grow up close to their cousins. They will read to your children, get down on their hands and knees to play with them, bring them to breakfast at fancy hotels and to The Nutcracker, and love them steadily.

One day you will notice your mother is forgetting things.

On a Santa Monica vacation, she will struggle to see the sidewalk and insist that people are eavesdropping on her. She will glare at a waiter and refuse to order her dinner. You will invent excuse after excuse because you cannot bear to admit she’s losing her mind.

She will have mini-strokes, you finally realize. You will take it in stride. You will tell your children that their grandma is acting differently because she has something called dementia, but all they need to do is keep loving her. And they will find this easy because all they’ve ever done is love her. Your daughter will hold her hand and help her walk; your son will sit beside her and tell her endless funny stories, and she will laugh.

To the end, you will be there for her. But you live five hours away, and so the real burden will fall on your father.

But he is the rock of the family, so you don’t worry about him.

Your mother will not want to die. She will defy every expectation and live in hospice for three and a half agonizing months. She will set records.

Your heart will break a little more every day.

And while you have been distracted, your father will be suffering. One day, he will crash his big tank of a car, flip it over, and become trapped upside down for 45 minutes until EMTs can free him. Even though no one is hurt, you will need to tell your father that he can no longer drive.

He will not take this well. He is still the Boss Man of the family, a man who has spent decades behind the wheel, driving for freedom as much as transportation.

After that, your father will start shrinking. He will lose weight. He will suffer a series of falls that hurt his poor head. He will develop terrible stomach issues from stress and seem to grow old overnight, a victim of loving his wife too much.

And this is all going to hurt you, Patty, to see your parents suffer like this. And it will change you. But it will not destroy you. Because you are your dad’s daughter, because you are a survivor.

And I don’t think that a younger person should know much more than this, honestly, so I’ll just tell you that your father will have a catastrophic fall that will change your lives. For 40 days, you will get him into an ambulance, through the ER and surgery, in and out of hospitals and one terrible rehab, and finally back home.

You can do this, and you will. You will be an advocate for your father. You will charm doctors, bring nurses pizza, negotiate with hospital aides, take notes, escalate whenever necessary, hire private help, and fight like you’ve never had to fight before.

You will get him home to help save his brain, and this will be only partly successful. You are not God, and you cannot control everything. Remember that. Be kind to yourself.

All through this somehow, you will have a wonderful life, Patty, and your children will thrive, two beautiful and happy young people, and you will be surrounded by friends, and you will fall in love and be loved. You will have a glorious life despite the pain of watching your parents suffer.

You must do the best you can, you must make sacrifices for others, and you must follow your heart, just like your parents always did for you.

Because it’s love that makes everything happen, just like the great James Baldwin wrote:

“Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”

And despite everything, love will still be worth it.

— Patty Bee

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My friend and I have been friends for 43 years. That is a long time.

We ended up buying houses a few blocks away from each other in a city more than 250 miles from our hometown. We talk about middle school, things that shaped us, our families, including things that other people would never understand. You had to be there.

But yesterday we started talking about The Bear, specifically the Fishes Christmas episode that ended with a car rammed through the side of the house.

We marveled at it.

It was excruciating to watch right from the beginning, the brilliant foreshadowing of Carmy and Nat smoking outside the house, dreading how bad things are about to get. Then we’re right there in the kitchen with Donna, clanging pots and pans, spilling marinara across the floor, steam rising, an ominous sauce-splashed timer ticking down. Donna uses her hands to smear garlic butter across bread while she swigs red wine at an alarming rate, tense lips clenching a cigarette, mascara smudged, manic, histrionic, unraveling in a terrifying and also somewhat magnificent way as she screams, “Are you motherf*ckers okay?”

No one there is okay.

But mostly, Donna is not okay, imagining herself some sort of Seven Fishes Martyr, and so she drives her car through the side of the house, destroying the car, her Christmas Eve dinner, her home, and her relationships with everyone who matters to her.

“That whole episode feels strangely familiar to me,” I remark.

My friend agrees. “Me too.”

We look at each other in surprise.

For my friend, her moment arrived on a Thanksgiving. She was hosting, cooking the dinner. her way, not overly stressed out by the preparations.

Enter stress: her highly critical mother was there. And so was her husband’s aunt, a narcissistic and highly critical person. The women bonded of course, at my friend’s expense, making many suggestions around the kitchen, telling my friend what to do, how to do it, ordering her around, and assigning tasks to her son.

My friend did not like this, but she was still okay. She expected it.

But then, somewhere between mashing the potatoes and straining the gravy, she heard the two of them—just imagine this, her mother and her husband’s aunt—talking about her within earshot.

“I wouldn’t dare tell Miss Perfect what to do in there,” one of them says. The other one laughs.

This sort of dialogue went on and on before my friend finally lost it.

“If you don’t like the way I cook, then get the fuck out of my house,” she screamed.

After that, everyone was very polite. Dinner was served. No one rammed a car through the living room, but it was still a memorable Thanksgiving in all the wrong ways.

For me, my Donna moment came when I became the perpetual hostess to a group of divorced women who came to my house for wine and pretty dinners of trendy salads and crudite platters. And Thanksgiving dinners, Galentine’s dinners, and countless BBQs. I made a lot of trips to Whole Foods for rainbow radishes and skirt steak, and even more trips to the liquor store for cases of wine even though I didn’t have two cents to rub together during my divorce.

No one asked me to do this. I wasn’t forced into it, just for the record.

A few of my older friends spoke up and suggested I might want to cut back a bit. They did not approve of the situation—or of the divorced women themselves. But I didn’t stop, even as my resentment grew, until I hit the tipping point when several of them came over one afternoon, and I was pouring wine and also brewing tea for them.

There was a lot of other stuff going on in the group that day, but my moment arrived when one of the women tapped on the teapot and told me she needed more hot water as she lounged in my backyard, watching me run back and forth to the kitchen and back.

I snapped. That was that. I was done, with her, the group, the entire situation. I would never be friends with them again. Long afterwards, a dear friend would tell me that I should give thanks on Thanksgiving for not having to cook dinner for this group ever again.

So why do we get ourselves into these ugly situations? Why do we offer to host, help, give—too much? And why does everything we do have to be perfect? Have we all been socialized too much by Martha Stewart? Are we getting some sort of value or validation out of all of this?

And why do some of us (especially women) keep taking on too much, telling everyone that we are fine and we don’t need any help, until our resentment makes us blow our tops and lose our minds?

Most of us are just overwhelmed. Some of us are true Donnas.

My ex mother-in-law, nicknamed The Bobbinator, was a narcissist who couldn’t understand why people continually moved away from her. She visited my home soon after my marriage and “helpfully” took every single pot, bowl, fork, and box or bag of food out of my kitchen cabinets one day while I was at work. When I returned, she had completely reorganized every item in my kitchen without my permission.

Every Christmas with The Bobbinator teetered on Donna territory. My ex and my children and I visited my family on Christmas Eve and then went to The Bobbinator’s house on Christmas Day, three hours away.

Every Christmas she wanted us there by 10 am, and every Christmas we were late because our children were little and believed in Santa, and so they woke up and had to open Santa’s gifts before we left for Vermont. So The Bobbinator started drinking at breakfast. She liked brown liquor in a short glass (or sometimes a tall glass) with ice. I never did learn what she was drinking, but she was drinking a lot of it.

By noon when we rolled in after the three-hour drive, she was buzzed, smoking cigarettes like Donna, and very very angry. She barely said hello to us. Seething with hostility and doling out passive-aggressive comments like candy canes, she demanded we rush down to the basement (every inch of it covered with holiday decorations) to open gifts since “we were so late.” Obediently we did, and she literally tossed the gifts at us—and even at her little grandchildren.

So do we all have pieces of The Bobbinator in us? Is there a Donna lurking in all of us?

I don’t think so. I believe that Donna and The Bobbinator are outliers. Not everyone has a personality disorder, or spends their holidays plastered and seething.

But some of us end up looking like Donna and The Bobbinator because were trained to be people pleasers, and though it rewards us most of the time, when it doesn’t work, it really doesn’t work.

My childhood friend and I were trained to be “nice.” What does “nice” even mean? Agreeable. Accommodating. Pretty. Pleasant. Always busy workers. What astonishingly small things to aspire to. But at the same time, how impossible.

But I think it’s more than this. It’s also our new culture. It’s the ornate appetizer boards on Instagram, the curated reels of gatherings and holidays, the suddenly mass-market Slim Aarons version of American life we’ve come to expect. (Since when did Slim Aarons become mass market!? That’s ludicrous.) This drive to do things performatively—to take on more than we can handle for people who may not even notice or care ultimately fills us with resentment. And if we keep doing it, we will burst.

And sometimes the breaking point looks like a car driving through a house. In that sense, Donna doesn’t feel so far away. It’s why my friend and I watched The Fishes in familiar horror, like if we just our guards down, if we were sloppy and careless, we could easily just for one terrible moment become Donna.

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He is a man of habit, a practical man,

and he does what he always does,

locks up the house, brushes his teeth,

pulls on crisp striped pajamas,

a gift from his grandkids every Christmas,

a fresh opportunity each year

to open the box and act surprised.

He gets into bed, slowly these days,

pulls up the covers and touches her pillow,

wonders if she sees the same moon,

if it fills her hospice room just eight miles away,

if it touches her through the dementia,

if it makes her remember him.

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The moms are in mourning.

Jimmy Gracey. We didn’t know him. But he was ours.

He was the focus of our text chats. He surfaced in Facebook moms groups for universities across the country. He appeared in worried conversations over coffee and around water coolers, in paused errands and in prayers murmured in parked cars.

This missing boy became everyone’s boy.

We are fluent in fear when it comes to our daughters. We warn them: Don’t ever accept a drink from a stranger. Don’t drink too much. Don’t ever, ever leave your friends. Stay in groups. Don’t wander anywhere alone. Keep your phone charged. Share your location.

We tell our daughters all the terrible things that could happen at any time.

But we do not do the same for our sons.

I know this because I have one daughter and one son in college. We don’t warn our tall sons, our strong sons, our six-feet-tall, easygoing, kind, “he’ll be fine” or “everyone likes him” sons.

So when something happens to a son like this, this tall, big-hearted boy with his entire life ahead of him, and the unthinkable has suddenly become real, we are left grasping for a narrative that was never written for our boys. This was a lack of imagination, a mistake.

We should not be entertaining the notion that girls are always the vulnerable ones and boys are always the reckless ones. Both boy and girls need to be supported, protected, and taught how to navigate the world safely and responsibly.

It is too late for this boy, but it is not too late for the rest of them.

As a society, we need to widen our circle of care and concern to include boys. We need to speak to our sons with the same urgency and the same honesty, and we need to start doing it when they are young. The world is a rough and dangerous place, and our boys can be hurt or lost too.

That means we need to talk to them about alcohol and drug use, depression and mental illness, sexual abuse and violence—yes that happens to our boys, too—crime, bad actors (no, not everyone out there is your buddy), sticking together, never leaving your friends alone, and all the other things out there that we don’t like to talk about.

Our boys are not invincible.

We need to do this because our sons, too, are everything to us moms.

Rest in peace much-loved boy.

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*This post was written in response to a prompt by : Write a letter to your biggest fear.

Hello Death,

When I was young, I didn’t understand how you worked. My mother cried in her bedroom because you stole away her aunt and uncles, childhood friends, people who formed her early life. I didn’t understand her pain. Not yet.

The first time you and I truly became acquainted, you came for my friend Denise, just 19 years old. She was driving home from a wedding when her car hit a tree. Denise was the type of girl who was going places in the world before you intervened. I don’t know if she’s busy in heaven now, but I suspect she is. What I do know is that you sucker-punched me with grief, and in that instant I understood all my mother’s tears.

You weren’t finished with us that year. Just three months later you took 35 of my classmates on Pan Am Flight 103, collecting them and carrying them heavenward above the little town of Lockerbie, Scotland. Artist Susan Lowenstein, who lost her son Alexander, created 74 life-sized sculptures depicting how the other mothers looked when they learned the news that you had taken their children. These moms came to Lowenstein’s studio to help with the project. “They allowed their bodies to fall into the position that it took upon hearing that most devastating news,” Lowenstein writes. “Some scream, some beg, some weep, some pray, some curl into a ball, while others raise their fists in anger and despair.”

Death, this is the impact of your work.

On September 11, you accepted the souls of 2,977 more innocents, including a boy I had always had a crush on. When I was little, I told my mother that I would marry him someday. True to form, she turned to me and said, “You’ll have a lot of competition with that one!”

She couldn’t have imagined that you would win the competition.

When you came for my mother, I played a role in handing her over. I stopped her hydration. She hadn’t eaten any solid food in hospice for three-and-a-half months, and I knew that ending the hydration meant I was giving her to you, but I didn’t want to believe it. Letting go felt like betrayal, even though I knew it was mercy.

Then you tried for my dad, but that time we fought you off. He is not ready for you.

When you come for me, I hope it’s in the middle of the night, that you come silently and swiftly, and I hope that my children will not mourn for long. I hope this will not happen for many decades. But after a lifetime of watching you pass through the lives around me—never gone for long, always somewhere close by—you and I are no longer strangers. And because of that, I am not as afraid.

Patty Bee

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Stay with me, I said that afternoon

on the beach at Garrapata

in front of the cave under the the cliffs,

where surf-softened rock

fills with the sea, day after day,

century after century,

as the tide flows in, flows out.

We have to get back, you said,

but I wanted to see more dolphins,

and I wanted to see them with you,

and so we waited, drank some more beers,

until the waves surged closer.

Pink and silver sprayed our faces,

and I raised my arms to the Pacific

until I glowed too, invincible,

skin molten, just twenty-three,

made of salt and sand and water.

It’s like heaven here with you, you said,

but our patch of dry sand

was slipping into the sea,

no more time for us on the beach at Garrapata,

and so we dashed, holding hands,

as one wave retreated,

and before the next one broke

hard against the rocks.

We ran laughing up the wooden stairs

through the fields of glowing dudleys farinose,

scrub and chaparral, and indian paintbrush,

and as we moved away from the sea,

we faded to bone and shadows,

and nothing mattered that night,

just two free souls on the road to Big Sur.

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No one tells you that your children will leave you someday.

My ob-gyn came the closest, though, during my second trimester. I asked him when I could stop worrying about the baby’s health and general welfare.

“I don’t know, maybe when he’s eighteen years old?” he said.

He laughed. “ Maybe twenty-one?”

And then he shook his head.

“Nope. Never. I’m really sorry, but you’ll never, ever stop worrying about your children. Even after they’ve left your house.”

My doctor was right. My children have officially left my house, both of them studying at a university eight hours away. At first I worried. A lot. I never got used to missing them, but I adapted, as moms always do, and I knew that I would see them every break, every holiday, every summer.

And then just when I got used to all of this, my son got accepted to a study abroad program.

In Australia.

The other day we turned over the big, square coffee table at my parents’ house and discovered the entire underside covered in ancient crayon scrawls: names, stick people with big hair, football players with mitts for hands, big-eared dogs, smiling suns, and lots and lots of what I can only describe as abstract art.

I asked my daughter when this had happened. Presumably it was a multi-year project conducted while the adults sat above, oblivious, eating cheese and crudités, refilling our wine glasses. Meanwhile, beneath the table, there was a whole other world going on—secret, industrious, and perfectly happy without us.

My daughter told me they knew it was wrong, and that they loved doing it for that reason. This gave me pause.

They knew it was wrong? And that was the point? Were they already pulling away from us?

The day I found out I was pregnant was one of the most joyful days of my life. But at the same time, I knew I held something so precious inside me, so vulnerable, so irreplaceable, that it raised the possibility of somehow losing it, or letting harm befall it, a possibility that I knew would cause me the kind of pain that was way too unbearable to even consider.

From that day forward, I never felt quite the same ease again. I never again felt those crazy euphoric invincible feelings that made me ski through the trees and walk home by myself through city alleys in the dark of night.

I had a greater mission now. My body and mind reorganized themselves around my children, and around nurturing them and giving them the best possible lives ever, lives saturated with love.

When my babies took their first steps, I held their little hands, waiting until they felt steady, and then I carefully let go. The first few times, they fell. But soon, they got the hang of it, and they took a few steps all on their own.

Everyone cheered.

But I noted that they walked those steps away from me, letting go of my supportive hands, ebullient about their independence, never once looking back.

It’s been like that ever since. It’s our job, I suppose, to raise little people into bigger people who can keep walking away from us into the greater wider world.

It’s counterintuitive. I want it because it’s what is best, it’s the goal.

I also hate it.

My son leaves in a week for Melbourne and has not yet started to pack. He doesn’t have his housing set up. His internship situation for when he returns next summer is unsettled. And so I follow him around the house, nagging him politely.

I throw all of my energy into worrying about the housing, his classes, his internship, the weather in Melbourne, where it is summer, and whether or not my son has enough shorts and socks and new sneakers to survive—no matter that he will be living in a major city with incredible shopping.

I think about the great Anne Lamott quote: Help is the sunny side of control.

I wonder if I’ve always secretly hated that quote because it’s too close to the truth.

My father, now 87 with dementia, once told me that the hardest thing in his life was when we all left for college. “I had no idea what you were up to,” he said.

“And I knew for the first time that I wouldn’t be able to help you if you needed help.”

My children don’t belong to me. This is a notion that has become popular in the past several years—because it is true.

And Australia is going to be fabulous. What can be better than to be 21 and living in Australia for a few months!

As for me, I’ll be fine —just give me a day or two to adapt after I watch that airplane pull away from the gate and head up, up into the clouds. It’s

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Addiction and infidelity. Secret email accounts and secret girlfriends. Empty bottles, broken promises. Financial deception and psychological unraveling. Double lives. Double crossed.

More than a decade ago, when our children were little, these were the kinds of discoveries that cracked apart the lives of the mothers I knew who were getting divorced.

I was one of them.

None of us expected to get divorced. We were serious people who took our marriage vows to heart, in sickness and in health. We took our children to heart, pouring all our love and attention into them.

Divorce was never supposed to happen to people like us. Deep down, we believed that our earnest work—our love, our basic decency—would keep us safe, make us an exception to the worst things that happen to other families.

Things like divorce. Divorce while children are still little. Divorce that cuts through a child’s sense of safety in the world. Most of all, divorce that marks the end of childhood for innocent little people.

This couldn’t possibly happen to us. We had done everything right.

We were wrong.

We all got divorced, every single one of us. And after we absorbed the events that led up to the demise of our marriages (as divorce attorneys say), we had to start rebuilding our lives.

It was brutal. At first, I closed in on myself. Filled with shame, and seemingly surrounded by perfect families (at least in my head), I hid the fact that my husband was no longer living with us, fibbing for months to friends, teachers, and other mothers.

This was a mistake, and it was probably cowardly. But I did one thing right during this time. I protected my children and poured every ounce of love and energy into them. And this mattered.

But at some point, I had to face reality. Things were so bad that I finally understood that the only way out was through. So I hired an attorney. I talked to teachers and therapists and child custody experts. I met other divorced mothers.

It all made me braver. Slowly, I began to breathe again.

During the divorce, I liked to visit my aunt, who never smoked a day in her life but was dying of Stage IV small cell lung cancer nonetheless. I idolized her because she had never married and instead led a fabulous career, traveling the world for a Fortune 100 company, going on cruises with other singles, and buying up homes as investment properties—all by herself.

But now she was dying—all by herself.

“I want you to listen to me,” she said one day, calling me over to sit beside her on the sofa, next to her oxygen tank.

“What you’re going through is terrible. But your story has a silver lining, unlike mine. Eventually, the divorce will end.”

I will never forget my aunt’s words. They were the difference between her story and mine. Some terrible things end. Others do not. Some things feel like they might kill you. Others do kill you.

So, no, divorce was not supposed to happen to people like us. But it did. And then, after several years of absolute agony, it was over. It ended, just like my aunt predicted.

And thankfully, divorce was not the only story of my life, or my children’s lives—back then, when I was in the thick of it, I just couldn’t have imagined know how many more lives we had ahead of us.

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She was wandering down the middle of my suburban street. She wore an open jacket, one glove (on the wrong hand), bright red bedroom slippers (on the wrong feet), and no socks. It was 35 degrees outside.

The red slippers caught my eye as I maneuvered around her in my car. Then I noticed how she walked: hesitant, unable to keep a straight line, pausing to look up at each house searching for something. I called out, asked if I could help her find an address. I couldn’t understand her reply, but she smiled. In her eyes: deep confusion, a drifting lack of focus.

Dementia. Once you know it, you recognize it immediately.

I asked if I could walk with her, help her find where she was going. She didn’t object.

Now I had to get her home. This wasn’t my first experience with dementia. And this—this small moment—was my chance, finally, to pay a few things forward.

Together, we wandered up the middle of the street while I chatted on and on, offering a stream of facts about myself and my kids. She smiled occasionally and nodded vaguely, but she didn’t seem to absorb anything. She was confused, looking at each house and then moving on.

When we reached the corner, I panicked. We were now heading in the opposite direction from where I’d first seen her. What if I was doing the wrong thing, going the wrong way, and what if we couldn’t find her house? She must have been freezing. Hypothermia wasn’t out of the question. But she kept weaving up the street.

I tried to guide her onto the sidewalk. She stumbled, so I took her arm in mine. It felt exactly like my mother’s arm.

Suddenly I wasn’t in my neighborhood anymore—I was in New York walking my mom back in time, before she died of Stage 7 dementia.

My mother stumbled over sidewalks too, because—though we didn’t know it then—she’d had a stroke in her brain stem. Brain stem strokes affect vision and destroy depth perception. Eventually, my mother became legally blind.

My daughter’s oldest memory of her grandmother is from a sidewalk in Santa Monica. Every time my mother reached a curb, she stumbled, and my little girl held her up.

And now here I was. Life repeating itself.

My mother was a wanderer for a while. She became sly about it—waiting for the moment when no one was looking, when my father was shaving or a caregiver was on the phone with a doctor. Then she slipped out the back door, down the steep driveway, and onto the street.

Every single time, a neighbor or passerby eventually walked her home. Once, two kind but very serious police officers brought her back, and she chatted animatedly with them the whole way up the driveway. It was the highlight of her week.

Though my mother returned exuberant from her escape attempts, her wandering phase caused us great stress. But the really sad part is that it ended. My mother was no longer able to open her back door. She lost all interest in sneaking out to explore the big world outside her home.

That’s one of the heartbreaks of dementia. Various stages can be terrifying and dangerous, and you wish they would end. But when they do—inevitably—and the patient loses their ability to do these terrifying things, you will look back and remember fondly when your now-passive mother had the brain and the glorious gumption to sneak out of the house for an adventure.

Remembering back on all this, I wondered if I should call the police for help. But just then, the woman abruptly turned left and climbed the steps to a tidy Tudor home. We had now walked several blocks from where I found her. The door was unlocked. I asked if this was her house.

She didn’t answer but walked inside. I called out to see if anyone was home. No one answered. The woman headed straight to the back of the house, and I hesitated. Could I get arrested for being in someone else’s home? But I followed her.

And then I saw the family room, and grief overwhelmed me.

It was like stepping into my parents’ family room—decorated many decades ago when we all still lived at home—with a big Christmas tree and built-in bookcases filled with books and family photos. Unmistakably a family house. This woman had been deeply loved by several generations. But the room was no longer the center of anything. Only one gift sat under the tree—a bathrobe, still in its box. The family that once gathered here every Christmas had moved on to new places, new homes, where they were now raising their own children.

The television was on. The room was warm. The woman sat down on the sofa, and I asked if I could help remove her coat. She understood that and nodded and smiled, and I realized that she was better here, a bit more cognizant inside her home. Yet she fiddled with the glove in exasperation, trying to put it on the wrong hand, and she seemed to think it was perfectly normal that a stranger was sitting on her sofa.

I looked around for a moment, trying to figure out my next steps.

And then I realized something else: this must be how the social worker recently saw my parents’ house.

The social worker been alerted by my father’s bank, which suspected elder abuse because my father kept withdrawing money to pay his caregivers yet couldn’t really explain things to the bank tellers.

You see, my mother wasn’t the only one of my parents with dementia. My father has it now too. I would say Stage 6 now.

And so, the social worker arrived at our family home with two police officers in tow. After a lot of drama including an interview with my father, which must have been pretty fruitless, she called me and told me that when she saw the family photos and the big crystal jar filled with M&Ms, she knew my father was loved—and probably not being exploited.

Standing in this woman’s family room, I wondered if the social worker had felt what I felt now: like she was intruding. Helping, yes—but also trespassing on someone else’s life.

Still, I was about to get even nosier. I went into the kitchen and looked around until I found a random home-repair bill with a man’s name and phone number on it. I called it.

The husband was shocked to hear that his wife was found blocks away from their home. It was the very first time she had gone out wandering on her own. He explained that she has aphasia. She was likely trying to reach her son and daughter-in-law’s house and missed it.

Here’s the thing: When I found her, she was walking straight toward Rock Creek Park—an immense 1,754-acre sprawl of woods and creeks and poorly marked trails.

Her husband told me that things were changing too quickly to keep up and anticipate the next issue. I nodded. This is typical of this cruel disease. It’s not linear, it doesn’t move step by step. It plateaus, it loops, and then it drops—sometimes overnight, sometimes in a moment so small you almost miss it. Sometimes a miracle happens and your loved one is speaking lucidly like my mom did more than once. You heart lifts, it’s a miracle! And sometimes the next thing you know, your loved one suddenly walks out of the house and starts wandering down streets alone in her slippers.

I think of all the countless times neighbors walked my own mother home to safety. I feel like the woman today wore her red slippers as a signal to me: pay it forward, pay it forward.

To all the people I’ll never get to thank—the strangers who walked my mother home—thank you. To the policemen—thank you. To the social worker—thank you. Though my mother never wandered in winter or made it close to the woods near her house, she lived on a curving street where it wasn’t safe to walk at all. She could have been struck by a car at any moment.

It’s a thin line between disaster and grace, in how often we depend on strangers without ever knowing their names. In how we give people a gift when we allow them to help us, to take our arms and guide us over curbs and towards safety. I received the grace yesterday.

Love leaves its traces everywhere—in family photos, jars of M&Ms, little girls walking with grandmothers, and red slippers on a frigid street.

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I saw her once in Marina del Rey,
under the lemon-scented gum tree,
I had the puppy on a short leash
and smiled at this stranger walking by.

But she wasn’t a stranger,
and she knew the dog,
and she did not smile back at me,
and for just a moment, we both froze,
right there on the path to Venice Beach.

Now time has passed,
I’ve long moved on,
and you live with her now,
two dogs and two Porsches,
prep-school memories,
trust funds to soften things,
trust issues that destroy everything,
half-truths and short fuses
all ready to blow in LaLa Land.

We are different sorts of people,
and I would have hated that life,
but something still catches–

It’s knowing you still hike
through thigh-high wild mustard,
past ghostly Chaparral yucca,
on the very same trails
I once wandered with you.

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My house is not quiet at 4:23 a.m.

I hear the snore of my old dog in the hallway. Did she always snore? No, I decide, this is new. She’s getting old. My dog is elderly. She might get sick. Eventually, she will die. Her brown spots have faded to white. My companion, my rascal of a rescue, is going to die. I will be heartbroken. What will I do without her?

Then the heat kicks on with a dramatic whomph. When did I last get it serviced? Why is it so loud? At 4:23 a.m., a noisy furnace isn’t just a furnace, it’s the start of a very expensive problem. Certainly this will be the kind of problem that could destroy my already-stretched finances. Two kids in college, double tuition, and now this? It will be the end of me, I am sure.

Outside my not-quiet house, the old dogwood branch scrapes across the window. Rasp. Rasp. Could the whole tree come crashing down? On my house? On my bedroom? Worse—so much worse—on one of my children’s rooms? The thought is unbearable.

Of course, once I’m thinking of my children, there’s no turning back. They’re away at college, living their best lives. Did my son get his LinkedIn up and running? Did he have any interviews yet for summer internships? I mean, so-and-so’s son already has an impressive internship lined up at a NY investment bank. My son does not. That’s it. No internship. Ruined. Washed up at twenty. What will he do with the rest of his life?

Why can’t I fix this?

When did I last hear from my daughter? Did she and her friends make it home safely from the bars in Boston after that last text? The dangers! Why does she go out at night? Why can’t she just stay in her dorm with the door locked, safe and quiet?

I shake my head. Stop, stop. You are getting ridiculous, Patty Bee. Crazy. You are insane. 4:23 a.m. is not your finest hour.

But why this hour? Why am I awake at all? Is it my age? Like my dog, I’m getting older too. (Oh, no. Don’t go there, Patty Bee. Not age. Don’t think about age. Not at 4:23 a.m.)

Why does everything seem so terrible when you wake up in the middle of the night?

And here’s the thing: my 4:23 a.m. brain is exactly like my writing brain. Both wake up suddenly, already mid-sentence, and immediately wander off into the weeds. They take one small, harmless thought—the dog is snoring—and blow it up into a rambling epic about loss, powerlessness, finances, mortality, tree safety, and the questionable nightlife decisions of nineteen-year-olds.

This is also what my first drafts do. We’re told to get everything down on paper—well on screen, I suppose, these days. So I do. My words spiral, no themes, no outlines, no sense. They inflate, embellish, conflate, and merge, leaping from one thought to the next without warning.

Every time, I decided that nothing is salvageable. I’m mortified just looking at the drivel I’ve produced.

But, and this is what I remind myself at 4:23 a.m., I know from years of experience that both night worries and messy drafts will look different in a few hours. They need a little time, distance, sleep, and light.

By breakfast, the dogwood is just a pretty little tree, the furnace is merely loud, and my children are doing great. And the writing, once I sit down and breathe, usually contains at least one true thing worth keeping.

So I truck on, knowing that the chaos, the first drafts, and the middle-of-the-night catastrophes will all eventually make sense—or at least make stories worth telling.

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It all started in the middle of my workday in Washington, DC, when my Ring app started buzzing. I glanced down at my phone to see two police officers at my father’s front door in New York. My father is 87, with dementia.

One officer leaned toward the camera, warning the other to stay back. I stare at the gun in its holster. I take note of an official woman standing behind the officers, clipboard in hand.

Was the threat my dad?

Why would I even think that? My father has been sundowning, getting confused at night, when his dementia turns familiar rooms into strange and dangerous places. He doesn’t know he’s home anymore. His hospital bed, meant to keep him safe, feels like a trap. Terrified, and angry, he yells, pounds on the rails, tries to climb out. When his caregiver stops him, he pushes back.

It’s not his fault. Or ours. It’s the disease.

And now, I am certain that this disease has gotten my father in trouble with the authorities.

I jumped up from my meeting and called my brother. “The police are at dad’s house,” I said. My brother got into his car and started driving toward the house.

My mind ran a bit wild. Would they put him in an institution? Would they make him go back to the sub-acute rehab that nearly killed him? I imagined him in restraints, like the inmates I’d seen in the trauma center where he spent weeks after emergency surgery.

I remembered a domestic violence expert I’d interviewed once: Every call ends with someone in handcuffs, she said.

Would they arrest my dad?

Finally, I reached his daytime aide—the Irish mother of three teenagers, who works as a bartender on the side to help put her boys through Catholic schools. If anyone could calm a houseful of cops, it was her.

But her voice was low and tight. “They made everyone leave the room,” she said. “They’re interviewing your father.”

Incredulous, I asked, “How in the world are they going to do that? He can’t answer anything accurately.”

For once, she had no words.

I asked to speak to the social worker. She got on the phone and asked if I knew my dad had gone to the bank yesterday.

I did.

“Are you aware how much money he withdrew?”

Roughly, yes. You see, my father likes to keep cash in his wallet. He’s always been the one who pays, the traditional dad, the responsible one. Even now, he wants to have a wallet full of cash, which seems like a little thing to do to make him happy.

Also. It’s his money. If he wants some of it in his wallet, it seems that he should be able to keep it here.

“The bank called the police,” she said. “He seemed confused. He was with a woman who did most of the talking. The manager flagged his accounts. We’re concerned about possible elder abuse.”

Elder abuse. My father.

I went silent, absorbing this unexpected turn of events.

Eventually her tone softened. She said it was obvious he was well cared for. The spotless house, family photos, sunlight pouring in the windows. The crystal bowl of M&Ms that we always keep full—after my dad filled it up for decades for his grandchildren. His big brown reclining chair, the hospital bed tucked neatly into his office, everything tidy and bright.

I heard a male laugh in the background—the police, relaxing now.

But my heart was still racing.

Because here’s the back story: I’ve seen this happen before—one ordinary evening my father fell down a flight of stairs and the EMTs gave him an fentanyl shot and took him away, 40 days in a trauma center, then a sub-acute rehab that broke him down while we fought to build him back up. Treated like a problem instead of a person trying to learn how to walk again, trying to recover.

My helplessness to fix all this has this stayed with me.

So when the doorbell rang, I didn’t see police officers trying to help. I saw danger coming for my father again. And maybe that’s how little bits and pieces of these baby traumas add up—leading up to a moment when your mind still thinks it’s all happening again, long after the rest of the world has moved on.

All is well now. My brothers took over. Official statements were made, documents were produced, police and social workers were thanked.

My father? I’m not entirely sure if he fully remembers the situation, but I teased him on the phone about it yesterday. His response? “Oh, those cops? I should have knocked them out.”

A little New York humor.

I guess.

At the end of this story, the hardest part isn’t caring for someone losing their bearings. It’s realizing how easily you can lose yours too.

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I loved those mornings 
in the Porsche
leaving Marina Del Rey.

Our boot are laced,
Camelbaks filled,
$8 skim lattes in hand.

We cross the 405 to the 101
as the marine layer burns off,
Pacific behind us
San Gabriels ahead. 

              ******

You always check the weather,
but today you said nothing,
though the wind is red flagged,
and the fire warning's extreme.

This devil's backbone, 
lives up to its name,
we hug the hill,
watch our steps.

Near 4,000 feet,  
I slow down to breathe
in the thin mountain air.

Just two minutes, I say.
Go ahead, I tell you.
And of course you do.

The puppy keeps running 
back and forth on the trail,
so conflicted, poor guy,
between keeping up with you
and protecting me.

            ******

I smell the smoke
right as you spot it, 
sky tinged rusty,
and this changes everything
because it’s rising below us.

We are supposed 
to be experienced, 
to know what we’re doing,
as we start hustling downhill. 

But things get confusing
and you can't rush switchbacks,
and we almost leave the trail.

I think of my children
alone without me
in this big, brutal world,
and how we didn’t tell anyone
where we were hiking that day.

             ******

But at the end of this story, 
it’s just another close call,
and back in the valley,
we sprint to the car. 

We drive towards the ocean,
the fire behind us, 
soon just a puff 
on distant skyline. 

You are jubilant 
and alive with it all, 
and that’s all I wanted,
another adventure
with you.

But my East Coast heart knows,  
these days together
in the thin mountain air
are burning out fast.

Just like the fire,
soon just a plume 
over the horizons
of opposite coasts.

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It comes to me in snippets, while I’m driving, during a tedious work meeting, while I’m struggling with writer’s block. But mostly, the snippets arrive at night, sliding into my dreams, taking their toll. Every morning now, I’m more tired than when I went to sleep.

If I wake up during the snippets, I talk myself down. “This is just a dream. It’s not real. I’m safe. Everyone is still alive.”

~ snippet one ~

I had a bad feeling that Friday afternoon in August as I followed the ambulance out of the hospital parking lot.

But when we finally enter the 54-acre retirement and rehab campus, it looks beautiful: stately buildings, manicured gardens, trees labeled in Latin. The “cottages” are homes for wealthy retirees, and the restaurant lights at independent living look welcoming.

Then we reach the Semi-Acute Pavilion.

This is the place that nearly kills my father. The place that almost breaks me.

~ snippet two ~

My father, 87, is a week out from hip replacement surgery. He has a broken back, a traumatic brain injury, and post-operative delusions. The EMTs pull him from the ambulance and run him inside as rain beats down. It’s deserted in there. No one greets us. The EMTS get lost finding his room. The lights flicker off before a generator hums to life.

The EMTs need help transferring my father from the gurney to the bed. But there is no one around, so they ask me to help.

I am told to take my father’s feet, and to be mindful of that new hip, that broken back. We heave him onto the bed. He screams, and my body absorbs the sound, where it still lives in me.

~ snippet three ~

The intake session does not go well. A man with a clipboard appears out of nowhere to quiz my father about the day, month, year—the good old PIMS Dementia Test. Useless, except for labeling patients for Medicare billing.

My father fails because he’s dazed, delusional, and certain he’s arrived at a pleasant vacation destination after a bumpy flight. He doesn’t know that it’s Friday at 4:43 p.m., he just got wheeled off an ambulance, and he’s just checked into hell.

Two nursing aides appear without introducing themselves and tell me to step out because they must “examine his skin.” Moments later, my father’s screaming begins—prolonged, desperate. He’s begging them to stop touching him, to leave him alone, to stop humiliating him.

I push the door open. The aides—a man and a woman—are holding him down in bed, my naked flailing father, a diaper halfway up his legs. He’s yelling at them to stop.

My father does not need a diaper. This detail matters. I tell them that he is not incontinent. You see, my father lives on his own. He wakes up every morning at 6:45 am and takes a shower and gets dressed (he still dry cleans his shirts and pants) and shaves and comes downstairs to pay bills, check his stocks, and wait for the caretakers who will bring him out to lunch and food shopping.

I try to tell them this. They tell me to leave. I hesitate, then obey because I’m disoriented, scared that any pushback will result in retaliation against my father.

When they emerge, one pulls me aside. “Your father tried to assault us,” she says. “I won’t tell anyone—especially her,” pointing down the hallway at a person I assume is a nurse, “because she’ll make us use restraints on him.”

I freeze. I don’t yet know it’s illegal in New York State to restrain a patient—that it’s even illegal to use a bedrail to prevent a patient from falling out of bed. It is very against the law to restrain a sweet, frail, elderly man for defending himself.

Also. My father’s arms are bleeding.

I start to cry. She watches this.

I haven’t hardened up yet. I stay the night on the chair next to my father’s bed, which they have lowered to floor level so he doesn’t fall out. I later learn that they took at least one photo of my father during the episode, wild-eyed and terrified.

~ snippet four ~

The next day is Saturday. I wake up when I hear a scream.

Please help me.

Another one. Please help me.

Panicked, I chase the screams through a pale yellow hallway until I find her. Slumped in a chair, head tilted, eyes staring at nowhere.

I step close.

“Can I help you?” I ask, heart hammering. “Are you in pain?”

Please help me.

I look into her empty eyes. Eyes like my mother’s eyes towards the end of her ten-year battle with dementia. This woman is not capable of telling me what’s wrong. So I run again down that pale yellow hall, finally finding an aide. “Can’t you hear that screaming for help?” I ask.

The aide shrugs. “She does that all day.” She walks away from me.

The scream rises again. Please help me.
And again.
No one listens. No one cares.

---

~ snippet five ~

Around 10 a.m. a nurse finally appears at our door—I will soon learn that she is one of the two good nurses here. She is not the nurse from last night who would put my father in restraints.

She examines the new purple bruises that have risen up my father’s arms since last night, but she says nothing. She does tell us that my father will most likely get no physical or occupational therapy—it’s the weekend. Then she adds that his medications haven’t been ordered yet.

In fact, one pill—his painkiller—won't arrive before he leaves this facility in three weeks. The Head of Nursing will keep lying about it, demanding to know which staff have been speaking to us. Meanwhile, the two nurses tell us each day that there’s no painkiller in the cart for him. Each day, they end up taking one from another patient’s drawer.

I ask this nurse when my father will be helped to the bathroom—and when the diaper will be removed.

“Oh honey,” she says. “I can’t help. Try the call button.”

I press the button. My father starts panicking because he really has to use the bathroom. I use the call button over and over again. 5 minutes go by. 10 minutes. 20. At 35 minutes my father can’t hold it anymore. I explain to him that he’s wearing a diaper but he can hardly wrap his mind around this concept, especially not with his post-op fogged-up mind. He nearly cries in defeat.

At 44 minutes, I flag down an aide wandering down the hall, and she rolls her eyes as she comes into the room.

“You need to leave the room now. He had an accident in his diaper.” She drawls that out, loudly, within earshot of my already humiliated father.

What I will soon learn is the biggest horror of this place that calls itself a rehab center. They have NO intention of taking the diaper off my dad or any other patient there. They refuse because they have no intention of walking anyone TEN FEET to the bathroom in a timely way. This place is not about rehab, I realize.

They will continue to change the goal posts throughout his stay, first telling us that my father is too confused to walk to the bathroom. When we prove that wrong, they will tell us that he is a “two-person carry” (meaning two people need to help him). And then when PT says he only needs one person, they will simply refuse to change his protocol. And when we ask again, pointedly this time, they tell us that his walking is not improving, and he must leave the facility in exactly two weeks.

In other words, my father, who can use a bathroom perfectly by himself, will be forced to wear a diaper for weeks because this rehab place refuses to bring people to the bathroom ten feet away. They will tell me they are understaffed as I watch aides sitting around on their phones. The entire time I am there, no one will ever come to the room in less than 20 minutes from the time I push the emergency call button.

Of course, the other unspoken issue is that the longer you force elderly adults to wear diapers, the more likely they will become incontinent forever.

~ snippet six ~

When PT comes on Monday and move my father out of his bed, I am relieved. There is hope, I think, that he can learn how to walk and go home soon. My father does not scream when PT moves him, unlike he howls after he soils is diaper (because he is not allowed to go to the bathroom) and they have to turn him over to clean him.

Later, I ask the aides why they are hurting my father so much that he is screaming when they clean him daily—and why that doesn’t happen when the PT staff moves him.

They laugh incredulously—three of them at once.

“We are not PT. We’re not trained to move patients around,” they say. “We can’t do it any better than this.”

They say this without anger or any recognition of how incredible it sounds to hurt people because you are not qualified or competent at your job.

The irony of this is not lost on me. In my family, we would never say we can’t try to do something better. We are always striving to do better. And we learned this from our father.

~ snippet seven ~

I decide to calmly walk around and figure out this place. It’s a series of long hallways and patient rooms, but the doors are mostly closed.

That’s when I come around a corner and find them—the “Rehab Patients.”

They sit propped in wheelchairs, like actors in a horror movie—necks twisted, eyes vacant. Only one small woman breaks the spell, lifting a hand to wave before recoiling in fear when I wave back.

A television hums in the corner, broadcasting nothing but its own blank reflection.

I will find them there off-and-on every day—morning, afternoon, evening. Always alone. Often on weekends, they sit at tables where dozens of half-eaten trays of food are left piled up for hours.

In all the weeks that we are here, I will never, ever hear one staff member speak kindly to them. Not even a “good morning.”

This is just the first 24 hours. My father was there for several weeks. I don’t know if I can get through writing down all the snippets that still visit me nightly. There’s the lady found lying on the bathroom floor, and the nurses and aides were talking openly about how they didn’t have to report it because they found her there and didn’t see her fall. Then there was the front desk aide who screamed every time she saw a mouse running around in the evenings—she kept a can of Raid next to her. And the fact that a rat trap sat underneath the table outside my father’s room—the same table where my father’s half-empty food trays sat for hours.

Then there’s the situation (as we like to call it) where my father sprang a fever, and when I arrived early the next morning to check on him, the nurses put a huge Do Not Enter on his door and told me he had pneumonia (not true). That same day, they decided he needed a catheter and fumbled the insertion until he bled and then they gave him the diagnosis of blood in his urine.

The good news? All of this got my father released to a wonderful hospital that saved his life.

The last parting gift? The Head of Nursing showed up for the paperwork as my father was wheeled out of rehab on the way to the hospital. She wrote in the paperwork that my father pulled out his catheter himself—an outright lie that made the ER doctors shake their heads in disgust.

My dad is home now, and maybe that’s all that matters.

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As soon as we arrive on my kids’ college campus, we get access to the inner sanctum of my daughter’s suite—eight girls in four meticulously clean and color-coordinated bedrooms (complete with wallpaper and matching bedspreads). I admire the keys hanging in a tiny row on the wall, each with a little gingham ribbon tied around it. I smile at the big posters featuring their hometowns, and at their sweet baby pictures strung across the wall.

I also take note of the beer pong table that looks to me like trouble. More on that later.

My son’s place is next. He informs me that his on-campus apartment is “very full of friends right now.” Translation: don’t even think about it. We’re not invited in. I make a mental note not to push. The weekend is young. I’ll get in there.

Instead, we head to Wegmans, where my children—starving, allegedly, despite the inflated checks I write for their meal plans—start filling the cart with boxes of protein bars, chai-flavored Milano cookies, and cartons of rainbow Goldfish.

I buy everything enthusiastically, because I love my kids to pieces and I have missed them so much.

For dinner, we end up at an overpriced brick-oven pizza place. My son, my daughter, my boyfriend B, me, and three big designer pizzas. Everyone is laughing, generous with their stories, glad to be together.

I listen hard, storing it up. Because this is their life now, at this fabulous university seven-plus hours from home, and I want to know all about it. I’ve felt a little emptied out since they left home. But tonight I feel filled again.

Spending time with young people, I realize. This is one of the keys to living a good life.

That night, I didn’t sleep well—street noise from the second-floor hotel room—and then my phone buzzed at 8 am. It was my son, reporting in from an early-morning tailgate with parents from Connecticut. They were already on the mimosas. From the sound of it, a lot of mimosas.

I decide to shake it all off. Time is short this weekend.

We head to meet my daughter. Her tailgate is just getting underway when we arrive. I hug her and take in the swirl of friends and parents converging from Cleveland, Palo Alto, New York, DC. Everyone radiates good will; everyone is here because they love their daughters, and I soak it all in. When the Jell-O shots appear, I happily down one. The beer pong table magically appears; and suddenly I don’t mind it, in fact I think it’s great. I skip that game but join a game of corn hole with a mom who, it turns out, lives just a few towns from where I grew up.

The girls are luminous—so much more worldly and self-assured, than I ever was at their age. And kind. Did I mention that? Eight kind girls, and a steady stream of kids passing through seem cut from the same cloth.

As I’ve said before, working at a university gives me a close-up view of this generation—and most of them are doing just fine. Despite media headlines painting their entire cohort as socially awkward, troubled, or glued to their phones in their parents’ basements, I see something different. Like every generation before them, they face challenges in a complicated world, and they’re rising to meet them.

Meanwhile, my son has been sending a steady stream of texts, urging us to meet him at various tailgates. I’m not inclined to trek across campus—and I’m even less inclined after he reports that they are holding up dads by their ankles and dunking their heads in a cooler—or maybe it’s some sort of open keg, I can’t tell, I’m obviously getting old.

He thinks it might be fun to dunk B next.

I glance over at B, chatting happily with all the dads, and decide we’ll pass.

But I get to see my son. He pops up at our seats at the football game, a little bit worse for wear. I watch him wander down the stairs looking for us, all six-feet-tall and wearing his football jersey, and my heart grows two sizes and I think fondly, “Oh, there’s my kid.”

And he comes and sits with us, explaining the players, the personalities, the plays, and all the little things going on that I would otherwise miss.

When the team loses in the last 20 seconds (oh yes, this is true), we jump up and down and frustration and then laugh and leave for dinner.

It’s only a game, I know, and the real victory here is spending time with my kids.

This is where things get rough. I hadn’t made reservations for dinner since I didn’t know when the game would end, or if anyone would be hungry after tailgating all day. So I suggest a casual burger place. My kids aren’t thrilled. I suggest another place. Same response. They want sushi. But B doesn’t love sushi.

It’s getting late, pushing 9:30, and it’s been a long day. Restaurant kitchens are closing soon.

My kids (one of them feeling under the weather after a long day that began with with cocktails) are not helping to find a place, and I finally get frustrated and tell them we can all go home and skip dinner then—as if they are toddlers. After this, B is silent; I go silent; my kids are silent.

I have gone too far. My kids are no longer toddlers, and I’m not acting like an adult.

Then B pulls over in front of a Chinese dumpling place that takes no reservations and somehow mysteriously has a Michelin Star. A parking space magically opens up, and despite the long line we spotted outside the previous night, it looks like a few tables are available.

“Okay, let’s try it,” B announces, and since the rest of us (especially me) are mortified, we all obediently get out of the car.

And just like that, the night is saved. Conversation starts slowly, then loosens, then feels normal again. By the time the dumplings arrive, the tension has lifted.

The weekend is saved too.

Now that I’m back home, I catch myself wishing for a re-do, but the truth is, this is real life: messy, imperfect, silly, ours. I never did get into my son’s apartment, but that feels fine. He’s a serious student, and I trust him. He’s an adult now.

And I’m grateful—because for a few days, I got to sit beside both of my kids, listening, laughing, watching them in their own worlds. And that is more than enough.

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When my father called me and told me he had fallen, I didn’t panic. I live more than four hours away, so I asked him if he needed my brother to come and help him get up.

That’s when he told me to call an ambulance. And that’s when I knew that our lives were going to change forever and that my dad was going to a hospital and would probably never return to his home again.

During the call, my father was calm, telling me that he had fallen down the entire flight of stairs. He was concerned about how the EMTs would gain entry to the house—so he gave me the garage code. When they arrived, he told them he wanted to go to a specific hospital because his doctor practiced there. He was clear-headed in every way.

That was the last time for more than 40 days that I would hear my father so alert and lucid.

He did not make it to the hospital he requested. The EMTs gave him a fentanyl shot and brought him to a huge trauma center 45 minutes away, located adjacent to a New York state penitentiary, where a steady stream of helicopters dropped off victims of gunshot wounds and devastating car crashes.

I never got used to the whirring of helicopter blades that shook the walls of that ER, the crash of the doors opening for the gurneys, the yelling, bodily fluids splashed across the floor, prisoners handcuffed to their gurneys with armed guards watching over them.

When I first arrived, through the chaos, I saw the father who raised me, who suddenly didn’t know where he was and how he got there, so frail and confused, this former larger-than-life superhero of a man, now with stitches in his forehead and broken bones and fractures, the man who traveled to my city weekly for years to help me and his grandchildren though my divorce, the man who kept his beloved wife at home for ten years with dementia without sending her to a nursing home, our hero, this now-broken man.

I didn’t know how I was going to manage all of this without breaking.

But in most of these situations, there’s always one helper, one hero. This time it was an ER nurse who ran around all day and night triaging dying patients. This was a man who had found his calling, who loved his job and the adrenaline rushes that fueled him. He took time to explain to me that my father had broken his back and the base of his neck, fractured his hip, needed stitches across his bleeding head, and probably had a TBI, a traumatic brain injury.

Then he told me that people can live with broken backs and broken necks, and that fractured hips can be replaced, even in elderly people.

He gave me just enough hope to carry me through the next several days.

In my normal life, I can pay my bills, reason with people, ask questions, make connections, smile, and get a response. Here, none of that mattered. We had entered a new world where you can only wait and hope things work out. I have never felt so helpless.

Every few hours, I stepped out, unnerved by my father’s gray pallor, his raspy breathing, his confusion, to ask about next steps. A nurse finally told me that delays were a good sign. If surgery wasn’t being done immediately in this ER, it meant the patient wasn’t in imminent danger of dying.

We had been there for 48 hours without talking to a doctor. In an trauma center like this, you don’t get to choose your surgeon; in fact, you don’t know who will perform the surgery or when it will happen. I began to see that this is probably for the best because your surgery (and surgeon) will probably get bumped for something more urgent anyhow.

I learned the yin and yang of asking questions in a hospital like this: push too hard and risk being branded a problem, stay quiet and risk missing something vital or life-threatening.

We waited. A stream of men came by to wheel my father away for X-rays and tests and scans, including an MRI that traumatized my father’s already fragile state. The technician told me he didn’t have time to explain to my father that he was going into a big, loud, thumping, enclosed tube where he could not move. Instead, he just strapped my father down and threw him into the machine.

By the time my father emerged, he was delirious, shaking in fear and pain. His arm was bleeding. For hours he would mutter that he was “manhandled” and “beat up” and in “the worst pain” of his life.

I could do nothing. What was done was done; it would be my father’s word against the technician’s, and that wouldn’t work, not right now with my father’s confusion.

Besides, I had to get him safely to surgery before the shattered bone fragments in his hip migrated and killed him.

Along this journey, I observed the truth about healthcare in our nation. The comforting myth of hospitals being filled with saints is just that, a myth. The truth is that many of the people working in our hospitals and sub-acute facilities today aren’t just understaffed and overworked, but cruel and uncaring. I have never before witnessed behavior so anti-social, so shockingly devoid of basic humanity.

Two days into the fog of the ER, two men arrived without notice to wheel my father into OR, where we met the surgeon—a self-important man, more concerned with how he appeared to us than with my father or the operation ahead. Behind the desk, the operating room staff smirked at each other whenever he spoke.

I became uneasy, knowing I was about to leave my father’s life in this man’s hands.

Then we waited. Nearly an hour in that OR holding room—no seats, just a raw view of how the staff really behaved when they thought no one was watching. My father, mercifully out of it, lay on the gurney staring blankly at the ceiling’s florescent lights. He looked like the dying patients I had seen in hospice where my mother spent her last months.

Then all in a sudden, the doors to his holding room hell swung open, and a young man was wheeled in, laughing, which startled me. Laughter amongst this misery! That’s when I noticed the handcuffs securing him to the gurney—and the two armed prison guards flanking him. I hadn’t yet seen anyone with two armed guards, and I wondered what he had done to warrant this kind of security. He was just a kid—and he was funny, making fun of the guard who struggled to squeeze into a paper surgical gown. I smiled despite myself.

Bet the guard did not. “Just remember, once we’re in there,” he said, pointing at the operating rooms, “you’ll be unconscious, and I’ll have a scalpel handy.”

He did not appear to be kidding.

Then they whisked away the prisoner and the guards—and it was finally my father’s turn. At this last moment, someone realized my father was wearing dentures. When one of the staff was told to remove them, she made a horrified, disgusted face.

She was obese, with greasy, unwashed hair, dirty Crocs, and a food stain down the front of her scrubs. I had earlier heard her viciously making fun of a coworker with bipolar disorder.

I looked at her hard, and I did not look away until she had completed her job.

Then we waited.

When the surgeon didn’t call after four hours, my brother and I got worried—did our father die? Was the anesthesia too much?

And then, lo and behold, by a stroke of good luck, we ran into his surgeon, heading home for the day. He looked at us, puzzled, not recognizing us.

We reminded him who we were and why we were there, and he pulled out his cellphone to show us an x-ray of the “beautiful” artificial hip he had placed in my father’s body.

I didn’t bother to ask him why he took cellphone photos of his patients in the OR, or why forgot to tell the family as promised that the surgery was complete. I needed to focus now my father’s recovery.

And this is where things should have gotten better, but instead they got worse. Because what no one don’t tell you is that most hospitals are not good places to linger once your surgery is over, not in the United States in 2025, especially not when you are old.

I can’t really remember it all, that miserable, touch-and-go, those terrifying ten days in recovery up on the seventh floor.

What I do remember is the rhythm of those days: once one emergency is diverted, or a problem solved, another one rises in front of you: Fix the hemaglobin crash with a transfusion, then do a scope under sedation, then mitigate how the sedation hurts the patient’s cognition, then postpone physical therapy. Now you’re worried about pneumonia and blood clots. So, take patient off blood thinners and now you need another scope for blood in urine.

Throw in a patient in extreme confusion who keeps trying to get out of bed, and you have a perfect storm. Especially when everyone forgets to put on the bed alarm.

Every 12 hours, the staff turns over, and you need to tip-toe up to the new nurse and aides and start all over again. Mistakes are made, mostly incompetence, but some malevolence lurks in the air on this seventh floor—erupting when an aide throws a temper tantrum and flings her dirty gloves across the room, two nurses get into a screaming fight in the hallway, a doped-up patient explodes in anger after he’s told for hours that he will be released but then nothing happens.

This man—bare backside exposed through his hospital gown, IV pole rattling as he dragged it behind him—cursed the nurses and stormed the door.

I have to confess that this man was a hero to me. He was furious about the obvious: they had stripped him of his autonomy, his dignity. Unlike the rest of us—cowed into submission by the hospital’s power over our loved ones—he refused to accept it. I silently cheered for him. I wanted him to escape. I wanted us all to escape.

What comes to me in my dreams now is my father’s roommate, a former alcoholic there for his second liver transplant, the nurses who spoke about elderly patients in the third person as if they weren’t right there in front of them, aides who rolled their eyes when asked to change bedpans, elevator rides with armed prison guards wearing holstered guns, the smell of hospital-grade disinfectants, the constant beeping and lights and alarms, the way you had to start every conversation with a thank you in advance—or an apology for “bothering” someone to do their job or answer a question. I remember the bullies, the heartless people in scrubs—and I also remember a few kind souls. I remember the way that the days slipped into nights in that place where you could never crack open a window for a breath of fresh air. But mostly, I remember the trauma center taking away my voice, my rights to ask questions, to advocate for my father.

What’s most important, though, is that on his second night on the seventh floor, my father told me that his parents were coming to get him the following day. His parents, of course, had died decades earlier. I stepped out of his room, shook off the tears, took a few deep breaths, and then returned to tell him that no one was coming from heaven to get him anytime soon.

He would just have to stick around with us for a while longer here on Earth.

And I promised him that we were going to get him home.

Luckily, we had no idea it would take us 30 more days. We had no idea that no one at the trauma center really expected my father to recover. We had no idea that things were about to get worse at the sub-acute care place.

Thankfully. Because it was our blissful ignorance that would save our dad.

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Dog Lovers, I apologize in advance. I am about to make a terrible confession.

After I adopted our rescue dog, I tried to give her back.

I know. This is worse than abandoning your infant for no reason at a firehouse in the middle of the night.

But here’s the full story. I hope you’ll understand by the end.

One day a long time ago, I was married. My kids were five and six years old, and I adored them more than life itself, which is one reason why I kept letting my ex-husband gaslight me all the time. When my children were born, I pledged to give them the most perfect lives possible. Raising them as kids of divorce in a broken family was unimaginable.

Then one September afternoon, I opened a laptop I shared with my ex-husband and spotted a strange Yahoo email account. I called my ex at work and asked him about it. When he said he closed that account a long time ago, I asked him to give me log-in information so I could confirm it.

This, of course, tells you quite a lot about the state of our marriage.

Trapped, he gave me the log-in information. Meanwhile, he was frantically shutting down the account. So by the time I logged in, Yahoo told me that it was indeed shut.

But Yahoo told me something else. You can re-open accounts within 90 days. So I did. And after reading through it, I told my husband of 15 years that he had an hour to come and get his stuff and leave our home forever.

Despite “the circumstances leading up to the demise of the marriage” (as the lawyers love to say), I like to think I could have forgiven my ex-husband just enough to co-parent with him. I would have done this for my children. But what happened next made that impossible.

My ex fought me for three long years in a narcissism-fueled war that drained me—financially and emotionally. It all culminated in a final courtroom showdown, something very few divorces ever come to. The judge’s words made it clear who was responsible for the turmoil, and for the first time, my ex-husband was found accountable for everything he had done.

Going forward, I would be the one making decisions for my children. But it had been a long, traumatic road, and all my work to shield my children, keep them in their sweet little school, maintain normalcy at any cost, had exhausted me. I came down with the flu.

A friend took my children for a few days while I recovered. What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time is that my friend didn’t just take in the stray children of divorced, influenza-suffering moms. She also fostered stray dogs who were waiting to be adopted. And that week, she was fostering a sweet rascal of a dog from West Virginia named Stella.

My kids fell in love with Stella. They begged me to adopt her. They were shameless, telling me that Stella was just like a kid of divorce and with nowhere to go. In my woozy state, and wracked with guilt for not giving my kids the perfect family, I said yes, even though I grew up in a New York City apartment and never owned a dog before.

And when Stella arrived and immediately ran through our house and straight out the back door to run away, I started wondering if this had all been a mistake.

I called a dog trainer, one who worked mostly with affable labs and eager-to-please golden retrievers. When the trainer arrived at our house, Stella ran through her legs and ran away again. The trainer and I found ourselves outside in the middle of the street, desperately screaming, “STELLA, STELLA” like Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar Named Desire.

The trainer dramatically announced that Stella was “incorrigible.”

I was humbled. I was a single mom, who had just gone back to work full-time. I just couldn’t do it. Not now, not this dog. Not an incorrigible dog! I called the rescue center and told them that I needed to give Stella back. It was all a mistake, I said. I wasn’t cut out to be a dog owner after all.

But when I went to tell my kids, I chickened out. I looked into their little faces lit up in joy over their new dog. I couldn’t disappoint them. I called the rescue center back, told them that the flu had made me crazy, and that of course I wanted to keep Stella.

I had one caveat. Her name could not be Stella. I could not stand in the street bellowing “Stella” for the next 15 years. My daughter suggested “Riley,” and that day Riley officially became our dog.

That was more than ten years ago. Since then, Riley has been incorrigible. She runs away every time a door or gate is left open for a second. She lies in wait when people come to fix things around the house—and also during social gatherings, knowing that someone will eventually slip up and open a door. After my son’s graduation party, the guests left, and then returned to search for Riley in the dark.

We tried everything, including trainers and an invisible fence, but the fence salesperson told us that Riley was the type of dog who would run through the fence while pursuing a squirrel or rabbit, despite the jolt.

I’ve spent hours wandering the streets looking for her, certain she’d been hit by a car. But she always comes back. Once, the police brought her home. Another time, three sweet little girls tied a string around her collar and brought her back. An angry older woman in sensible Earth shoes banged on my door one day to tell me she saw my dog wandering down the street—and added that I was an irresponsible dog owner. It was the one time that a person did not try to bring Riley back to us.

When the rescue organization first found Riley in West Virginia, she was nearly starving. So now, not surprisingly, Riley takes food seriously. In our house, if you have food and you turn your head, Riley will get it: steaks off the barbecue, plates sitting on guests’ laps, a wheel of Brie, an entire sausage and mushroom pizza. Until recently she could jump up on the kitchen island to lick mixing bowls and steal leftovers. Once she ate every piece of chocolate out of two Advent calendars. (Lucky for her, there isn’t enough real chocolate in those calendars to do much harm.)

When my daughter had a big sleepover party, the girls ate breakfast in our dining room as their parents came to pick them up. As a divorced mom, I tried extra hard to make that party perfect. But as one mom was leaving, she tapped my shoulder. I turned around to see what she and all the other parents were looking at. It was Riley, standing on the dining room table scarfing down the food that their daughters were eating just a few moments earlier. Pink balloons floated around her as she licked the plates with pieces of bacon hanging out of her mouth.

Lastly, did I mention that Riley hates other dogs? Really really hates them. We’ve tried our best to socialize her, and in every way it’s been a disaster. Riley only weighs 26 pounds but has no problem taking on 98-pound German Shepherds.

Riley is not a dog park dog.

But Riley loves people—especially her people. That’s us.

Endlessly loyal and loving, Riley’s always been patient with my kids, even when they dressed her in tutus and carried her around like a doll. She’s our loyal defender, launching herself at the front door every time the mail slot clinks. She’s a cuddler, curling up on the sofa, sneaking into my daughter’s bed in the middle of the night. She’s a constant in our lives—always happy to see us, always ready for a snack, up for any adventure, and quick to comfort anyone feeling down.

We often wonder what Riley thinks of us, these three humans in all their messy emotions and silliness and visitors and loud laughs and sarcasm and petty squabbles and some epic teenager-parent scenes. But Riley doesn’t mind it all; she has grown into the most steady one in our house.

And now, Riley is getting older. Her fur turned an elegant white several years ago. She has hip issues and can’t jump up on a bed quite as easily, much less a kitchen island. She has slowed down to the point that when she goes to run away, she can finally be cajoled to come back with the promise of a treat. I waited for this day, but now it makes me sad. Like so many things in life.

For several years, while we weren’t paying attention, this puppy we “rescued” has aged faster than us, and in all in a sudden, she’s much older than me.

So yes, Dog Lovers, I tried to give our rescue dog back.

But thanks to my kids, I did not. And Riley joined our family and spent a decade stealing our food, evading capture, dismembering rabbits (once in our house right before a dinner party), and barking at the mail. But somehow, in the middle of all that chaos, our crazy dog became our steady dog. I guess the rescue worked—just not the way I expected.

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