This week, I sat down and watched an ABC After School Special.

No, that’s not still a thing. And no, it’s not making a comeback. Kids don’t come home and turn on the TV these days; they pick up their phone, an iPad, a video game controller.

But back in 1977, it was all about graham crackers, frosting, and an hour spent with teen star Kristy McNichol.

If you’re really curious, you can watch The Pinballs on YouTube. Although I’ll warn you, it’s very much a product of the 70s, from the cheesy opening music to the saccharine representation of life with a foster family.

But it still made a deep impression on 11-year-old me. I absolutely believed Kristy McNichols character, Carlie, was a role model. She was tough, sarcastic, spoke her mind. She allowed herself to be angry. No people-pleasing in sight!

But what I hadn’t realized at age 11 was glaringly apparent to me as an adult. Carlie wasn’t a scrappy little smartass because she was cool. Carlie was who she was because she was protecting herself, taking aim at others before they could take aim at her. Bristling so nobody would get too close.

You can read the story here if you missed it.

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I sit cross-legged in front of the TV. Mom bought some Betty Crocker frosting, so I’ve whipped up my favorite snack—a paper plate laden with chocolate-frosted graham crackers. It’s time for the ABC Afterschool Special.

Amazingly, I’ve got the living room to myself. Dustin, the baby, is asleep. Scott and Dad walked down to the lake. Mom’s starting dinner. Finally, I’ll be able to concentrate on the show.

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On the screen, a huge green car pulls up in front of a house, and Kristy McNichol climbs out the passenger side. She’s my favorite! She plays Buddy on Family, and now she’s starring in this new Afterschool Special episode, The Pinballs.

I’m rapt as Kristy, who plays a girl named Carlie, enters her new foster home and immediately starts being a total jerk. She’s sarcastic to the core, and she doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks. She quickly scouts out her foster family’s TV and settles in for a soap opera.

Kristy McNichol’s Carlie is the coolest girl I’ve ever seen. She doesn’t hold things back like I do—when people are acting up (and even when they aren’t), she lets them have it. What would it be like to just speak your mind like that, to not quietly hold every feeling inside, to be unafraid of how people would react?

What would it even feel like to be angry and just let people know about it? I could never be like Carlie, but I desperately wish I could. I try practicing a few times. Once, when my little brother Scott is teasing me relentlessly, I even lose my temper. I put a hand on each of his shoulders and bring my knee firmly up into his groin. He doubles over in pain.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I cry, and I run away. I carry the fresh memory of what I’ve done for months, riddled with guilt.

* * * *

Peter stands before me in our bedroom, hands on his hips, red-faced and leaning in toward me menacingly. This used to intimidate me, but now I’m reminded of the nature documentary I’ve just watched with the kids, where a tiny jumping spider reared up and waved its front legs like it was about to throw down. The kids and I laughed at the tiny creature: “Ooooo! Scaaaawy!”

I put my hands on my hips, too, and I don’t flinch. My husband has, inexplicably, found a gold cufflink shaped like a treble clef on the floor of our bedroom. And I can honestly say I have no clue where it’s from or how it got there. So, of course, my husband is convinced I must be having an affair with the director of the community choir I belong to. Especially now that I’m secretary of the board and we meet at Sherman’s house monthly.

“You mean to tell me this just showed up, Karen?” He wields my name like it’s a weapon. (And this is long before the name Karen became a social media phenomenon.)

“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean to tell you.”

He leans in, sneering in my face. “Why should I believe you?”

I’m done with this. I’m done defending myself, because there’s nothing to defend against.

“You know what?” I say. “I’m not pulling my punches anymore.”

“Oh, really? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You want a reason to believe me? Let’s start here: I’m not trying to sleep with every man I meet. But I can absolutely see why you’d think I would, because hey, it’s what you’d do, right?”

Peter glares. And I know this look; it’s the one that might precede shouting, shoving, backing me into a corner, preventing me from leaving the room. But Peter’s less fit than ever, our kids are almost grown, and I’ve got nothing left to lose. So when Peter snarls that I’m pushing my luck, I don’t back down. I double down.

“Patty, Virginia, Patricia the Second, Victoria, Susan…”

Peter dramatically clutches his chest with each name, as though I’m stabbing him through the heart.

“How could you say those names?” he gasps. “Are you trying to hurt me?”

A dry, sardonic laugh escapes me. “Do you even hear yourself? You’ve become ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous?!” His face registers cartoonish levels of outrage.

I shrug, shaking my head as I walk away. Unlike in years past, Peter doesn’t try to block the door. He doesn’t grab my arm, leaving a hand-shaped bruise. Instead, he lets me go. I feel a newfound power surge through me, one I’ve exercised for the very first time. After years of fooling myself into believing I could save him from himself, I’ve come to accept that Peter is exactly who he is, and nothing I can do will ever change that.

And I’ve started to realize that I can no longer accept Peter.

Months later, when my grandmother succumbs to pancreatic cancer at 94, I ask Peter to read a eulogy I’ve written at her funeral. I was close with Little Grandma, and we’d even lived with her for a time after Gramps died. I know I won’t be able to contain my emotions if I read the eulogy myself, but Peter is a skilled orator, so I’ve asked him.

I’m emotional as I make dinner the night before the funeral. I snap at Peter and, inevitably, we get into a fight over something small that gets blown so far out of proportion that suddenly we’re in the kitchen shouting at one another.

If my anger is an ember quietly glowing, what Peter says next is the iron poker that prods the log and causes it to flare into a roaring flame:

“You can get someone else to read for your grandma’s funeral, bitch!”

I’m standing over the sink straining spaghetti when he says it. Without a word, I pick up the plastic spaghetti spoon and hurl it at his head. Like George W. Bush famously dodging a shoe, my husband also has surprisingly good reflexes. The spoon clatters to the floor. Peter stares at me, mute, his mouth open.

There is no question I mean what I say next. The voice I summon rises from low in my chest, rumbling out:

“Get the fuck out of my house!”

And because I own the house on a land contract, because it’s my name on the deed and Peter has no legal right to it, that’s exactly what he does.

* * * *

I sit with my leg elevated, still recovering from a broken fibula. Though the cast is off, the leg aches, reminding me I’m alive.

I’m bored by the inactivity, but my curiosity is piqued. I naturally lean toward curiosity, and for reasons I can’t even trace, suddenly I’m tugging at a long-lost thread and searching for The Pinballs. It’s something I carry a strong memory of from childhood. It must mean something, right?

I’ve forgotten much of what the story was about. I remember cool Kristy McNichol, of course, and how much I admired Carlie. I remember the story is about a mismatched group of kids in a foster home. Beyond that? I’ll be seeing it with fresh eyes.

Carlie and a CPS agent (who’s never actually called that, but as an adult I get the gist) pull up in a 1970s sedan the size of a yacht. The earnest agent introduces Carlie to her new foster mom. Carlie immediately starts in with the witty repartee.

“And this must be Carlie!” says the sugar-sweet foster mom.

“Well, it’s not exactly Helen of Troy,” quips Carlie.

The two women smile and nod at each other with raised eyebrows. Oh, that irrepressible little rascal, Carlie!

But nearly 50 years later, I can see what I missed when I first watched The Pinballs and chose Carlie as my hero.

Carlie wasn’t fearless. She wasn’t even being herself. The sarcasm I’d thought was so impressive and honest as a child was nothing more than a mask protecting a frightened girl who’d learned to fire shots at people before they could take aim at her.

But Carlie had also given 11-year-old me a gift. She’d shown me that buried beneath all that snarky meanness was something I’d needed: permission to be angry. Permission to stop smiling through my pain, cushioning every blow by simply absorbing it. Permission to stop making myself easier for people and start being someone who demands to be seen.

Carlie wasn’t exactly free—she was still a teenager living with a foster family, still the survivor of an impossible childhood. But she’d shown me the shape freedom could take. She’d shown me the difference between letting anger build another kind of cage and finding the freedom that lies in truly becoming yourself.

Dearest Gentle Readers,

Occasionally, I take a little side trip away from my usual format—I tell you a story from my life that I hope you’ll find things to relate to in, and then I hand you a metaphorical pen and say “Go forth and write!” (I’d love it if you shared more of what you wrote with me, but we’ll get to that eventually, I’m sure. We’re still getting to know one another.)

I decided to call my little side trips “Detours.” So, whenever you see that tag here on I’ll Go First, you’ll know we’re on a side quest.

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I've been thinking about how to thank the people who financially support I'll Go First. I don't want to put my stories behind a paywall—that's never felt right to me. But I'd like to occasionally create something extra for the lovely people whose paid subscriptions make that possible. So, I wonder:

Would some of you enjoy hearing the stories in my own voice?

It would be less of a podcast and more like sitting across the table from me while I tell you a little tale. (And of course I’ll make sure it sounds good. I’ve worked in podcasting. I was a managing editor, not a producer, but I learned enough by osmosis to not assault your ears with terrible audio quality.)

Here’s how it would work: Every now and then, I’d record myself reading one of my essays aloud, along with a few thoughts that didn’t make it into the published piece. Not every week; more like once a month to start.

Before I go impulsively charging ahead like the chaotic, ADHD-addled gremlin that I am, I’m curious...

Would you ever listen to something like that? Feel free to vote even if you’re not a paid subscriber! I’d love to know what you’d enjoy.

Peace and love,

Karen

“There’s one!”

We’re lying on the cool grass in our backyard staring up at the stars. It’s late summer, and the trilling insect chorus nearly drowns out Mom’s excited voice. In the darkness, I follow where her finger points and, sure enough, there’s a tiny white light speeding across the sky, like some sort of star racing across the universe.

“How many is that for you?”

“Three!” she says with childlike excitement. “I’m winning!”

“No, Mom,” my brother Scott says. “Jon’s got five.”

Mom hmphs. “He’s cheating. He has binoculars.”

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Jon, our neighbor, is five years my senior and heading off to UW-Madison in the fall. I like his quiet, thoughtful, scientific mind. Of the chaotic men and boys in his large family, Jon’s the black sheep. And that makes me think he’s the good one.

“I hate to break this to you,” Jon says, “But it’s actually harder to see satellites with binoculars. The ones I spotted were all with the naked eye.”

“Spoilsport,” Mom pouts. “I thought I was actually winning for a change.”

I reach over and clasp Mom’s hand in mine. “Three is really good,” I say. “I’ve only spotted one so far.”

Mom feels a little fragile these days. Just a couple of weeks ago, as I was returning from a walk down to the lake with my little brother Dustin, I heard shouting coming from our house. My parents didn’t get into loud squabbles often, but I knew what I had to do. I stopped in my tracks, placing a hand against my four-year-old brother’s chest and saying, “Let’s not go in yet, OK?”

We walked back down the road. “To check on the fish!” I’d said, making it seem like an adventure. But as we walked, I heard my Dad’s reedy tenor voice wailing, “You’re never home, Kathy! All my friends think you’re shacking up with some guy every weekend!”

We spent every weekend at my grandparent’s house, an hour away from our home by the lake, because Mom hated Cambridge. It was “cliquey” she said, and no matter how hard she tried to fit in, she never seemed to. So when the weekend came, we went back to her safe place, the place she’d always called home. There, Mom would make herself useful mowing the lawn with the big green John Deere, tackling Grandma’s little household projects, cleaning the garage.

And yes, sometimes flirting with the neighbor guy, Frank, whose own wife was a bit of a recluse and also named Kathy. Small world.

When we went to Grandma’s, sometimes we’d go to Oconomowoc for groceries and Mom would say, “Let’s go cruisin’.” We’d take the long way, around Oconomowoc Lake. As we drove, Mom would look up at the huge houses. One of her favorites was a mansion with a porte-cochère (although I wouldn’t learn that term until I was much older; I simply thought of it as a “carriage driveway”).

Mom seem to love imagining she lived somewhere else. Anywhere else. Every time we drove past the mansion—and it must’ve been hundreds of times—she would slow the car to a crawl and gaze across its expansive lawn. I could almost feel her imaging herself standing on its second story veranda in a gauzy sundress, one hand shading her eyes as she gazed out at the sunlight glimmering on the lake.

“Can you imagine?” she’d say with awe. “Can you even imagine living like that?”

But didn’t we sort of live like that? Our house is just up the road from Lake Ripley, and we can walk down and use the community pier whenever we want. Mom loves the lake. She waterskis behind our old boat, the one with the gold sparkles. We swim nearly every day in the summer.

Isn’t Mom happy with our boat, our house, our life in Cambridge?

* * * *

Ra and I roll up to the estate sale and they grab their UV light from the glove compartment. We have a couple of objectives. First, we’re going to look for antique uranium glass, which Ra has started collecting. Second, we get to snoop around what looks like a really cool old house.

The house is the draw for me. It always is. Part of it is my fascination with imagining the lives that went on in that place. I wander through, looking at the remnants of things someone gathered, possibly treasured.

I peer into a bedroom and see a story. A walker in the corner. An ancient bed with a metal spring and one of those nubby bedspreads. Paintings of ships and seascapes. A cross hung on the wall with a rosary draped over it.

“Catholic pirate,” I murmur.

Ra laughs. “But a walker? What’s wrong with a peg leg?”

I spot a photo of a German Shepherd in a little frame on the dresser. “Dog chewed it up,” I say, and we burst into irreverent laughter.

Then I pick up a pair of binoculars. Sturdy and black. Surprisingly heavy, as the good pairs always seem to be. I put them to my eyes and look out the window toward the lake, and suddenly I’m in our backyard in Cambridge counting satellites with Mom, Jon, and Scott.

Mom eventually found something resembling contentment.

By the time I’d left home, my family had moved back to Oconomowoc. It always seemed to me like the one place Mom considered home. Life certainly hadn’t been without its challenges, but as my parents grew older, they found themselves settled in a house Mom loved, a little Cape Cod. The house had been in the way of a freeway bypass, and my enterprising dad figured out a way to buy it and have it moved. There was great celebration after the house was set, unscathed, on its new foundation on my parents’ farm.

Mom had a house she was proud of. She decorated, painted, wrangled Dad into putting in new flooring, which always looked as if it had been installed by someone who really didn’t know how to install flooring. She went with me to nurseries and adopted my obsession with plants and growing things.

Mom spent a decade or so making that humble little house her home. Settling in. Feeling pride when people came to visit.

Having her Happy Place didn’t stop her from driving around the lake, though. She’d roll down the windows, inhale deeply, and say, “Smell the lake!” She’d always reminisce about Great-Grandma’s lake house, the one shed grown up visiting, and the one we’d lived in when I was small. We’d moved away from the lake when I was about 10, but I remembered watching fishing boats leaving the channel, the scent of the lake mingled with the pungent tang of boat fuel, the ping-ping-ping of a motor boat pulling a skier over the choppy waves.

As I set down the estate sale binoculars, I remember Mom coveting Jon’s, certain he had the satellite-hunting advantage even after he patiently explained that no pair of binoculars was going to help track a satellite screaming overhead at seventeen thousand miles an hour.

It occurs to me that I’m not all that different.

Here I am, wandering through a beautiful old house, admiring the soaring ceilings, the conversation pit, the orange shag carpeting wrapped around a cone-shaped Malm fireplace. I’ve already mentally moved in, and I’m playing the grand piano sitting beside floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a patch of woods.

“There were absolutely sex parties here,” I say.

Ra doesn’t hesitate. “Oh, a hundred percent.”

“The kinky swingers kind.”

“Definitely.”

“Chips, dips, chains, whips...”

They look at me blankly.

“You’ve never seen Weird Science?“

“I don’t think so.”

I sigh. “Well, I’ve failed as a mother.” They roll their eyes, smirking. They can quote The Princess Bride and So, I Married an Axe Murderer like a champ. They love Bill Joel and Fleetwood Mac. They know I raised them right.

As we wander from room to room, I notice something. I’m not imagining my furniture in these spaces, wondering what it would feel like to wake up and drink coffee on the deck, or imagining hosting Thanksgiving in the dining room.

I’m wondering who has. The walker tucked beside the bed. The rosary draped over the cross. The photo of the German Shepherd. Who laughed here? Who cried? Who sat awake at three in the morning wondering what came next? Who stood at these windows watching winter storms roll across the lake?

On the drive home, I catch myself looking at another house I’ve admired for years. An old Craftsman tucked beneath enormous oak trees, its yard delightfully, intentionally unruly. Through the front windows I catch a glimpse of warm light, rich woodwork, books, plants. For a split second I want to peek inside. But I don’t want the house so much as the story.

And that’s when I realize I’ve inherited something from my mom. She spent years imagining herself inside other people’s lives. The mansion on Oconomowoc Lake. The veranda. The view. The life she thought might make her happy.

I inherited the imagining, just not the longing. Instead of imagining my own life between those walls, I wonder what life was like for the people who reside there, or who once did.

Although, I wouldn’t resist a lovely Craftsman of my own if I had the means to get one.

These days, I live in a humble manufactured home on almost an acre in western Washington. It’s hardly the mansion Mom dreamed about when we cruised around Oconomowoc Lake. But when I watch birds on the back porch as Dodger, my scruffy muppet of a dog, tears around the yard menacing squirrels and rabbits, I feel I’ve arrived at a place where I belong. I don’t find myself wishing I were somewhere else.

Maybe Jon was right all along: The trick wasn’t having a badass pair of binoculars, it was simply learning where to look.

When I started writing my latest post, “All Come to Look for America,” I didn’t know quite what I was writing about. I knew I wanted to talk about the difference between America’s bicentennial in 1976, the year my baby brother was born, and contrast it with the semiquincentennial this year. But the piece I ended up with was both unexpected and exactly the one I needed to write.

Writing helps me make sense of the world. And in workshops I’ve taught, I’ve connected people with writing as a way to find meaning in the chaos life throws at us. That’s exactly what happened when I started writing about my middle brother, Scott. I realized we hadn’t just grown apart over time, we’d grown into people so completely foreign to each other that we just couldn’t communicate anymore.

Through writing, I realized I wasn’t angry or disappointed; not anymore. I was just… deeply sad.

And I realized that so many people are in the same place—their ideological differences with a family member or friend feel insurmountable. They’ve lost people not to death but to differences.

It feels bewildering. Lonely. Hopeless.

If you haven’t read “All Come to Look for America” yet, I hope you’ll take a moment. It’s one of the most difficult pieces I’ve written, but it also says exactly what I want it to say.

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Family portrait. July 3, 1976.

Mom stands bracing herself against the door frame with one outstretched arm. She leans halfway between the garage and the Bar Room, hunched protectively over her big, basketball belly as she calls out, “Doug! Come on!”

Mom’s baby is coming. And by the way she’s panting, tears in her eyes, it seems the baby doesn’t want to wait.

Dad comes rushing into the room carrying a paper grocery bag, one of Mom’s shirts poking out the top. He’s grabbed a long-sleeve shirt. She’ll hate that. I run to Mom and Dad’s room and grab one of her wispy, cool summer tops. I stuff it into the bag and Dad shoots me a quick nod of acknowledgement.

Dad gets mom situated in his El Camino and they hurry out of the driveway, tires spewing bits of gravel across the asphalt. I stare out the huge picture windows into the bright July day and wonder if all the commotion has woken Scott. But I peer into his room and find him still asleep, one arm flung over the blue teddy bear Gramps got him at the church bazaar. I have a matching pink one.

Will we have need for another pink bear, or will it be a blue one? I’m hoping for a sister, but I suppose another brother is OK, too.

I pace around the Bar Room for a moment. The space that serves as our family room has an enormous bar along the north wall that we never use. Sometimes, Scott and I sit on the swivel stools, spin until we’re dizzy, then try to walk across the room without careening into the furniture.

I go to the phone hanging by the bar. My mission: call Grandma. I dial the number I’ve known by heart since I was five. Grandma and Gramps live just 10 minutes away.

Gramps answers. I breathlessly tell him my news, and I hear him call, “Sylvia, the baby!” Scott and I pack our things, and before we’re even finished Gramps drops Grandma off. For some reason, she’s been tasked with driving Mom’s Chevy Vega to the hospital. As an adult, I’ll wonder whether that was so Dad didn’t have to concern himself with driving my Mom and the baby home.

When Grandma attempts to back out of our garage, she forgets to close her door. It catches on the garage frame and tears part of the molding away. The car door is bent too far forward, but Grandma manages to close it while muttering, “Shoot! Gosh darn it anyway!” It will creak loudly and never close right again.

That night, Mom will stand at the third floor hospital window alone, holding our new baby brother, Dustin, watching fireworks. Normally, we’d be seated in a blanket on the grass beside her while she whooped and cheered, the reflections of colored sparks glimmering in her eyes.

But on this July 4th, when America turns 200, Mom is in the hospital and can’t be part of the celebration. So Gramps takes us to the bicentennial parade downtown. He stands erect, his barrel-shaped chest puffed with pride, saluting the flag as the color guard passes. He cheers at the high school band and tells me they get better every year, although I can’t hear a difference.

I gaze up at Gramps, my favorite person in the world besides Mom. His delight at watching this grand parade makes me delighted, too. I reach for his hand, and he smiles down at me. On Gramps’s other side, Scott fidgets and slurps a Bomb Pop, the red and blue dye painting his lips and chin. He stares, smiling and rapt, at the passing band, waving a little American flag on a stick.

* * * *

Family portrait. Friday, June 26, 2026.

I sit in the recliner with a knee scooter beside me and my casted right leg elevated, five weeks along in my recovery with a broken fibula and high ankle sprain.

Blam!

The sound comes from just outside the open window. I jump. Dodger, my scruffy black cattle dog mix, jumps too, then looks at me with ears pinned back, concerned eyes seeking my own: What was that?

“Idiots,” I mutter. “It’s all good, Dodge.”

My dog lies back on his bed, releasing the kind of groan only a canine who lives in a comfortable space with daily meal service, but pays no rent, can utter. Meanwhile, I wonder whether I should give him some trazodone to curb his anxiety in case the neighbors really decide to light things up.

Each year, my neighborhood sounds like a war zone. This year, the guys up the street—who seem to compete annually for Supreme Amateur Pyrotechnician of the Year—are apparently starting early to get a jump on the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration.

I can’t feel joy over any of it.

Once, I thrilled to fireworks displays with Mom at my side. Now, Mom’s been gone for 13 years already. I glare at the window wondering when the next blast will startle me and my dog and potentially spark a grass fire. Or worse.

From in their room, my daughter texts me:

The neighbors are getting an early start

We’re both fed up with fireworks. Not only do they annoy us and scare the dogs, but they don’t exactly feel earned these days.

I sit in the recliner. No place else to go. I’m braced for another explosion, so I try to relax my shoulders, if only to keep Dodger from noticing how tense I am.

Blam! Boom!

Really? What are they celebrating? It’s not even July yet. And even if it were…

Much has changed since that day we watched the July 4th parade with Gramps.

Scott moved to Colorado as a young adult. We led separate lives and connected rarely. Even when Scott came home for visits, he spent most of his time with friends rather than family. Once we were separated by our grandfather, standing on either side of him as we watched a patriotic display. Now, we’re separated not only by miles but by ideologies.

I awkwardly reposition my casted leg. I’m beyond mourning the beautiful summer days I’m missing in this damn thing, but that doesn’t mean I’m comfortable. I think back to that day in September when everything went wrong.

Charlie Kirk had been assassinated. Stacy, Scott’s wife, who always referred to me as “lovely Karen,” was outraged. I commented on her Facebook post, urging people to wait for facts before feeding the flames.

It wasn’t what she needed.

In the present, another firework explodes, this one more distant as other neighborhoods join this Friday night precursor to the July 4th weekend. A 50 pound cryptid of a dog climbs into my lap, eyes wary.

I realize the mistake I made with Stacy. She didn’t want to be preached to; she wanted to be angry. Had a political figure I cared about been assassinated, I would have been angry, too.

Maybe I could have prevented what happened next. Or maybe it was always inevitable.

Scott texted, telling me to leave Stacy alone, to stop posting on her Facebook timeline. A cold, wormy knot unspooled in my stomach. Scott and I spoke only on birthdays and holidays, and now he was texting me out of the blue to admonish me?

I answered that I’d been encouraging people to wait for more information, to resist the urge to add to the turmoil. It was nothing personal, just a wish for calmer heads to prevail.

I always blamed the other side, my brother said. And now I was implying that his wife was a bad person. But that couldn’t be right—I loved Stacy! And if Scott knew me at all, he’d have known I wasn’t loyal to parties, just principles.

I closed my eyes to compose myself. I thought of my big-hearted daughter, Ra, trying to bond with her uncle over their shared love of archery but eventually giving up, convinced Scott’s unenthusiastic response meant he didn’t care.

“It’s not that he doesn’t like you,” I’d said. “He’s your uncle. He just doesn’t get you.”

My child. Why couldn’t Scott see what I saw?

It was time to tell the truth I’d been holding close for decades.

I texted back that I couldn’t understand Scott’s support for leaders who opposed everything my daughter represented. How could he champion political figures who wanted to take rights away from LGBTQ people?

Scott insisted that all Kirk ever did was welcome debate.

My fingers flew across the phone keyboard, hands trembling:

“I’m asking whether you believe in human rights because your political beliefs suggest otherwise. Answer this: Is it OK to assume that some people don’t deserve the same rights you do?”

Scott immediately answered that, technically, by asking about rights, I was saying what happened to Kirk was OK.

We ended the exchange in agreement: We no longer had anything to say to one another.

* * * *

I decide to drown out the continuing sporadic fireworks with music. Music always soothes. I get into bed and lie in the dark, headphones on, staring at the ceiling with my broken ankle elevated above my heart.

I think of Scott standing on that sidewalk in 1976, happy, sticky, waving his little American flag.

I think of us riding bikes together. Building blanket forts. Scouring the forest floor for animal tracks, pretending we knew what each one was.

I remember Scott’s 18th birthday party. I worked in a music store and hired my coworker’s band to play a barn party. Someone brought a keg. Then another. My parents’ farm flooded with partygoers, many of them underage. Legend has it that the cops showed up, surveyed the chaos, and then returned when they were off duty to join in.

I didn’t drink. Hated beer. Wasn’t much for parties, either. But I’d wanted to give my brother a big celebration for his 18th. Because I could.

But now, I can’t keep making room in my life for someone who couldn’t answer the simplest, cleanest question I knew how to ask. Something I’d believed we couldn’t possibly disagree on.

My playlist scrolls to the next song, and Paul Simon’s plaintive voice fills my ears:

Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our futures together

The music soothes as Kathy identifies the man in the gabardine suit as a spy, and later drifts off to sleep. Paul confesses to his sleeping travel companion, “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.”

The moon rises over an open field.

Empty and aching. Lost. I close my eyes as the verse continues, then the chorus swells:

All come to look for America…

The line repeats with growing urgency, strings soaring, cymbals crashing, until the organ waltzes us into reverie, a quiet longing for what used to be, or what never really was.

I used to say my late friend Dena had a “cultivated image.” She was a free-spirited, eclectic, artsy eccentric, and it was important that everyone see her just that way. And for a minute during our friendship, that’s exactly what I saw.

But only for a minute.

Dena was desperately in love with a married man named Robert. They’d been having an affair for over twenty years. She’d moved about an hour away from him in hopes of making the affair easier to end, but she was still hooked, and things were still messy.

We’d gather in Dena’s quaint kitchen, with its antique stove and its walls papered with old cookbook recipes, and I would listen to her endless litanies of Robert’s misdeeds. It got to a point where I no longer knew what to say, so I started answering with a shrug and a joking, “I think we should have him killed.”

One day, frustrated with my auto-response, Dena scowled at me. “Are you totally over my drama?”

I was. So I told the truth.

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I’ve spent most of my life believing I’m not pretty.

If there was a singular moment when I realized it, I was too young to log it to memory. My understanding is the culmination of a lifetime of jabs, like my mom’s reminders that I had to “work harder” to look presentable, or my German great-grandmother’s penchant for poking my muffin top and saying, in her slight accent, “You must reduce!” or my grandmother’s constant observation, “Your hair is so stringy.”

I come from a long line of critical women—three generations of them. They’re all gone now, but their judgments remain. As does their love, which is no small thing. Paradoxically, I never had one without the other.

As a child, on the playground, I collected every cruel taunt like discarded shotgun shells on a shooting range. “Fatty, fatty, two-by-four!” Pick it up, hold it close, pretend it didn’t hurt because it didn’t kill you. The insults I heard, coupled with the criticism at home, slowly began to mold me into a young woman who knew she would never be good enough. Not because they were valid, but because I believed them.

I married Peter, a man who, at least for a brief, shimmering time early in our relationship, made me believe he thought I was gorgeous and sexy. I almost felt pretty when I was with him. But eventually, I realized he’d been one of those angler fish lurking at the bottom of the sea with his physical compliments like a tiny bioluminescent light dangling before his toothy maw, a lure I’d followed readily.

I stayed with Mr. Angler Fish long after the glow of his “angle” faded. It didn’t take long before a wicked combination of stress, cortisol, and sleeping too much—a coping mechanism I’d begun using to escape my volatile marriage—caused my weight to balloon. And that’s when Peter started taking shots, too. “Even your mom says she’s never seen you this big,” he told me. Peter, who weighed over 300 pounds and had type 2 diabetes, never seemed to find the irony.

I just accepted the reality of who I’d come to believe I was: a woman past her prime who’d never truly had a prime to begin with.

I was forty-nine when the next blow landed with a cruelty only nature can heap on a woman who already knows she’ll never be conventionally attractive. It arrived the way these things always seem to: while I was standing in front of a mirror.

I was gingerly brushing my teeth when I felt something odd and lumpy on my tongue. I spit into the sink and yelped when I saw my front tooth lying there among the toothpaste foam. I plucked it out and rinsed my mouth. Then I grimaced at myself in the mirror, tears streaming down my face, as I stared at the gaping hole in what should have been my smile. I wrapped the tooth in toilet paper and flushed it, as though hiding the evidence would somehow make the horror go away.

How could this happen? I remembered that, while pulling up the covers the night before, my hand had slipped and I’d comically punched myself in the mouth. I’d laughed at my foolishness and then gone to sleep. Maybe that punch was the reason the tooth was gone now. How silly, I could tell that to the dentist when I made an emergency appointment. Surely, he’d get me a new tooth right away.

But the dentist was not kind. In fact, he acted almost hostile as he poked around in my mouth muttering to his assistant, “All of her teeth are mobile!”

“I can’t do anything about this,” he finally said. “You need dentures.”

“But I’m not even fifty!”

“Well, maybe you lost the genetic lottery. Some people have lower resistance to infections like gingivitis. But it looks like you haven’t had very good dental care.”

He wasn’t wrong. Before the catastrophe that sent me to the dentist, I’d been fretting over my front tooth. It felt loose and wiggly, a sensation I hadn’t experienced since losing my baby teeth as a child. But this time I wasn’t excited by a childhood right of passage. I was afraid to smile, and horrified by the prospect of going to the dentist. I ignored the problem, hoping, with the futility of the fearful, that it would just go away if I brushed even more often and used an anti-bacterial mouthwash.

But of course, it didn’t.

My mother had instilled the fear of dentists in me at a young age. She was terrified of the men with the whirring drills, and so I only saw a dentist twice before I reached adulthood. He was a pediatric dentist named Doctor Bittner who held me still by drilling his knee into my chest, pinning me to the chair while he scolded me for squirming. When he finally let me up, he scowled and said I’d been bad. His assistant talked him into grudgingly allowing me to pick a cheap plastic toy out of the cheap plastic treasure chest he kept in his exam room for “good kids only.”

I have a family history of autoimmune disorders. Later, kinder dentists would tell me that autoimmune issues and a lack of dental care had probably played a significant role in the state of my mouth. But, at that time, I was certain it was all my fault and I was destined to become a toothless hag. People would look at me and judge — drug user, hick, white trash.

The dentist did not simply pop in a new tooth, as I’d foolishly hoped. He gave me a pamphlet about dentures, told me they were expensive, and suggested I call him back when I was ready to invest.

But at that time, I was far from financially stable enough to pay for extensive dental work. I’d summoned the courage to leave Peter and was living on my own. I didn’t have thousands of dollars to spend on what the brochures advertised as: “A new smile, a new you!” I was barely scraping by, keeping the kids and I fed and housed.

As teeth tend to do, mine shifted and moved closer together and eventually almost filled in the gap. By the time I lost the next front tooth, the one that had been adjacent to the first one to jump ship, I was living in Washington state, two-thousand miles away from my ancestral home.

* * * *

“Smile for me,” Mark said. I grinned toothily while looking at myself in a handheld mirror. “You look beautiful!” he enthused. “That’s a Hollywood smile!”

Mark was my denturist. He’d created a new set of teeth for me so I wouldn’t have to be humiliated by my gap-toothed smile any longer. I could smile with confidence. Mark put a hand on my shoulder and asked, “What do you think?”

“Dey wook gweat,” I mumbled. My mouth was packed with gauze around and beneath the new dentures. But my smile did look “gweat” nonetheless.

After recovering from the anesthesia and pain medication, I would find myself standing in front of my bathroom mirror smiling. Something I’d never experienced before was happening—I actually liked my smile. It was the kind of smile that could finally reflect the growing love I had for Washington and the new friends I was beginning to make. A smile I actually wanted to greet people with.

By the following week, I was back to singing with my choir. Choral singing, and music in general, has always brought me peace and contentment. It was only after I separated from Peter and began reinventing myself that I found music again.

Although I was worried that my choir friends would notice the sudden change in my appearance, no one said a word, and soon I was smiling confidently and singing with a joy I hadn’t been able to experience when I felt compelled to hide my failing teeth.

I found my tribe in the Pacific Northwest, an enclave of liberal hippies like me. They are artists, poets, dancers, and musicians. Earth mothers and moon dogs. I discovered people to love, and people who love me.

And in my new home, I also met the love of my life, John.

One night, John and I were curled up together watching a movie in which the main character attended a formal dance. John asked if I’d ever experienced a formal.

“Oh, that’s for pretty people,” I answered, half joking. “I’m not pretty.”

John didn’t appreciate my self-deprecating joke. He turned to me, his eyes narrowed, and said, “Who told you that?”

I took a beat. It was the first time anyone had ever challenged the story instead of either dismissing it or agreeing with it.

“I … lots of people,” I said.

“Yourself? Did you tell yourself that?”

John seemed angry. Not with me, but with the voices in my head. I’d rarely seen him this fierce.

“Maybe,” I admitted.

“Don’t believe it,” he commanded, as if his directive was the final word.

I let John’s words settle over me, and something began to shift. “Not pretty” was a tale I’d told myself since childhood. But much like a fairytale, myth, or urban legend, just because the tale endured didn’t make it true.

Yes, society has some standards I don’t meet. By society’s standards, it’s possible that I am not pretty, and I never will be.

But I am strong. And I’m so much wiser than I was when I listened to the voices of my matriarchs, peers, and ex-husband, letting their criticisms become my story. Today, I have a different story to tell.

Now that I’ve found my place in life, I understand that I’m enough. I’ve opened myself to people and found that I am welcomed, appreciated, and respected.

Most of all, I’m not valuable because someone chose me; I’m valuable because I am me.

It’s Juneteenth, and for my late partner, it was a day of contradictions. John used to get contemplative on Juneteenth: Is it a happy celebration? Can you really be happy about enslaved people finally being freed over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation?

It’s a fair question. But when John asked it of a vendor at a Juneteenth celebration, things didn’t quite go as planned. And I’d argue that John knew they wouldn’t, which was part of what enticed him to engage. You can read more about it here:

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For the happiest six years of my life, I was a white woman named Karen in love with a Black Vietnam Veteran named John.

We laughed at the same obscure references, knew all of the same obscure songs, loved adventuring together and discovering new places to eat where we could have a drink, share a plate of food, and then fight over who got the biggest “half” of our shared dessert.

We sang together. Always. All I’d have to do was kickstart John with a bar or two of any song, and we’d be off, harmonizing and grinning.

Also, we were both smart asses of the highest order.

I used my wit to laser-focus on people’s human foibles and gently tease them. Never in a hurtful way  (I hope)  but in a way that said, “Hey, I see you. We’re both flawed individuals here. Isn’t it great?”

John, on the other hand, used his powers of observation to quiz people, sometimes accidentally trodding on their tender spots. Not often, but whenever he felt especially mischievous, he’d push things a little further than strictly necessary. Like me, he wasn’t aiming to hurt anyone, either. Ultimately, his was a ploy to get people to loosen up a little. A ploy that rarely worked.

And sometimes John exploited someone’s tender spot and put me on the spot in the process.

Juneteenth at Jimi Hendrix Park

Washington isn’t the whitest state in the U.S. (that’s Maine), but it’s not especially diverse, either. I’m a Washington transplant by way of Wisconsin, which is whiter still. So, the Juneteenth celebration at Jimi Hendrix Park was one of the few times in my life I’d found myself in the distinct minority.

The event had music, food, and booths run by artisans selling handcrafted goods. (It was also hotter than Hades. Why does Jimi Hendrix Park have no trees or shade, Seattle? Do better.) John and I were strolling from booth to booth, checking out carved wooden masks, paintings, t-shirts, and African-inspired clothing.

We came upon a woman selling soap. The heat found her fanning herself with a flyer folded like an accordion, scowling out at the people browsing surrounding booths. As we approached, she looked me up and down with disdain.

John noticed. Because John noticed everything.

“How are you today?” he crowed cheerfully.

“Hot,” the vendor answered. “Yourself?”

Himself was comfortable, but perhaps a tad warm.

“So, Juneteenth,” he mused. “Tell me: Do you consider it a happy celebration? Or is it more of a somber one?” John loved thought-provoking conversation starters, but I sensed he was looking for an angle.

The vendor sneered. “What’re you talking about?”

“Well, those people in Texas back then,” John said. “Slavery’d already been abolished, but they were still slaves.”

“Well, they were freed either way” the vendor said, cocking one eyebrow at him. “You’ve got some strange ways of thinking.”

Oh, no. She was misreading John. She was getting him all wrong.

John had a habit of continuing conversations out loud that he’d started in his head, leaving them utterly devoid of context. Since I was his person, and he mine, I’d sort of made myself his de facto interpreter when others didn’t have a clue as to what he was referencing. John didn’t need me to interpret for him, and he never asked me to, but he didn’t judge me for it, either. I’m otherwise a bit shy with new people, but John knew my interjections were meant to keep the conversation flowing.

“He’s saying those people stayed enslaved for a couple of years after slavery officially ended,” I explained. “They needed troops to show up and enforce their freedom. So, I guess that could feel solemn instead of happy?”

Looking back, I see my mistake. Even though I ended with a non-confrontational, submissive little question mark.

The vendor didn’t know I had a habit of tying up the loose ends John left dangling. All she saw was some Karen (actually named Karen —the irony!) stepping in to explain what a Black man meant.

She glared at me, looking me up and down, and then narrowed her eyes at John and grumbled, “This your wife?”

The window of opportunity was open. John didn’t miss a beat.

“Nope,” he said. “My girlfriend.”

He gave the vendor a moment to mutter a disapproving, eye-rolling “Huh.” Then he delivered the second half of his one-two punch with a sly grin:

“Wife’s at home.”

If the vendor had been simmering before, now she’d completely boiled over. She launched herself up out of her lawn chair and leaned across the table, bellowing into John’s face: “You gonna buy something or what?”

John smiled beatifically, tipped an imaginary hat, and said, “We were just leaving.”

There’s no moral to this story. It’s an anecdote I share because … well, just because, I guess. Because it’s funny. Because it’s mortifying. Because fucking up is human, and some days I’m more human than I’d like to be. Because life is short and ridiculous and we take it far too seriously sometimes.

And also because, when John died in 2022, he left me with all of these stories, and the stories preserve who he was: A bard, a mischief maker, a healer, and an agitator (within reason).

He wasn’t above making a hot day ten degrees hotter.

In fact, I don’t even believe in them, at least not in the Ghost Busters sense.

I don’t believe the dead wander old houses knocking stuff off shelves just to freak us out. (Cats, maybe, but not dead people.) I don’t think every cold spot is evidence of a spirit. And despite what cable television has spent the last two decades trying to convince us of, an EMF detector or a “Spirit Box” has never once persuaded me that the ghost of a Civil War soldier is lurking in the pantry.

But I’ve seen some weird shit.

Enough weird shit that I’ve become deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to have all the answers. The older I get, the more comfortable I am living in the deep gray space between certainty and possibility.

Which is fortunate, because I’ve got some stories.

There’s a windstorm happening.

It’s something meteorologists call a “bombogenesis” — an explosive cyclone that rapidly intensifies around a dramatic drop in atmospheric pressure. I’m a trained Midwest storm spotter, so I understand the gist of it: low pressure, big wind.

I’ve just arrived home after dropping my kids off at school. I’m recovering from a cold, so I opt to crawl back into bed. My 1880s farmhouse rattles around its hinges. The attic door, which is in my bedroom, clatters as gusts seep in around the old window panes. Outside, golden pillars of maple leaves sail up, up into the sky, swirling into colorful chaos against a steely backdrop.

Despite the noise and energy of this storm, I manage to drift off, warm beneath my comforter.

But then I hear the door to my bedroom creak open. Footfalls from hard-soled shoes tap in measured strides across the floor. Peter must be sick, too, I think. Great He’ll blame me for getting him sick and forcing him to come home from work early.

I open my eyes, expecting to see my husband. Instead, I see a shadowy figure bending over the bedside table, as though it’s inspecting something. It has a human shape, but it’s like a vapor or storm cloud, a dark mass I can see through.

“Go away! You’re scaring me!” I yelp, coming fully awake.

And just like that, it dissipates. I go back to sleeping, relatively unperturbed by what was, undeniably, an event that ranks pretty high on the weird-o-meter.

It seems odd that I went back to sleep so easily after such an uncanny happening, so I begin telling myself I probably dreamed it. The next day, I tell my kids about my dream as I’m driving them to school.

My son Ian, then a high school senior, gets quiet. Finally he says, “I’d agree that you probably dreamed it.”

I nod. Yep, that makes sense. All a freaky dream brought on by some freaky weather. And Ian is my mini-me, so of course he’s a skeptic.

“But it’s weird,” Ian continues. “Two different people told me similar stories yesterday. Like, individually — neither one of them had heard the other person’s story. Both of them saw shadowy people as they were getting ready for school.”

* * * *

I’m a newly minted graduate of cosmetology school in the 1980s. (A terrible career choice, but that’s a story for another time.) I work at a salon, and because I’m the new kid, I get a lot of late shifts. For the last hour or two before closing, I’m usually holding down the fort alone. Most nights, that means washing and folding towels and babysitting the tanning bed.

It’s about a half hour before closing time, and I’m eager to get out of the empty salon. That’s when things get weird.

I look up from a stack of towels toward the front desk. A wicker display shelf filled with styling products partially blocks my view, but through the slats I can see a woman seated behind the counter, bent over the appointment book. I can’t make out much, but I can tell she’s wearing a floppy-brimmed blue hat.

There shouldn’t be anyone in the salon.

I stand and call out, “Can I help you?”

The woman is gone.

Then I hear an electronic hum.

A glow suddenly appears beneath the tanning room door.

How the hell did she get from the front desk to the tanning room without me seeing her?

I cross the salon and knock.

No answer.

“Ma’am?” I call through the door. “Do you have an appointment?”

Nothing.

Carefully, I crack the door open, hoping I’m not about to startle some poor naked—or nearly naked—woman.

The room is empty.

A few weeks later, I mention the experience to a coworker. She tells Linda, the salon owner, who promptly loses her little mind. That’s when I learn a few things.

First, Linda has been carrying on a long-term affair with Joe, the man who owns the building. Second, Joe’s wife recently died of cancer. Third, Joe and Linda have been arguing ever since because Joe refuses to take down a portrait hanging in his apartment above the salon.

The portrait is of his late wife. And in it, she’s wearing a floppy-brimmed blue hat.

* * * *

I’ve had other experiences. I frequently saw what I thought looked like a little boy in Victorian-era clothing in my apartment when I was in my mid-twenties and worked at a dog boarding kennel. I later learned the kennel was supposedly home to a child ghost named Joshua (according to a psychic who’d done a seance), and the common wisdom was that Joshua had “followed me home.”

After my brother’s high school best friend died in a horrific car crash while racing on a rural backroad, I swore I saw him stroll under the glow of our farm’s mercury vapor light, wave at me cheerily, and then vanish into the dark.

And still, I don’t believe in ghosts.

I’m 100% OK with the possibility that my brain made up the creepy stuff I experienced.

Maybe something environmental played a role. Buildings that are reportedly haunted have roughly five to six times more mold spores floating around, for instance. Researchers have discovered that mold exposure is associated with neurological symptoms.

But what about things I’ve seen outdoors, like my brother’s dead friend? Atmospheric changes and infrasound can cause anxiety and even hallucinations. The U.S. Air Force experimented with 15 human volunteers and learned that the resonant frequency of our eyeballs is about 19 Hz. The researchers suggested that sounds matching that frequency could cause people to see things in their periphery that they perceive as paranormal.

Ghost hunters often talk about ghosts as “energy.” But that’s a distortion of Einstein’s law of the conservation of energy and mass. Einstein proved that all energy in the universe is constant — neither created nor destroyed, only changed. Ghost aficionados would have you believe that because our energy isn’t destroyed, that means it’s hanging around, conscious and hellbent on taking human form.

It’s a fun idea, but it’s not scientifically sound.

I may not believe in ghosts, but I do believe in possibilities.

I’m not a scientist, but I have a mind naturally wired for two things — a sense of wonder and a healthy skepticism.

I see death as a natural and inevitable process, as much a part of life as birth. When we die, the organic structures that form our bodies begin to break down and energy is directed into a simple metabolic process — decomposition. In the absence of interference with that process (such as embalming, coffin burials, and cremation), we quickly become food for other organisms and could even contribute to the food ecosystem as organic compost.

But we humans naturally wonder about the consciousness that animates us. After all, we’re not just our bodies, we’re our minds. Everything we love (or don’t love) about the people we share our word with stems from how those people think and behave, not just how we interact with their physical bodies.

The morning after the love of my life died in late 2022…

I found myself standing in my bathroom, of all places, dripping after a shower. Grief overwhelmed me. I stood there wrapped in a towel, sobbing. My path forward had always included John, but now the entire landscape had shifted before me into something barren and alien.

That’s when I felt it.

I can only describe the feeling as being wrapped in an energy embrace. It wasn’t a physical touch so much as a full-body feeling of being held in some sort of protective stasis, if only for a moment. And it felt undeniably like John’s hug. I have never doubted for a moment that he somehow found a way to say goodbye to me that morning.

Might there be scientific explanations for what I felt? Of course. But my explanation gives me comfort, and it’s what I’ve chosen to believe.

I won’t ask you to believe it. After all, I can’t prove that the happening truly was a hug from beyond.

Maybe ghosts are worlds colliding.

I love to entertain the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) when I think of what we commonly perceive as ghosts.

To massively simplify what I don’t truly understand (because I’m not a quantum physicist), the MWI theorizes that every time a particle makes a “decision” or can exist in different states, the universe splits into different versions for each possible outcome.

Imagine you flip a coin. In one world, the coin lands heads, and in another world, it lands tails. Both of these worlds exist at the same time, but we only experience one version. According to the MWI, every possible outcome of an event causes a new version of our universe to spring to life in which one of those outcomes happened.

So in other universes, John didn’t die. And maybe that version of John was able to break through and give me an energy hug somehow. How would he have experienced me on the “other side”? Maybe to him, I was the ghost, inexplicably grieving.

Or maybe, when conditions are just right — like when there’s a massive windstorm caused by rapidly lowering barometric pressure — we get a glimpse across the threshold into other universes. Maybe the shadowy figure I saw by my bedside table years ago was a glimmer from another plane of existence that, just for a moment, found a way to intersect our own.

You can come along with me and speculate. Or not. I’m not here to convert you because I don’t hold any firm beliefs, just a collection of possibilities.

I won’t insist that the numbers you see on an EMF detector mean a ghost is nearby. I won’t try to convince you that the bump you heard in the night was Brigit the housemaid, murdered on this property in the 1800s. I won’t even claim that the weird stuff I saw in my twenties was paranormal.

I didn’t go to MSU. I don’t Make Shit Up.

But I do like the sound of “maybe.” I like the idea of “possible.” And I’m keeping my mind wide open.

Life doesn't usually hand us one pure emotion at a time. More often, when we think back on important moments, we find ourselves unwrapping layers from the sublime to the ridiculous … or the fucked up to the beautiful.

This dynamic has shown up throughout my life, but a recent fucked up moment (read: a frustrating and traumatic accident that resulted in pain and temporary disability) revealed some stunningly beautiful truths. Here’s that story:

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A spring day in 1995. I’m 28, with my 9 month old son Ian slung on my hip. It’s a sunny and warm afternoon, and I’m excited to go out and run errands, to see the snow piles in parking lots turning to puddles, purple crocuses dotting lawns, leaves budding and ready to turn the whole world green.

Then my foot lands on a jacket that’s fallen off the coat rack onto the steps. Suddenly, my left leg is unexpectedly sledding down a flight of carpeted stairs, and my right leg curls up under me and … snap!

I literally hear the sound, like a brittle twig broken beneath a stomping hiker’s boot. The pain is instant and fierce. I let out a cry as Ian, still clutched in my arms, looks at me quizzically.

This is bad. I have to get to the phone.

I steel myself and slowly butt-walk up the stairs. Each butt-bump brings fresh tears as pain surges through my body. But for Ian, each butt-bump brings laughter—to him, this is a curious little game we’ve never played before.

“Mommy’s hurt,” tell him through gritted teeth. He smiles at me, eyes full of recognition and love.

Finally, we reach the top. When we’re far enough away from the stairs, I scootch myself across the carpet, across the living room, to the phone. I dial my husband’s work number.

“Ernie von Schledorn Auto Sales; this is Peter.”

“I need help,” I wail. I’m shocky and hyperventilating now, trembling as Ian, still on my lap, looks at me with concerned eyes. “I fell on the stairs. I hurt my leg bad.”

“Kayly, you know I can’t leave work,” he says in a clipped, impatient tone. “Kayly” is the nickname he gave me when we were dating because my real name apparently wasn’t good enough.

I look down at my ankle and see blood and a gleam of white.

“I think my leg is broken,” I cry. “There’s bone poking through my skin!”

Peter sighs heavily. His is a language punctuated by long, exaggerated expulsions of air meant to express frustration and intimidate anyone tuned in to his explosive moods.

“How did this happen?” he asks.

“I slipped on a coat that fell off the rack,” I gasp. How does that matter now? “I need help!”

Peter ends up not coming home. Instead, he calls our neighbors, Steve and Julie, whose children I babysit. Steve calls an ambulance, gets the super to unlock our coach house apartment door, and waits with me. The EMT’s come, and Steve holds Ian as they brace my leg and strap me to a gurney. Then, when they’re ready to whisk me away, my son lets out a plaintive cry. I turn my head to see tears streaming down his face as he reaches for me, hands like tiny anemones waving in a current of emotion.

I broke my right tibia and spent long, terrifying hours in the ER getting painful X-Rays and having a cast put on. Peter arrived just as I was getting final care instructions. He performed concern—and in fairness to him, when he saw just how serious things were, his concern was as legitimate as it could be for a man so lost in his own dysfunction. The doctors deferred to him as they provided care information, all while I knew that the only people I could rely on for real help were my mother and grandmother, who lived a half hour away from us.

* * * *

A late-spring evening in 2026. I’ve recently turned 60. I’ve long since cut all ties with Peter and moved 2,000 miles away to the Pacific Northwest. I’m struggling financially since I was laid off from my corporate job and struggled to find work in a market heavily hit by AI, but tonight I’m having an exciting little date night with my daughter, Ra. It’s the eve of their 29th birthday, and they've bought us tickets to Phantom of the Opera at the historic Paramount Theater.

Inside the sprawling building, we climb three flights of stairs, and then another shorter flight to the mezzanine level. We take our seats, but the people in our row seem determined to play a game of musical chairs, forcing us to stand in the aisle and let them go in, and out, and in, and back out in what seems like an endless and exhausting rotation. Not during the show itself, but before it begins, and during intermission.

And every time I stand to let them in and out, I’m reminded of how unstable I am on these stairs. I have nerve damage from osteoarthritis that extends to my feet, where I have diminished feeling. I’m constantly aware that my balance isn’t what it used to be.

And the Paramount has strange, uneven stair treads. Not only that, but in the seating area, there are no hand railings I’ll be able to steady myself on as I descend these stairs. I give myself an inner “you got this” motivational speech. I’ve done it before, I tell myself, and I’ll do it again. No problemo!

When the curtain call happens, I nod at my daughter. They know the drill—we bug out early to avoid the rush. As much as I love a good curtain call, I also get anxious to the point of panic in crowds. I’m getting better at managing it, but hey, why tempt fate?

I make my way down the stairs at a slow pace. I’m not going to tempt fate in that area, either. But the lack of handrails feels so …

My left foot hits the edge of a carpeted stair tread—I literally feel it when it happens. My foot flies out, my right leg folds under me, and I’m down, sliding down three or four stairs. I lie there for a moment getting my bearings. What happened?

I hear my daughter behind me say, “Mama!” and people seated nearby saying, “Are you OK?” I hear myself answer, “I don’t know…”

Fear and adrenaline take over. I grab the railing (here they have a railing, enclosing the seats) and pull myself to my feet, wincing in pain. Ra asks, their face a mask of worry, whether I can make it down the stairs. I clench my jaw in determination and answer: “I have to.”

Yes, we could have called for help. Yes, I could have been carried out in some way. I’ve even heard that the Paramount is equipped for just this thing. But I’ve spent a lifetime figuring out how to do things for myself, and I’ll be damned if I’ll suffer the embarrassment of being lifted out when I can walk.

Also, curtain calls don’t last forever and my fear of being crushed under a stampede of theatergoers is real.

I navigate down the stairs in a blur, hobbling and grimacing. People turn to gawk. I ignore them—I’m singularly focused on getting to the bottom of four flights of stairs. When I finally reach the ground floor, I tell Ra that there’s absolutely no way I’ll be able to walk to their car, which is parked in a garage up a steep Seattle hill.

An elderly man and woman pull up next to me and the woman takes a seat on the bench beside me. “I’m just finding a seat for my wife,” he says, smiling. I try to smile back but shock has set in. I’m shivering and unable to focus.

“I got hurt,” I manage to say. “I fell on the stairs. I’m waiting for a ride from my daughter.”

The man turns to his wife, who’s literally sitting right next to me. “She fell on the stairs!” he says. “She’s waiting for her daughter!”

The woman smiles, not without some concern. “Always an adventure here,” she says kindly. “I have neuropathy.”

“Me too,” I answer, shivering.

“She has neuropathy, too!” says the man. ”Are you able to walk to the curb?” he asks. And I wish—oh, I wish—he would just leave me alone. I can’t pay attention to him right now. I’m just trying to hold myself together with rubber bands and duct tape.

“I don’t know,” I answer.

He turns to his wife. “She doesn’t know if she can walk.” The woman turns and shoots me a sympathetic smile.

To his credit, the man goes to the theater staffer standing at the exit doors and asks if the little wheeled chair—not quite a full-on wheelchair, but clearly some sort of mobility aid—is for public use. The theater worker comes over and gets it set up for me. As he does this, I learn that the tall, bearded man’s name is Eric. As a Phantom of the Opera nerd, I know that Erik is the Phantom’s chosen name in Gaston Leroux’s gothic novel, and his unspoken name in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s production.

But this Eric is no Phantom. He calmly gets me to the curb as I profusely apologize for putting him out. “It’s what we’re here for,” he tells me, his tone friendly and kind. Finally, Ra’s little Prius pulls up to the curb, Eric helps me get into the car, and we set sail.

I turn to Ra: “I think I need to go to the ER.”

A few hours later, at about 2 a.m., I butt-walk up the four stairs to our humble little house, let out an agonized war whoop as I pull myself to a stand, and finally manage to crawl into bed, thoroughly exhausted and wearing a temporary splint. I have a fractured fibula. Additional X-Rays at the orthopedist a few days later will also reveal a “high ankle sprain,” which I’m told is notoriously slow to heal.

So, that’s fun.

But I’m managing. Despite all of the logistical challenges, not to mention the complete rewiring of one’s nervous system that comes with suddenly losing mobility and independence, I’m in good spirits. Ra and I laugh when I adjust the covers and accidentally flash parts of my anatomy my kids were never meant to see. We figure out home mobility aids together (expensive), and Ra assembles a knee scooter (because why are we still using the same medical device Tiny Tim used?), then a tub chair, and another chair with offset legs to help me navigate those four evil stairs up to the house just a bit easier.

Ra doesn’t just assemble things. They cheerfully assist me with… everything. They cook dinner, deliver food, clean. They apply for family medical leave. And after that, they fix the dislocated mower deck belt on our old Craftsman lawn tractor and mow the lawn. I’m filled with love and pride watching them step up while hating being the one who forced this burden on them.

We keep our good humor as I announce to my friends that I biffed it but good at the Paramount (and that I feel like a badass for getting hurt in the line of musical theater duty, considering I’m a musical theater singer myself). I cancel the joyful, always-anticipated classic rock and folk song circle I’ve led for the past seven summers.

And that’s when the messages start coming in. Friends want to deliver food, with no expectations of coming in to see me during such a high-stress time. Becky shows up first with an entire tray of lasagna and, because my beautiful daughter turned 29 in the ER with me (we’d been going to see Phantom in part to celebrate their birthday), an ice cream cake, which has always been our traditional birthday treat. Then Andy delivers three little trays of chicken enchiladas, perfect for freezing to reheat when we need them. Donna emails to offer food. Meggin drops off a lentil stew and naan bread, plus gifts and some treats for the dogs.

Then the garden fairies show up.

Since 2022, my life has felt like one long endurance test. And, true to my “I’ll figure it out,” eldest child, Gen-X, parentified roots, I cheerfully powered through every roadblock. Not without late-night panic attacks, but with stubborn persistence nonetheless. My life literally became a years-long meme:

And over those years, slowly and insidiously, my home and yard started showing the strain that comes with a person who’s trying to process a little more than humans were intended to process: the death of my soul dog in July 2022; the death of my soulmate in November, 2022; a sudden layoff from my corporate job in February, 2024; the business I tried desperately to launch only to discover that AI was quickly developing the ability to do what I could do (web design and marketing) not better, but faster and cheaper than me.

My yard had become a jungle. A broken riding mower could mean weeks of overgrown grass because I simply didn’t have it in me to figure out the problem like I usually would. A garden full of weeds became an insurmountable obstacle because I’d spend 10 minutes trying to tackle them before losing all hope and ambition. My yard and gardens were supposed to be a retreat, but here in the rural wilds where every noxious weed was waiting to encroach, they’d become a source of shame.

Enter my friends Marlene, Marti, Mimi and—wait for it—Betty. (Someone had to break the M-name cycle.)

Without judgment, they showed up during my ortho appointment, went into my yard, and weeded. They cleaned my dumping-ground enclosed back porch, swept my deck, cleaned up planters, staked a droopy tomato. As Ra looked around the yard, they sent me videos, squealing with delight: “They cleaned the whole back deck!” “They fixed up the entire front where the planters are!”

I’m agnostic, but “blessed” is the only word that comes to mind. Since I moved to the Pacific Northwest, away from the Upper Midwest and Peter, I’ve found a close circle of beautiful people that I love, and who seem to love me back. And that’s no small thing.

* * * *

When you’re lying in bed with your leg elevated above your heart, as directed, things can get weird. I started exploring old memories of my tibia fracture when I was 28, and suddenly I found myself shaking as though I’d been locked in a walk-in cooler. What’s happening here? I asked myself.

And the answer came:

This is your nervous system trying to process… all this. This isn’t just anxiety and sadness: It’s grief, relief, comparison, memory, and safety colliding all at once.

Once, I’d been unsafe in a marriage to an emotionally volatile man. Once, I’d been rescued by a neighbor because my husband couldn’t be bothered to leave his important work as a used car sales manager. Once, the only help I’d had was from the matriarchs in my family, both of them gone now.

But now, in this new world I live in, my found home, I have gathered people around me who are eager to drop off ice cream cake, enchiladas, naan bread, soup, lavender wands, and dog treats. I have friends who happily descend upon my yard and garden and make it nice for me… just because.

And that’s it. That’s the difference. Life hasn’t exactly been easy for the past few years, but with my community of friends nearby, I know I’ve got this. People always talk about the spectrum of life bridging from the “sublime to the ridiculous,” but I like to think I’ve gone from the fucked up to the beautiful.

And I’m gonna be OK.

I come from a long line of smartasses. My maternal grandpa was the Elder Smartass. Because she served as his apprentice for years, my mom developed a finely honed sarcastic edge, too. We’ll call her a Smartass Adept.

We kids were no different. We were all forged in the same fire. But we were not equally gifted. Of us three, I claim the edge because not only am I a smartass, but I’m an extremely literate one. (My brothers wouldn’t read a book if you threw it at them. But they’re smart in their own ways.) I’m a … Smartass Sage, if you will.

We’ll call Scott a Smartass Initiate. Dustin ranks a bit higher as Smartass Prefect. The man has a talent that can’t be taught.

And if there’s one thing smartassery requires, it’s understanding. You have to know your audience, and they have to know you. A quip is only as quippy as the quipper’s understanding of the target. If I don’t “get” you as a person, then my sarcasm will miss the mark. If you don’t “get” me, then my jibe is going to leave you feeling insulted rather than observed in a wry, humorous way.

I got off on this tangent by simply writing a placeholder sub-header for this post. I wrote the words, “the gift that keeps on giving.”

And suddenly, I’m in my mom’s living room. Someone has just mentioned some dubious “gift” they’ve received, and one of us is 100 percent going to comment, “Clark, that’s the gift that keeps on giving.”

Why? Because in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Cousin Eddie said that to Clark W. Griswold after he received his Christmas bonus: a one-year subscription to the Jelly of the Month Club.

And because the sarcastic use of movie quotes is our sibling love language. We’ve sort of become infamous for it. I remember sitting in my parents’ living room one summer afternoon. Dustin and Scott were both visiting from Colorado, and their friend Kurt had come along for the ride. There’s something that happens in rooms full of adult siblings sometimes—a regression. Suddenly, you’re a teenager again, giving your sibling crap like it’s your job. (Because let’s face it; it is.)

I don’t remember the specifics. But it probably involved Scott saying he’d handle the driving on some night-out adventure, and Dustin quoting Weird Science: “He don’t even have his license, Lisa!” Which would naturally send us off on a Weird Science quoting spree: “How about a nice, greasy pork sandwich served in a dirty ashtray?” “Why do you have to be such a wanker?”

Anyone outside that Circle of Sibs might be utterly baffled. And, as I remember, Kurt was. He looked from one sib to another and muttered, “You guys really are related.” He had no idea we’d grown up watching 80s movies on repeat because we visited our grandparents’ house every weekend and Gramps had cable.

That’s the thing about a shared language. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone outside the circle. It just has to work inside it. Most families seem to have one, whether they know it or not. Maybe yours is movie quotes, too. Maybe it’s a specific song you all sing badly on purpose. Maybe it’s a running joke that’s been running so long nobody remembers where it started. Maybe it’s the way you all use a particular word wrong, on purpose, because someone mispronounced it once in 1987 and it stuck. (A little something the Grammar Girl podcast devotes a regular segment called “familects” to, by the way!)

The point isn’t the quote or the joke or the word. The point is that using it means I know you. I’ve been paying attention. You’re my people.

Being seen and understood really is the gift that keeps on giving. Twelve jars of jelly in lieu of a bonus, though? Not so much.

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I’m a singer, but I never sang for you. And now I’ll never have the chance.

Choir concerts littered my junior high and high school years. You lived about an hour away, but you came to all of them. Even when your vision got worse and driving in the dark was unnerving, you came. Even when you were recovering from heart bypass surgery, you came.

My own dad didn’t show up. To my knowledge, he’s never heard me perform live. I got the courage to email him a video not long ago — one featuring a song I wrote that a 100-voice choir I belong to sang. He wrote back saying, “My family always said you had talent. You should check out the song I wrote …” Because that’s how Dad is. If it isn’t about him, or for him, or a buddy from the bar, it isn’t important.

But you always showed up.

I sang in the school concerts you attended, but almost always as part of a group. When I was in the show choir, I got the courage to solo Ain’t Misbehavin’. When I risked a glance at the audience, I saw you sitting next to Mom, both of you crying. Neither of you had known I had a voice.

But I wasn’t singing for you. I was singing for a crowd.

Gramps, you were the person who was proud of me without fail. I was your shining star, your “Boopsie.” I hated that nickname, but I’d give anything to hear you say it again, the affection in your voice ringing through.

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Every Sunday, you and Grandma made the trek to our house for dinner. The two of you wanted to spend time with us as a family. But you also came for your weekly organ recital.

When I was small, you discovered I could play keyboard instruments by ear. When I turned 12, you bought me a Lowrey organ. It came with EZ Play music books and a little folded paper cheater that I placed over the keyboard to show me which keys matched which notes on the music staff. I’d taken enough school music and band classes to understand basic notation. And so, every Sunday, I opened up those books and played classic tunes for you.

Every little breeze seems to whisper “Louise” …

Although no one sang the lyrics, you knew the tune, and you’d crow, “Maurice Chevalier! The Frenchman!”

I love you … for sentimental reasons …

“Ah,” you’d sigh. “Nat King Cole.”

The music flowed for you every Sunday. And I never once refused to play or rolled my eyes like the almost-teenager I was. I loved how much you loved what I could do.

But I couldn’t sing for you.

A few years later, when I as 15, you got me a job playing the organ at our family’s church. Eventually, I was asked to cantor. I resisted with every fiber of my being. But you knew I could sing, and so you nudged me, gently, toward this new way of sharing myself.

So, I sang. For the church. For the acquaintances and strangers in the audience.

But not for you.

I could sit down at the keys and play a song and sing when I was all alone, or even with a friend, but I couldn’t sing for you, the one person who would have appreciated it most. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to figure out why.

I suppose it was because you were so proud of me. You bragged about me. You told people I was a musician with talent and a beautiful voice. How could I possibly live up to that? How could I possibly be the talented, brilliant person you thought I was? Your praise drew attention toward me, but I wanted to fly under the radar. My childhood taught me that when people looked at me, they found things to criticize. The criticism hurt like a physical blow. I was terrified of the pressure to be perfect. So, if I just avoided doing things I loved — like playing music and singing — around people who might criticize me (or brag to people who would), I could avoid the pain.

I avoided the pain by hiding from who I am.

I did not sing at your funeral.

Our church held about 300 people. When you died, the sanctuary filled to capacity. People stood in the side and center aisles. People stood outside the door in the freezing January cold and snow to honor you. You were kind and affable. But you were also stoic and reserved. Although you mystified people, they loved you.

The little church choir sang, and I played the big Allen organ to accompany them. But this time, it wasn’t fear that stole my voice, it was sorrow. I had lost my person. The one who believed in me always. The one who celebrated my simple talents. The one who truly saw me.

I don’t know if there’s an afterlife, and I’m not afraid of the possibility that my consciousness will gutter like a snuffed lantern when I die. But I like to think that sometimes you see me.

Yesterday, the musical theater singers group I belong to performed with joy and passion for an appreciative audience who ping-ponged between laughter as Matt belted out gospel riffs in “Don’t Let Me Go” and tears when Ellie crooned “We Live on Borrowed Time.” My song was the penultimate number. Not a show-stopper. Not grand, but simple and honest. I sang “Feels Like Home” for a crowd you could never be in, but I sang it for you, and for every person I’ve ever loved who feels like home to me.

Every audience has its share of people who watch with flat expressions, unmoving and (possibly) unmoved. But when I glanced out this time, I saw people smiling, crying, swaying. Not because of my voice, but because the song itself transported them to their person, the one who felt like a light in the dark, the one who saw them just as they were and loved them that way.

You would have been smiling and crying, too, Gramps. And somehow, somewhere, I hope you did. Maybe, wherever you are, you hear my voice ring through on occasion and you pause to listen, smiling with pride.

“That’s my Boopsie.”

We’ve all been there. Life throws us a challenge, and we’re spiraling. Sometimes, the challenge is a minor nuisance. Other times, it’s a huge life-shaping event that takes us for a ride. And when we turn to family and friends, so much of the time, they offer us suggestions instead of a hug, advice instead of empathy.

We know what it feels like when people try to fix our problems instead of simply listening and saying, “Yeah, that sounds really hard.” And yet, when we meet someone who’s having their own troubles, we genuinely want to help. We care about them, and we want them to not be struggling. So, we shift into problem-solving mode: Have you tried…? What about…? Just do this!

I wrote about my own urge to fix (and my resistance to being fixed) in my newsletter on Monday.

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"I’m feeling so weak and dizzy,” my daughter says, flopping onto the couch with an exhausted sigh.

They’ve been going through some health challenges and they’ve just come home early from work. They’ve been to the doctor. They’re proactively trying to make things better. And yet, my parentified GenX brain still chides silently, Then stop whining and do something!

And every time my brain makes that unspoken judgment, I hate myself just a little. Because intellectually, I know what my kid needs: They need someone to say, “God, that sucks! I’m so sorry. I really hate that you’re going through this.” And instead, my first instinct is to say, “Tough it out. You’ve got this. Have you checked in with your doctor? What’s next?”

I just want to fix things, the way I used to when my kid was nine as opposed to almost 29. But clearly, I can’t give my daughter a kiss on the top of the head to make it all better. They don’t need me to problem-solve, they just need my presence. That’s what the moment requires.

And it’s really fucking hard.

I grew up in the “rub some dirt on it” generation. Our parents left us alone at precariously young ages to figure out our own problems and solve them without much help. And so, I’ve long embraced my role as the oldest child, only girl, and the mature kid who was “wise beyond her years.” I’ve assigned myself the role of “fixer,” and when I can’t fix something, I flail.

But I can’t fix my kid’s health issues. And even though I suspect they’re going to be OK, right now they need me to validate, witness, and be the person who gives a hug instead of an answer.

If I’m not the answer person, then who am I?

My daughter and I have had variations on the same conversation over the years. They open up about a problem; I offer solutions. They discard most of the solutions and present me with 15 reasons why those solutions won’t work for them. I get cranky and say, “OK, whatever! Do what you want. Why do you even ask me?”

Their answer is usually… telling.

“I didn’t ask for anything! I’m just letting you know what I’m going through.”

And usually, I don’t want to hear that. Because it negates everything I’ve grown up believing myself to be: the fixer, the problem-solver, the wise-beyond-her-years one. Why won’t my kid just accept my solutions? Wouldn’t most people feel grateful to have a fixer in their corner?

When I was laid off in 2024, I felt some relief at first. I hated my corporate job, which seemed to be getting worse with each new upper manager who flowed through the revolving door. I got a decent severance, and I could use my unemployment benefits to keep from spending the money I’d tucked into savings. But as the months wore on, the panic set in. My savings was nearly depleted, my unemployment benefits were expiring, and I was, to use the vernacular of job seekers everywhere, fucked.

Over the course of a year, I sent out more than 1,000 résumés and landed six interviews.

Then came the advice.

“Have you looked into working for the state? My cousin just got a job with—”

Gosh, the realization that I live in a capital city where state offices are ubiquitous almost escaped me! Thanks for the suggestion.

"What if you signed up for [Uber/DoorDash/Amazon Flex], just temporarily?”

Why didn’t I think of that? It’s possible I gave up on stuff like DoorDash because in our small city I couldn’t make enough to make my car payment let alone my mortgage and it was taking energy I didn’t have away from the work I needed to be doing to, you know, actually survive.

All these people thoughtfully and kindly trying to fix my life for me. When what I mostly needed was for someone to see me, validate what I was experiencing, and say, “God, that sucks!"

And for each “solution,” I anxiously offered 15 reasons why they could never work, all while feeling ungrateful because I wasn’t more accepting of their ideas.

Eventually, it was a friend from the choir community I belong to who put forth a solution I could work with. Callie had never offered job hunting tips. She was compassionate, contributed to the GoFundMe I was forced to put online to survive (as did so many other beautiful souls, for which I’m humbled), and then gently shared a “trickle” income source she thought might help just a little—managing Zoom tech for the Quaker community she belonged to. And because this wouldn’t sap my energy like delivering subs during the lunch rush, I accepted.

And then I met a lovely community of progressive, justice-minded people whose entire worldview revolves not around offering answers but asking questions. It doesn’t matter if you’re a new “seeker” or an elder who’s been practicing Quakerism for a lifetime—Quakers consistently have more questions than answers. And although I’m agnostic, I’m absolutely here for that whole vibe. Each Sunday, I preside over the Quakers’ silent worship, making sure people who can’t come to the Meetinghouse are able to join remotely. There’s no preacher, no pulpit, just a community sitting in silence, pondering. Occasionally, someone will rise to share a “message”—some thought or idea moving within them. And often, those messages are profound and world-shaping.

So, when the Quakers needed to hire an office manager—a role they call Hearthkeeper—I was asked whether I’d like to apply. Of course, I said yes. And I was offered the position for fair pay, albeit on a very part-time basis. It wasn’t enough, but it was at least enough to help me pay my monthly mortgage. The rest, I cobble together writing on Substack (thank you, subscribers!), freelancing for Grammar Girl, writing for a local arts publication, and taking whatever odd gigs I can find.

I’m still barely scraping by. But I am somehow scraping by.

My redemption (well, my ability to hang on by my fingertips, at least) didn’t come in the form of a quick-fix solution offered by a well-meaning friend or family member. It didn’t start with someone saying, “Maybe you should…” but rather someone saying, “I know this isn’t much, but if you’re interested…”

And I think that’s all it takes, really. We all want to fix others’ discomfort, ostensibly because we hope to improve things for them. But in reality, I’ve learned that the urge to fix is often born out of our own discomfort. We don’t like to see people we care about struggling. We want everything to go back to good, or at least to whatever “normal” feels like for us.

Now, I look at my daughter and everything I want to say bubbles to the surface of my conscience. Have you tried…? Did you do…? Are you getting enough…? What about…?

I push those words down carefully. They come from a place of love, but I know they’re not what’s needed in this moment. I step forward, open my arms, embrace my child, and say, “God, that sucks!”

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“Which way?” Ra asks. My daughter is driving today, but only I know how to get where we’re going. I’ve been there before, they have not.

“Just keep heading south,” I say, fluttering a hand dismissively in a southerly direction.

“This way?” they point straight ahead.

“Yes,” I snap. South, for fuck sake. South is south!

“Why are you like this?” Ra whines. “You know I don’t know directions like you do.”

I slide down in the seat, crossing my arms over my chest. And before I know it, I’m thinking judgmental thoughts I don’t want to be thinking. Who doesn’t know which way south is? Aren’t the cardinal directions elementary school stuff?

Turns out they are, yes, but people generally have a much worse sense of direction than most of us assume. In other words, if you don’t know which way’s south… you’re in good company.

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I went down a rabbit hole recently and discovered that human navigation typically splits into two categories: egocentric (self-centered) and allocentric (world-centered). Most people rely on egocentric route-following using landmarks. (“Turn left by the gas station.”) But people with high spatial intelligence are allocentric. They rely on a sort of god’s-eye view of the landscape.

I’m an allocentric navigator. Ra? Not so much.

A researcher named Nora Newcombe and the folks at the Hegarty Spatial Thinking Lab have a name for what I do: “survey mapping.” It’s not just a good sense of direction; it’s more like carrying a fixed mental grid of the world that doesn’t shift when your body does. The map stays put; you move through it.

What’s even wilder is what linguist Lera Boroditsky found studying people whose languages don’t use words like “left” and “right,” only absolute directions, like north and south. Those people develop what amounts to an internal compass so finely tuned it operates below conscious thought. They don’t calculate where north is. They just... know. The same way you know which way is up.

The catch is that this background operating system can go offline.

* * * *

I’m 25. I’ve just moved to Ashwaubenon, a little suburb southeast of Green Bay, Wisconsin, to follow my fiancé, Peter, who just took an exciting new job there. But he asks me to get my own separate apartment, which seems strange.

“I’m not ready for you to move in yet,” he tells me. He has to get things settled with Patty, he says. I’ve been told she’s his ex girlfriend, and that she suddenly showed up on his doorstep with a baby saying it was his. Peter has embraced his infant son, Brandon, and I’m going along for the ride.

“If Patty finds out about you,” Peter warns me, “I don’t know what she’ll do. She’s psycho. She’ll take Brandon and run to get even with me. I’ll never see my son again.”

“But why would she be upset about me?” I ask. “If you’re broken up, then you’re both free to be with other people, right?”

Peter shakes his head. “You don’t know her,” he says. “In her mind, I broke her heart, and if she can’t have me, no one can. I can’t let her know about you until we have some sort of custody order.”

I accept what he’s saying—I have no choice—but it still feels off. Just as Ashwaubenon does. For some reason, although I never get lost—in fact, I find it almost impossible to get lost even when I’m trying to—every time I get onto the freeway with the intent of heading south, I end up going north and having to turn around when I realize I’ve screwed up. I’m baffled. Why does this little city have me so disoriented?

And then, only a month or so after I move into my own apartment, Patty moves in with Peter. It’s just temporary, he tells me. Her mom kicked her and the baby out of their house. Patty has nowhere to go. He has to provide a place for Brandon, doesn’t he? And just as soon as he gets some money set aside to file for custody rights, he’ll send her packing. After all, she’s making a nearly two-hour commute, one way, to go to work in Milwaukee every day. Over time, that’s going to wear her down, right? And then she’ll go.

But she stays. And I’m forced to stay hidden. I’ll never quite understand why I bought into it all, except that Peter could be incredibly convincing. When I think about my naivety now, I’m ashamed I didn’t cut Peter loose then and there.

Things with the Peter and Patty situation continue to escalate. Patty often spends the week down in West Allis, staying with her mom to avoid the commute.

“If she’s just staying with her mom all week anyhow, then what was the point of her mom kicking her out?” I ask.

Peter says that Patty’s mom views her staying as a houseguest as different from, and somehow more palatable than, her actually living there.

So, during the week, I stay with Peter. And that means navigating around Patty’s things. Her clothing strewn everywhere. Her hygiene products all over the bathroom. Peter calls her “hurricane Patty,” because she leaves his place a mess.

And during the week, I clean it. I don’t want to see Peter living like that, do I? And what of Brandon, the baby I’d met many times? Peter brings him by when he takes Patty’s car to gas it up for her commute. Do I want to see Brandon living in squalor? Of course not.

So I live separately from my fiancé. I clean up after his baby mamma. (Or so I thought. I would later learn that Peter was the hurricane.) And I continue to turn north when I want to go south.

* * * *

I would have to write a novella to recount all of the things that happened in Green Bay in detail, so I’ll summarize instead.

Patty stayed for many months. Autumn turned to winter turned to spring. I stayed with Peter during the week and cleaned around Patty’s things while Peter reassured me he slept on the couch every night despite the absence of blankets or pillows.

(“I put them away every morning.” OK, but you put those things away and nothing else? Really?)

One night, I walked past Peter’s apartment, as I often did, and saw candlelight flickering in the bedroom window.

(“You don’t get it. The woman loves candles. She literally lights candles every night.” I walk by almost every night, and I haven’t seen candles before.)

And then, while cleaning, I found a Rough Rider condom wrapper on the floor on Peter’s side of the bed. I was on birth control. I believed I was in a committed relationship. We didn’t use condoms.

(“She forced me to! She was trying to seduce me. You don’t get it—she’s literally crazy!” Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Why is he doing this to me? I trusted him!)

The condom incident led me to buy a pack of straight razors and sit in my bathtub holding a blade poised over my wrist for over an hour while the water turned cold before crawling out, drying off, and lying in bed cold and demoralized.

And I kept turning north when I wanted to go south.

Weeks later, I contacted an attorney. I asked her about custody law. I explained Peter’s situation and his “Patty the psycho” narrative. Looking back, I’m sure the attorney saw me as pathetic. But to my shock, Peter actually followed through. He filed the suit, evicted Patty (who would prove to be pretty “psycho” in the future, even forcing me to file a restraining order against her), and I moved in.

It was around that time, when I stopped cleaning up after my own humiliation and took some action, that I stopped turning north when I meant to go south and started what would prove to be a very long journey toward discovering myself for the first time.

* * * *

I married Peter, convinced I could make him into the person I needed him to be instead of the man he was, someone who lied and cheated his way through life.

We had a son we named Ian. Not long after he was born, Patty discovered Peter was not only living with me, but we were married and had a child together. Peter had convinced Patty somehow that he was living with her, and the reason he was never home—he slept at our apartment nearly every single night, although not all—was due to work travel. But he was a new car sales manager, and Patty couldn’t quite bring herself to believe that someone who sold cars needed to travel constantly. She grew suspicious and eventually tracked down Peter’s real home address… and me.

When Ian was just a toddler, my grandpa—my person, someone who always made me feel safe and loved—died in his sleep of a massive heart attack. A few months later, my grandma, who now lived alone, fell on her concrete stoop and hit her head. She lay there in the cold until the neighbors found her and helped her inside. I convinced Peter that we should move in with my 78-year-old grandmother. She welcomed the company.

We lived with Grandma for a couple of years. Enough time for me to have another child, our daughter Shayla (who now uses the gender-neutral nickname I gave them when they were a teenager, Ra.) Peter and Grandma, now in her 80s, fought sometimes. I couldn’t stomach the idea of my husband raising his voice to my grandmother, and it became a source from which much conflict in our relationship flowed.

Although it was 1997 and the paint was still drying on this new technology called the Internet, Peter managed to meet women online and recruit them into sexual relationships. But of course, they all lived a few hundred miles away. Two in Minnesota. One in Missouri. Peter called them on the house landline—this was well before everyone had a cell phone—and ran up an enormous phone bill. He discovered Grandma’s credit card lying out one day and used it to pay off his delinquent account. Grandma asked my mom to review this weird charge on her bill, and all signs pointed back to Peter. Mom confronted me about it, and I immediately kicked him out of my grandparents’ home.

I wish I could say that I’d found my true north by then. But although I was back home where the freeway system was familiar and my internal map was flawless, my emotional compass still glitched. When I realized that not only would I be financially responsible for raising two children alone but that Peter would almost certainly get joint custody, I invited him back into my life. Living with Peter at Grandma’s was no longer an option, so we rented half of a duplex.

Life went on. There were some OK years, particularly when Peter opted to take medication for what his counselor labeled “complex PTSD” but privately told me was probably borderline personality disorder—something then considered mostly untreatable.

But there were many abjectly awful years, too. I continued to slog through the emotional turmoil and Peter’s abuse, which sometimes got physical. I knew that even though I no longer wanted to be with Peter, I was fused to him, locked in a dysfunctional dance until my children were grown and I could leave.

* * * *

It’s 2023. I’ve long since left Peter and moved to the Pacific Northwest. Although my son Ian opted to finish college in Wisconsin, Ra lives with me. We’re content. I’ve bought a house, Ra pays rent and contributes to bills, and we’re doing OK, just the two of us.

We’ve finished eating dinner and the TV is on, but we’re not really watching. Some random thing I’d learned that day pops into my head.

“Did you know that some people can’t visualize?”

“Yeah,” Ra says. We watch a lot of the same content on TikTok, which is where I first heard about this trait called “aphantasia.”

“There’s a test that asks you to picture an apple, and then say what color it is, as if you’re actually seeing something,” I say. “But how can that be effective? People are going to just make stuff up, right? If you ask me what color my apple is, I’ll just pick a color at random and say that’s it. What does that test even tell people?”

“Um…”

“Like, when someone tells you to picture an apple, you don’t see an actual picture of an apple. That’s ridiculous!”

“Mom—”

“We just think about the idea of—”

“I see an apple, mother.”

I quirk an eyebrow. “Do you mean ‘see’ an apple? As in, you see a real image of an apple?”

“Yes.”

I’m stunned. Almost speechless. What?

“You’re saying you actually see something? In your head?”

“Mom, I can watch a full-blown movie in my head if I want to.”

“And most people can do that?”

“As far as I know, yeah.”

“What the—?”

“Mother,” my daughter smirks. They not only love watching me make an intellectual discovery, but they’re also a little smug about having realized something about me mere seconds before I did. “You have aphantasia.”

* * * *

I’ve been putting the pieces together ever since.

Aphantasia, the inability (or diminished ability) to visualize, affects from 1 to 4 percent of the population. But people like me, with a total inability to visualize, make up 0.8 percent. (Although those numbers are likely skewed, because many people are just like I was—they don’t realize that most people actually can visualize.)

When asked to “picture” something in my mind’s eye, I always assumed that “picture” was a metaphor for “think about conceptually.” It was a revelation to realize that I lacked an ability most people had.

Then the aphantasia discovery started making other parts of my life make sense. Like my astonishingly good sense of direction. Just like a blind person compensates by strengthening other senses, my own brain had strengthened my spatial reasoning abilities. When I learned about the connections researchers were drawing between aphants (a term for people with aphantasia) and heightened abilities like spatial reasoning, something clicked for me.

A few years ago, I discovered a curious lifelong ability I’ve had: I can tell you which cardinal direction the head of my bed faced in every home I’ve ever lived in. Instantly. With barely a thought.

The house on Lake Nagawicka? West when I slept downstairs, north when I moved to the upstairs room.

And I’m not pulling those directions out of thin air, even though it seems like it. I’m not making them up. I just know them. The same thing is true even of temporary lodging. That Airbnb in White Salmon? East. My brother’s place in Colorado? Also East.

When my friend bought a new house and we stood in her backyard surveying her soon-to-be garden for the first time, she tried to gauge how much sunlight the spot would get.

“I wonder what direction we’re facing,” she mused.

“Northeast,” I said.

“You think?” she looked up at the gray Washington sky. I could see her doing the mental calculations in her head. Last time I was here, the sun came in the spare room window, so…

“I know,” I said, shrugging. “I’ve always had a good sense of direction.”

Aphantasia likely gifted me with incredible spatial reasoning skills. I know where my body is in space. I don’t have to spin a mental map in my head (because hey, I can’t!) to get “northeast,” I just consult my inner survey schematics for an instant answer.

Thinking about my spatial reasoning skills made me remember a long-ago test result that had baffled me at the time. I’d talked my counselor into administering an IQ test. (I suspect I just wanted to prove I was smart despite all of the naive things I was doing to survive a relationship with Peter.) My IQ score was in the “highly gifted” range (and believe me when I say that doesn’t feel like a flex given how often I struggle to use that brainpower), but my spatial reasoning score was 170. For context, that subtest is scored the same way IQ is—100 is average, 130 is gifted. The test doesn’t have much room above 170. It just kind of... runs out of scale. (When I asked AI to contextualize that for me, it said: “A 170 score isn’t just ‘good at puzzles’—it means your brain is essentially a dedicated spatial workstation.”)

Just call me Wile E. Karen, Spatial Genius. (The competition will ultimately be good for Wile E. Coyote, I’m sure. Not to mention the ACME company.)

* * * *

Last night, I was questioning AI about something that piqued my curiosity (because I believe that’s one use case AI’s good for) and the conversation turned to aphantasia and spatial reasoning. I ended up remembering that period in my life back in Green Bay where I kept going north when I wanted to go south.

And then it hit me.

“Could stress cause my internal compass to break?” I asked.

And the answer came back: Yes. Research shows that stress can dampen cognition, and spatial reasoning skills are no exception. High stress. Trauma. Survival mode. When the brain kicks into fight-or-flight, it can override the navigational circuitry entirely, leaving some people with a disorienting sense of being untethered from the grid they’ve always trusted. Spatially lost in a way that has nothing to do with geography.

Getting on that ramp the wrong way was a literal manifestation of my life at the time: I was moving in a direction that my internal “truth” knew was wrong.

And now we’re back in the car, with Ra behind the wheel. I’m in Washington state, nearly 3,000 miles away from where Peter lives now. I’m safe. And even though this isn’t where I grew up, I’m home.

“Just keep going south,” I reiterate to Ra, glancing in their direction. They mutter something about wishing they’d turned on GPS instead of using Mom-PS, which is fair. But I know what it feels like when my compass breaks. And now, I know what it takes to get it back. South is south, north is north, and for the first time in a long time, I trust myself to know the way.

John sits beside me humming and gazing out the window. He’s always humming, always thinking, always musing. He looks toward the Seattle skyline rising ahead of us.

“Emerald City!” he says. “Why do you think they call it that?”

Always asking questions, too. Always curious.

“Because of the trees, the moss, all the green stuff?”

“Mm,” he says, and in my periphery I see him bob his chin in a decisive nod. “That’s gotta be it.” I suspect he knows it is, but he likes to make sure I’m curious, too.

We’re on a “mission”—John’s term for anything he has to do that he’s deemed critical. Today, I’m driving my favorite retired soldier to go shoe shopping, and he has particular, bougie tastes. We are in search of the perfect pair of Mephisto loafers, and I already know how this is going to go. John will try on five or six different pairs, putting the salesperson through their paces. We’ll be in the exclusive shoe store for close to an hour. And we’ll leave, as we do every time, without a pair of shoes.

But it’s been a hell of a year. It’s 2020, and in March COVID descended and shut the world down. Millions died. Refrigerated semi trailers held bodies outside overflowing hospitals in New York City. We survived those long months of scuttling into grocery stores, masked and anxious, to pick up essentials. No live music, no festivals, no nights at the movies, and no dining out.

But carry-out is still a thing. And so is dining in the car.

Culinary exploration was at the heart of my relationship with John. He loved trying new types of foods and exploring new restaurants. Any time we traveled together— something we did often—his first question the moment we arrived, or sometimes even en route, was, “Well, darlin’, where we gonna eat?”

And today, after John put the poor saleswoman through her paces trying on many different pairs of Mephistos, often in multiple sizes “just in case,” we were going to look for a real Jewish deli. We’d experienced matzo ball soup at a local place the previous summer, but it had been a one-time special. We were on a mission to find the real deal somewhere in the heart of Seattle.

We left without shoes. Because of course we did. Despite John’s urgency—”I have got to get to Seattle to find them shoes!”—he was really just the world’s most dedicated window shopper. We were moving on to the “find sustenance” leg of our mission, so we sat in my Toyota Camry and Googled.

“There’s a place on Pine Street called Dingfelder’s,” I said.

“How many stars?”

“Five and a half.”

John pursed his lips and raised his eyes, pondering. “Not bad, not bad. Now, five stars would be—”

“Babe, it’s pretty unheard of for a restaurant to have five stars on Google. Four and a half is good.”

“Dingfelder’s it is, then!” he said, pointing his index finger toward the windshield and tipping it in a little “wagons, ho!” gesture. I set the GPS and off we went, our empty stomachs leading the way.

I have no doubt that when John and I rolled up on a restaurant we looked like an odd pair. He was 72, a Vietnam Veteran and former paratrooper who jumped out of the first plane he ever flew in, and a slim bow-legged Black man with the kindest eyes I’ve ever seen. I was 55, fat, and as pale-skinned as any auburn-haired, green-eyed woman of Nordic descent could be. But although we were mismatched, most people in the Pacific Northwest greeted us with delight rather than judgment.

Such was the case at Dingfelder’s, where a young man slid open the walk-up window and beamed at us. “What can I get you folks?” he asked.

We ordered two individual containers of matzo ball soup, two orders of potato latkes with sour cream and applesauce (because having both and refusing to choose sides is the power move, right?), some chocolate rugalech, and two bottles of iced tea.

When the server came back to the window with our late lunch in a big brown paper bag, he asked if we were taking our food home or needed utensils. (Dining in was still very much not a thing.) We told him we’d driven up from Olympia, so we’d be dining al fresco, or al Toyota Camry, at least. And then we returned to my car. We ate in the shade of a tree that was nearly done leafing out while the spring sunshine beamed through the window, causing leafy shadows to flicker and dance across the dashboard.

I could always tell when John and I had found The Perfect Food. During a good meal, we’d have animated discussions—we never ran out of things to talk about. But during a great meal, we were mostly silent.

Such was the case when we opened our “Grandma” matzo ball soups. John cut into a matzo ball and scooped up some of the savory chicken broth along with it, brought it to his lips, and then turned to me with raised eyebrows and an expression I could only interpret as “hot damn!”

We tore through our soup and latkes in silence—the ultimate compliment. John insisted that I take some soup home for my adult daughter, Shayla, so he ambled back to the walk-up window and ordered another soup, latkes, and some black and white cookies. “The kid needs to experience this,” he said in a hushed tone akin to religious fervor.

That COVID year was the beginning of a decline for John. As the virus stripped away all of the things he used to cope with the legacy of C-PTSD his military service left him—movie theaters he could slip into, restaurants he could linger in, music performances he could enjoy swaying and humming to—he slowly lost his spark. His kind eyes began to look haunted. He spent more time at home texting me from his recliner. I started booking quarterly Airbnb getaways to draw him out of the house and into the world, and they helped, but the psychic damage the pandemic wrought ran deep. Although I tried to keep his spirits alive, I could feel him giving up.

In 2022, John died from complications of what should have been relatively minor surgery in Madigan Army Hospital. The man who, a few months into our relationship, looked into my eyes and said with amazement, “I’ve known you all my life!” was gone.

Anger is a potent part of grief. I was angry at Madigan, at the pandemic, at circumstances, at the universe—forces that conspired to take John away. But mostly, I was bereft of the one person who knew me so intimately that eating matzo ball soup in silence, forgoing the need to fill that Camry cabin with conversation, was the ultimate declaration of a day well spent.

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I wake to a ruckus coming from downstairs.

Loud, slurred male voices. Then Mom’s voice saying, “Shhh! You’ll wake the kids!”

I pull my feather pillow over my head to block out the sound. I’m nine years old. I’m not sure who’s making the noise downstairs, but I’ve been to enough grown-up parties to know when someone sounds drunk.

The men downstairs sound drunk.

“Show me the way ta go home! I’m tired and I wanna go ta bed!”

They’re singing now. Loudly. And Mom is still shushing.

Suddenly my bedroom door opens and light from the hallway spills in. I pretend to be asleep but open one eye just enough to see Mom’s silhouette. She creeps into my room, takes the feather pillow gently from off my head, and slides stealthily back out the door, closing it softly behind her.

My pillow!

Not many things in my house belong to me. My canopy bed is one. My Breyer horses are another. My notebook, my colored pencils.

And my pillow.

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I am strangely attached to my soft, lofty, snuggly pillow. And now it has been ripped away from me in the middle of the night.

In the morning, I will learn that my uncle had been on leave from the Coast Guard, and he and his Coastie buddy had been out doing what men on leave often do. Mom had sent the two men to sleep it off in the living room, and she’d commandeered my pillow for the cause.

I slept one whole night without my pillow.

It took a while to forgive Mom, not to mention my uncle, for that offense.

Growing up, I never knew we were poor.

Only now, as an adult who has waded through a housing market crash, recession, and inflation, do I recognize the daunting challenges my impossibly young parents faced raising me. They not only endured historic inflation and economic turmoil in the 70s and early 80s, but they also lived through the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War, Watergate, Cold War tensions and rapidly shifting social norms.

My parents were fighting to feed and clothe us, pay the bills, and keep a roof over our heads. There was little money for toys or other non-essentials.

Many of my most cherished childhood possessions came from my doting grandparents, members of the Silent Generation who had survived their own years of turmoil and emerged, if not wealthy, then at least fiscally secure.

We lived in a rural Wisconsin community, so our infrequent trips to the Milwaukee suburbs for shopping at Kmart were a Big Deal. On those trips, Grandma delighted in letting me choose a gift for myself. I often came home with a Breyer horse or a Barbie. I also got a record player and little books with 45s tucked in the back sleeve. I could listen to Disney stories on the record and read along.

Turn the page when Tinker Bell rings her bell like this: Rrriiinnng!

Although I didn’t consciously register that we were poor, I knew the things Grandma gave me were special. I became possessive, eager to protect my precious resources from my rambunctious little brother and cousins, who were known for breaking and losing things.

Grandma had also given me a feather pillow clad in a quilted cover with fairytale designs on it. As an adult, I would zip on more covers to keep the feathers from leaking out. The pillow grew heavier and more dense as time passed.

I’ve since learned the thoroughly disgusting fact that dead skin cells, mites, and other detritus are what cause pillows to grow heavier with time. These days, I replace my pillows every couple of years, but back then I refused to give my beloved feather pillow up. I kept it until I was well into my 30s. If anyone dared to rest their head on it, I would swiftly pull it away and replace it with a different pillow.

No! This one’s mine!

Peter and I are fighting.

This time, for a change, it’s not about his lying or cheating. Instead, it’s about an online flirtation I’ve been having with a man I met playing the multiplayer online roleplaying game EverQuest.

“I’m working to support you and the kids so you can sleep with another man?” Peter rages.

I roll my eyes. “He lives in Bumfuck, Canada. Exactly when do you think I traveled 2,000 miles to have sex with him?”

Peter’s wild eyes are a sign things are escalating. I should surrender. I should try to soothe him. But years of twisting myself around his chaotic emotions have left me both weary and defiant.

Nothing good can come of a weary, defiant woman who’s just been accused of sleeping around by a man so deeply dishonest and fidelity-challenged that she discovers a new mistress every few months.

“Do you love him?” Peter asks.

I gaze, unflinching, into his crazed eyes.

“Yes.” I’m not sure I do, but the answer feels satisfying.

“So, you’re leaving me for him?”

“What part of Bumfuck, Canada, didn’t you understand?”

“I don’t even know what you mean by that!”

I’ve been sitting on our bed while Peter paces the room, ranting. Now, I straighten my spine and cross my arms over my chest. “It means I’m not running away to Canada any time soon. There’s no way in Hell I’m leaving my kids.”

Peter quickly does the emotional math. “You said nothing about not leaving me.”

I purse my lips and stay silent. I don’t have an answer. Everything in me tells me to get far away from Peter, but I know the reality. We would have to share custody, and I’m terrified of leaving Peter alone with the kids. Dave, the man I’m emotionally involved with online, has been a source of affection and adoration I hadn’t known I needed.

“Answer me!” Peter rages. “Is it gonna be him or me? Choose!”

I’m rarely candid with Peter. I’ve long since learned that moderating my emotions yields far better, safer results than telling him how I truly feel. But this time I can’t seem to hold back the truth simmering inside me. It rises to a boil.

“Neither!” I finally cry. “I’m fucking done with you, him, all of it!”

Peter narrows his eyes and lowers his voice to a menacing near-whisper. “Then you can slink off like the whore you are,” he says, “But the kids stay with me.”

With that, I grab the only weapon available — my feather pillow full of 30 years’ worth of dead skin cells and dust mites — and swing it at his head. It connects with a satisfying thunk.

What comes next terrifies me. Peter storms out of our bedroom and into the room our children share, waking them from a sound sleep. He locks himself in, barricading the door.

“Get the fuck out of this house!” he screams. “But you’re not taking them with you!”

Them. As though Ian and Shayla are collateral, not the precious young souls I bore and have struggled to raise amidst the daily turmoil their father causes. I can only think about how terrified they must be, awakened from a sound sleep by their volatile, rage-filled father.

My mind flashes back to about a decade earlier when Peter had clutched our nine-month-old son and uttered the words, “If you leave, I’ll kill him.”

I dial 911. Then I call my mom, who lives three miles away.

I don’t remember much of what happened during the rest of that terrifying night.

Instead, I can only summon little glimpses:

The cops coercing Peter to release the kids from their bedroom.

My daughter, dragging one of the officers into our living room to proudly show him our pet cockatiel.

Ten-year-old Ian calmly suggesting that the police might take his dad away for “anger management.”

Two cops standing in our kitchen, asking for details, and then finally coercing Peter to come downstairs and give his statement.

It’s the statement that lingers in my memory. Peter told the cops I’d been having an affair, we’d gotten into an argument, and I’d assaulted him. By all rights, he said, he should’ve been the one calling the police.

“Can you describe the assault?” one of the cops said.

“She hit me with a pillow!”

The two police officers stood dumbfounded for a moment and then tried, unsuccessfully, to stifle laughs.

“A pillow?” one of them finally asked, still grinning.

Peter glowered, hung his head, and muttered, “It’s a very heavy pillow.”

Both cops laughed again while Peter fumed.

All I remember beyond that was being given the option to stay in my home, forcing Peter to leave for the night, or to go someplace else. I opted to take the kids and leave with my mom, who showed up ready to rescue us.

I wish I could say I left Peter after that night.

But just like an old ratty pillow full of mites and skin cells, sometimes I hold onto things that don’t serve me anymore. Sometimes, I’m haunted by the fear of scarcity and the weight of uncertainty.

I didn’t make enough income to sustain my two kids alone. I hated the idea of getting a second job and working so hard that I didn’t have the energy to raise them.

But most of all, I was afraid Peter would get joint custody and that I wouldn’t be able to protect the kids when they were with him.

So, I stayed until my youngest graduated from high school. Then, I moved to the Pacific Northwest and filed for divorce.

Both of our children ghosted their father as adults. Both have expressed relief since they’ve gone no-contact.

Although Peter tried to maintain that he and I were “better as friends than a married couple,” I began avoiding his phone calls and leaving his texts unanswered. Eventually, I felt safe enough to write him an email telling him how profoundly our dysfunctional relationship had affected me and the kids and asking him never to contact me again.

So far, he has honored my request.

And I’ve long since replaced that heavy old pillow.

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