I’ll never feel “just right” as a mother. That’s what I’ve learned. No matter what I do, a piece of me will wonder about the other side, the other choice. I’ll crave it a little, yearn for it a little, lie down at night and wish for it, a little.

I’ll wake up in the morning and go on with my day anyway.

I’ll wake up and get dressed and go to my office and write. It will feel right. I will feel refreshed to be out of the house and alone, invigorated to be doing the work in my gut, trying, bringing our finances to a more comfortable level.

“When I grow up I want to be a writer like you, mama.”

Ha. George thinks I’m a writer. Of course she also has a fake friend named “Carrot” (who’s also a giant), but her declaration makes me smile all the same.

I get home from work and Mac has taken the kids to swimming lessons. I bring home Mexican food but we miss each other. I eat alone and leave again to work with women alcoholics.

When I get home, Arlo is already asleep.

My breasts and arms crave him. I’m a little irritated at Mac for putting him to bed, which is insane, and I know it. It’s not him it’s me. It’s the sadness, my choices and non-choices, the guilt and stab at my heart. The not right. The just not quite right.

“But I have to nurse him!”

“I’m sure he’ll wake up for a little nursing, Janelle.” Mac is right.

I lie beside my babe and pull him close and he nurses instinctually, eyes closed, wide open mouth like a little bird. We settle down near each other as we have since he was a newborn, in the same bed, and I kiss and smell him over and over again like a starving person who just found food.

I physically crave my baby.

I physically ache for him.

I imagine this is the ache that drags bereaved mothers to the brink of insanity. Hair-pulling batshit total delusion insanity. Because if that craving could not be satisfied…my God. I think of my friend Kim.

Three days a week, from 9am until 4pm. That’s how long I’m gone. It’s not long. I used to work more. Some moms work 50, 60 hours a week.

Some evenings I’m gone too, but I’ll be gone a lot more than 3 days a week if I start drinking again.

I know these things, all of them, and yet at the close of the day I think of my first baby turning 14 in a few months and last summer, when I was home all the time with them and we went to the library every day with new tiny creation Arlo and how Ava mentioned it as the best summer and how this summer we’ve only gone once. To the library, that is. We swam on Sunday together as a family and Ava played with her siblings. I wonder how much longer she’ll do that.

When I think about it like that I curse every moment I’m gone and want back. BACK HOME. Back with them.

Yesterday though I met with a filmmaker who’s working with me to write my first screenplay and when she and I are talking I feel an energy vibrating through us and I think there’s no way I would survive without finding out what the words will say.

Now, and in 20 years.

I can’t quit silent.

From the outside it looks sometimes like women are secure and clear in their choices or non-choices. For better or worse, it appears black and white.

I want my kids to see an independent mother.

I want my kids to see a mother at home.

I want my kids to see a professional mother.

I hate staying at home.

 I hate working.  

I work because I have no choice.

I stay home because I have no choice.

For me, it’s all gray. (Maybe it’s gray for all of us, deep down.) I work because I have to and mostly want to, but I also know if we seriously down-sized I wouldn’t “have to” anymore. But I don’t want that either. I’m never “sure.” I’m never not regretting, sometimes. I’m never just right.

Maybe you’re the same.

I see you.

And here’s what I want to tell you: Maybe not just right can actually be “just right” and life can roll on okay with us over here flailing a little back and forth, acutely aware of how little we know, and how much we’ll never be clear how to be, exactly. And what’s “best,” always.

Maybe this is it. The clarity and the best.

Maybe I can be grateful for my life, my choices my words my home my breath my kids and husband and trust that this is enough.

I think this is it. I think I can relax in the gray and be here now, in my office writing to you.

And home in a couple hours, wondering what the fuck happened to the kids’ room.

And sitting down to play the sorting house with Arlo because 9am to 4pm is an awful long time when I walk in the door and he comes toddling so fast his tiny legs blur like the side of me that will walk out again tomorrow.

You know, because I called Ava yesterday while she was visiting her grandparents and asked how she was keeping herself entertained. She responded “looking at feminist posts on Instagram.” And I thought well that’s pretty rad since there are a few thousand other things a 13-year-old could be looking at with her smartphone and Rocket read his fortune the other day in the Chinese restaurant by himself without even a lick of fear and George, well she wants to be a writer now and Carrot is doing just fine,

and Arlo will wake up for a little nursing.

He’ll find me again, even with his eyes closed, in the gray of evening when we can’t see a thing.

Somehow still here, just right.

When I started this blog you were 5 months old. You were bald, and your ears kind of curled over at the top. We called them your “elf ears.” This will probably be less amusing when you’re 15.

you see the dimples?

When you smiled your face exploded in tiny indentations: A cleft chin, and a dimple on each side.

That still happens. It happened just this morning when you asked me if I’d give you “side spikeys” today. Your hair, that is.

Tomorrow you turn 5.

I thought your birth, my first one at home, was going to roll out and along like soft waves crashing on a foggy ocean shore, because that’s what happened in your brother’s birth a few years before. I envisioned myself dancing you out all calm and quiet and serene, maybe pulling you to the surface of the water with eyes wide open.

Instead I drank castor oil, setting off a 9-hour torture session of me squealing like a hyena and cursing the day I realized children were a possibility.

You were in a funky position. I had to push for approximately 9 years and 27 days.

There was no doubt in my mind I could not do it. When the midwife said “Well you’re the only one that can” and I met my mom’s eyes as her mouth said “Janelle get angry” I knew they were right and I let go and readied myself for the end and pulled all the energy from you, me, the ocean and all the motherfucking hyenas to get your 10-pound body out of me, with your chin not tucked appropriately and head cocked to one side.

Not gonna lie, your head was super jacked up on one side. I didn’t notice.

Your daddy lifted you from the water and the midwife said “cord.” Your older brother and sister gathered close. She flipped you over twice and your body flooded pink right there from the center and I think I cried and broke in elation because neither of us were dead and you were so big and lovely and mine and soft.

Ours, actually: me and daddy and Rocket and Ava.

You hardly cried. I swear it’s true. Through your whole damn infancy. You played and played and laughed and smiled and nursed a lot, but preferred sleeping alone. It was like a dream. You were like a dream.

ELF EARS

Your independence was fierce and full right from the beginning, as if you started out knowing, just knowing what you needed to know, already. Like you showed up and said “I’m here, folks.” And started living complete, or mostly so, or more than the rest of us.

On your first day of preschool you stomped up the stairs, threw the door open and said “GEORGIA IS HERE.” And walked in.

That’s kind of how you’ve treated life.

We went camping when you were 10 months old and you already talked quite a bit, which was super weird after your brother, who barely spoke until he was three. You found a rock you loved and named it “owl.”

YOU NAMED THE ROCK “OWL.”

Georgia and “owl”

I think we still have it.

At 18 months you explained you were a “big boy” and for two years were adamant that you were a boy and cried if people called you a girl, so you were our boy and it was fine and damn you were adorable.

You had a “big boy dinosaur monster truck party” when you turned three.

A few months after your 4th birthday you decided you were a girl and then both, but really, you’ve just been you and that’s enough for me. All of us, your family, and the world.

At least I hope it is.

A few months ago you said when you grew up you were going to build a room where nobody asks if you’re a boy or a girl.

I’ll join you there, my love.

I hope they’re nice to you in kindergarten. I hope you can just be Georgia there too. I hope your faux hawk (you begged for it for a solid year) and digger shirt paired with a bright floral skirt and red Pumas doesn’t make the other kids wonder.

Some of them are very disturbed by you. It makes me sad to think of the rigidity that must exist in their homes. We have had children yell in our faces “GIRLS DON’T HAVE SHORT HAIR!”

Oh, my heart.

I hope nobody tells me I shouldn’t let my kid look like that if I want people to know how to treat her because I’ll tell that person to kiss my ass seventeen thousand ways before I’ll tell my kid “Sorry. There’s no place for you…and to make other people comfortable, to conform to arbitrary, archaic societal guidelines regarding gender, I’m gonna need you to pretend to be something someone somebody you are not.”

Nope. Kick rocks asshole. You change.

We’re fine. 

Here. HERE IS A PRIMER ON HOW TO ACT IF YOU ARE UNSURE OF SOMEBODY’S GENDER: Nice.

Act nice. Proceed with life.

You turn 5 tomorrow. This year it’s a dinosaur astronaut party.

We’ve had some rough patches, you and I. Some days I thought you were too much. The wrestling. Yelling. Jumping. Running. Dancing.

No. Not the dancing.

The dancing has never been too much.

At the public pool, if your jam came on, you danced. Within a few moments you had a little audience. “Does she go to dance class?” Some of the kids asked.

“No,” I answered, “That’s just how she moves.”

That’s just how she lives.

Tomorrow you turn 5. It feels huge. It feels heavy and deep and a little
mean.

It feels perfect. It feels lucky. It feels the only way I’d ever have it.

I watch you all move along, a day a week a month a year beyond. I wonder if I held on, played enough. I regret the day care and babysitter. I regret every day spent away. I regret the time you were at the doctor’s without me. Every time I’ve yelled.

I remember I can’t do motherhood if I’m never away. I remember I needed to earn money. I remember I did what I could, then, and now. I take a breath and watch your face explode in tiny indentations.  

I remember it all lead us here.

Here. Now. To tomorrow.

Motherhood is a series of letting go. It does not grow easier.

On the first day of school I’ll do your spikes just right, pack your dinosaur lunch box and watch you walk away, holding the hand of the boy who came like the waves.

And watch as you go out with them too.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by janelle hanchett (@renegademothering)

I don’t have many regrets in my life. Not because I haven’t made mistakes. Lord knows that ain’t the case. When I got sober there were memories so dark I spent the first year of recovery shaking my head occasionally – literally, physically – in attempt to rid the thoughts from my brain.

As if I could rattle them out of there.

The person who helped me get sober told me that the only way we can survive those memories is if we transform them into a way to help others. So I talk to other alcoholics. I talk to alcoholic mothers. I tell them how it was for me – the dark shit too, perhaps most importantly – so they can understand that I’ve been there too, and I lived, and found a way to stay sober.

And in that way, the present day infuses my past with a vague sense of meaning. The faces of the sick people in front of me give those experiences a shred of value. It’s not much, but it’s all I’ve got.

If I could do it again, I would not do it again. I would not hurt the people I hurt. But I can’t change the past any more than I can erase the memories.

My life brought me to my knees, flattened me into damn near nothing until I had no choice but to see the truth of myself and change.

I can’t regret that. Without the failure of my life I would have remained who I was. And nobody wants that.

So I don’t regret much.

But I regret the last year of my grandmother’s life.

In 2008 my paternal grandmother, who was one of my favorite humans in the world, with whom I felt a special affinity and understanding since I was a young girl, was dying. She was fading into dementia, passing into the gray.

I did not visit her once.

She was born July 26, 1920. She would be 95 in a couple weeks. She died in September of 2008, at 88 years old.

On the day I found out she passed, I went to a local dive bar and threw a few back in her memory. I went to her funeral pretending to be sober. Though I was sober that day, I was out of my mind with alcoholism, absent in thought and spirit.

About 6 months later, in March 2009, I found the beautiful “bottom” alcoholics speak of and crawled back into life after years of attempts at lasting sobriety.

But she was already gone, and I never said goodbye, and I never told her what she meant to me, and I never wrote her life history as I always said I would (she was a renegade journalist and mother of 5).

I can’t even recall exactly the last time I saw her.
How is such a thing possible? How is such a disaster possible? The extreme self-centeredness of alcoholism, the immaturity, the inability to tell the true from the false. Yes, all of that.

I try to make peace with it, but it feels like a terribly twisted up, skewed, inappropriate final scene of our lives together. A sick representation. A lie. A lie I cannot set right.

That was not what we were, and yet it is, forever, precisely what we were. At the end, at least.

You don’t know what you got til it’s gone.

It never seemed real that a force like hers could be gone.

But the years pass without her and the words I wished I would have said hang as if in purgatory. Unsettled ungrounded unheard and aching. Like hungry desperate spirits.

I guess this too is about me. She is at peace. I’m all tore up, at her birthday, on the anniversary of her death, thinking about how I would give almost anything for a chance to stop by her house one last time to say “Hey grandma I love you and goodbye.”

Maybe she wouldn’t have even recognized me. Maybe she had forgotten about me weeks before in the ages of a fading mind. Maybe it was best I didn’t show up, so she never had to see me quite so sick: Barely employed, separated from my children, lost lost lost.

And I, her.

I don’t remember her mind as faded.

Maybe she would have wanted it that way.

I want to beg you to go see your people. I want to shake my fists in your face and demand that you just fucking GO, NOW, no matter what, no matter how much they pissed you off last Christmas.

I want to say it so I can feel like 2008 has meaning, like it isn’t just the lack of understanding, selfishness and laziness of a 29-year-old granddaughter too young and dumb to realize what she was missing.

But you probably won’t go. Not if you’re like I was. One of the luxuries of our young lives is not having to go because they’re still here.

Until they’re not.

One of the luxuries of having your people alive is that you don’t have to think about them being alive.

I don’t wait any more. I don’t hesitate any more. I say it now, yesterday. Words hanging in the gray, scratching at my brain. Go ahead. Go on. Get outta here.

A few weeks after I got sober I was asleep in a bedroom in my mother’s house with just my little dog in his bed when I heard the door open. I sat up in bed, watched my dog jump out of bed and stare at the door. Then I watched the door shut. Assuming it was my mom, I got up to see what she needed, but when I walked out into the hallway I saw her bedroom door shut, and heard her snoring.

There was nobody there.

The dog settled back into his bed. I sat on the edge of mine and stared at the wall, overcome with the feeling that my grandmother had visited me. It was peace to my bones.

After years of struggle and alcoholism, I was finally getting well and my whole family knew something was different, something had changed. Finally.

I thought perhaps she opened the door, looked in, said “Well I see you’re okay now, Janelle.”

And left.

Settled?

I tell myself that was our final meeting. But in my guts it isn’t quite enough.

Happy birthday, grandma, a little early. You always hated the damn things anyway.

And to the rest of you, go say it.

I have never been quite as lost as I was the past few months.

I think it started with Mac’s hand injury on December 29. Maybe it doesn’t sound huge, but it was. Something about a 6 foot piece of sheet metal dropping 40 feet onto your best friend and husband, father of your 4 children – the vulnerability, the sudden realization of his vulnerability – though it seems at times invisible. Watching him in pain, in surgery, recovery, realizing he will always be in some pain from arthritis and screwed-up joints.

The surgeon was amazed he had his hand let alone his life.

Just a couple weeks after that a family member was harmed by someone in a real, terrifying way. I cannot go into details, will not, but my fallibility as a mother came crashing into my reality and I thought for the first time, “My God I really cannot protect them, not fully.” I even got a calendar out and counted the days from the day I became a mother until that one: 13 years, 1 month and 29 days.

That’s how long I made it.

And then, Mac called to work out of town. Gone. Barely cleared to work, then gone.

First 5 days a week. Then 6.

Then sometimes 7.

It’ll be done in July. No, August. Hopefully August.

And me, there, with all those fucking kids. And my job.

The thoughts took over my brain:

for many reasons, I prefer this man home. ha.

I can’t survive this.
I’m so miserable.
Why is my career (because I work too, ya know?) hinging on HIS? Why is my life less important than HIS? Why is my career/life/existence PUT ON HOLD (transformed completely) because HIS work changes?

Oh, the self pity.

And then, rage. Resentment. Rage at all of it: The hand, the injury to my child, the loneliness, the incessant routine and relentless, mindless, unforgiving work of babyhood and toddlerhood and children and house and work.

I had two panic attacks. I had never had one before in my life. I woke up sweating and shaking with irrational, racing thoughts.

Good times.

A gray settled around my head. I found myself unable to sleep but never wanting to leave my bed. Crying for no reason or any reason.

Yelling, irritated, anxious.

I knew this feeling. I hadn’t had it since post-partum depression with Ava. I knew it well. The rumination. The remembering back before I had kids, the staring at myself naked in the mirror before I got in the shower: The disgust. At my body, my face, the wrinkles. The gray hair. Non-descript self-hatred.

Why don’t you take care of yourself you loser? Still wearing maternity clothes because you’ve never bothered to get others I see? WHAT A FUCKING LOSER.

And fat. Still fat. How did you get so fat? Why do you turn to food? DISGUSTING.

And all these kids. You have no business with these kids.

All of it is a mistake. Every moment of your life.

Think about Spain. Remember that? 20 years old, thin, beautiful, your whole life ahead of you. You had a chance then but you ruined it.

Had a kid at 22. Full-blown alcoholic by 24. LOSER.

Remember when your life had purpose and meaning and hope?

Writing this, I see how stupid it is. Writing it, I see how ridiculous and melodramatic it is. But try explaining that to me when I’m in the middle of it.

All the days were like this. I was in 2 small car accidents from not paying attention. Zombie-like exhaustion. Inability to finish sentences. Getting words wrong. Sadness. Rage.

And then it shifted to apathy, and I knew I was fucked.

I tried taking a weekend away at a yoga farm. Ha. Ha. Ha. (Although that weekend did help me in a way I didn’t expect).

I tried a therapist (she was the worst I had ever seen in my life and I’m looking for another).

And then, I made myself a deal: I would try all the health stuff I could, “go back to the basics” of my life and if I didn’t feel better in a month I would go to the doctor.

So I did research on mood and vitamin deficiencies and hooked myself up with B12, probiotics, Omega-3, Vitamin D, turmeric supplements. I cut down on sugar, increased water. I took my placenta pills in case it was hormonal. (YES I AM THAT HIPPIE.) I prayed and meditated, a little each day. Yes, I believe in God. I believe in a power of good underlying all things. I believe I can tap into that power because it’s made of the same shit I am. I believe this is the same power holding the motherfucking planets in their spots in an infinite universe.

I believe God doesn’t care if I say “motherfucking.”

I tried to get more exercise. I went to my acupuncturist who treated me for anxiety (and his help removed the panic attacks) and suggested I get outside and do at least ONE fun thing with my kids every day. So I did.

this was the actual day I spent with Georgia and remembered motherhood could be fun

The very next day I blew off work and took Georgia to the park, just because. I had forgotten that it was fun, too, to be a mom.

I told my friend Kate I couldn’t do anything and my house was beyond recall. She said “Get up and clean your fucking house Janelle. YOU NEED TO DO SOMETHING.”

That day I said “I will clean one closet today.” And I did. It was the linen closet.

The next day I said “Now I’ll clean this one.” And I did.

And then the armoir. Each day, one thing.

The 4th day, I cleaned my house. It was the simple act of taking action. It was moving forward. It was tiny steps toward normalcy, toward feeling a little okay, a little in control.

A friend sent me a book that reminded me of what I had always known, but somehow forgot: The events of my life are neutral. The events of my life do not have an emotional charge in themselves. My emotional state is the result of a three-fold process:

First, the event. Then, my thoughts about that event; and finally: The emotions caused by my thoughts.

The problem was not that my husband was gone or that my life sucked. The problem was that I had convinced myself I was the eternal broken victim, could not survive in these conditions and was a VICTIM of my life.

I felt hopeless because I had painted a hopeless story. And I believed it. And I told it and retold it until I forgot it was even a story in the first place.

Remembering it was a story – an egoic invention – was like a thousand pounds lifted off my back. OH, that’s right, my soul seemed to say, “You’re okay. You’re not in charge of this rodeo. You’re along for a ride, and this is what the scenery looks like right now. You can either work with it or die trying to fight against it.”

I surrendered, I guess, again.

the hand was something like this

A couple days later I was nursing my baby Arlo when he flattened out his hand against my breast and his little fat palm felt like a piece of velvet across my aching skin and I wept. At the touch. Just that. I don’t know why. Something about the feel of his little hand against me that afternoon in that bed reminded me of what I am and who I am and what I have and that I always, always, somehow get carried.

It told me I was okay.

What washed over me was a profound sense of reality, of gratefulness, of TRUTH. FIVE YEARS AGO I WAS DRINKING ANCIENT AGE WHISKEY AND SMOKING PALL MALL CIGARETTES ALONE IN A BEIGE FORD TAURUS WONDERING HOW I WOULD EVER GET MY LIFE BACK.

And now, it’s all back. It’s better than I could have dreamed, and I’m spinning in circles of “This isn’t good enough.”

I was crushed under the weight of his tiny beauty, and the sacredness of my life. And the story changed. 

It was a close call. I dodged full-blown depression. I watched myself spiraling down and caught it just in time, with a lot of help from people who love me.

But I hesitated to even write this for fear that people would think I am saying that we can cure ourselves from depression. NO NOPE NOPITY NOPE FUCK NO not what I’m saying.

I don’t think you can take supplements and fix your depression or pray or meditate or eat better or exercise your way out of depression. I don’t think the touch of a baby or cleaning out a fucking linen closet can heal you.

What I’m saying is that I’ve been on every motherfucking psych med known to man (exaggeration) and I wanted to try things myself before going down that road again FOR MYSELF but by god get some help if you need it and there is no shame and if those methods had not worked I would be there right now. Today, telling Ms. Pill Doctor GIMME ALL THE PILLS.

After my head lifted a little, I took 3 weeks off this blog to gather myself and my brain and heart and pull it together.

In that time, I rented an office all my own, to give professional writing a fighting chance. I’m not teaching college in the fall. I’m writing a motherfucking screenplay. And revising my book.

And cleaning out that goddamn linen closet, as it needs. And writing to you.

So here I am.

Heyyyyyyyyyy. It’s good to be back.

(Note: I’m taking the month of May off from from the blog (well, except this post). Be back in June. Don’t leave me. Love your faces.)

My mom taught me that if you’re broke and possibly broken, the thing to do with your tax return check is to pack up your kids and drive north, up the coast of Oregon, Washington, all the way to British Columbia, fishing along the way.

You go to those fancy gardens and ride a ferry.

If it rains, you hang a big blue tarp over the hatchback of your Ford Taurus Wagon and cook up the crawdads your kids caught.

No need for campsite reservations. You’ll find something along the way.

Even in Yosemite, in the middle of the summer, when there’s no chance in hell you’re getting a campsite. When you’re done patrolling the campgrounds, finally accepting that there are no spots available, you go to the walk-in campground and share a site with a couple German rock climbers who tell your kids how they sleep on cots sticking out at a 90 degree angle from the face of Half Dome and your daughter gazes at them, sure she’s finally found love.

She goes to sleep imagining the Yosemite stars and moon and clouds and trees from a cot sticking out of Half Dome.

If  you come upon an event you can’t afford, you buy one ticket then tell your kids to meet you at a certain spot down the way so you can pass that ticket through the fence and each kid can get in for free.

If you need mayonnaise for your sandwich you stop at Carl’s Junior and grab some from the condiment area. You send your daughter in and it embarrasses the crap out of her.

If you break down in Las Vegas you play nickel slots and eat buffet food until you get a ride home, or the car gets fixed.

When the window breaks on your mini-van you duct tape that shit and keep driving, even when it’s spewing black out the black muffler and humiliating your junior high kid.

My mom taught me that when it gets insane tough and the money’s gone again, you do your chores on Saturday then go to the beach, and you cook up some hot dogs in the fog while the perfect cold sand squishes between your toes and curls form in your hair around your face from the fog and wet air and the sun slices through the gray in slivers of pink orange.

Because there it all becomes freedom again.

If you can’t afford a nice place to live you find a nice place to live by living in places that are for sale but ya gotta go when it sells so you move every few months, which is weird, but you still get the sweet digs, and your kids learn to pack their rooms in 30 minutes flat.

When life really really isn’t working you pack up and move to Texas. If it doesn’t work there either, you move back.

When you hate the public high school available, you work in the kitchen of the fancy private school because the only option for your kids is college.

How will we pay? Who knows you’ll figure it out.

How will we get there? Doesn’t matter we’ll get there.

Keep driving. You’ll see it. You’ll arrive. I know it. (She always seemed to say.)

(Her optimism infuriated me at times I will admit.)

If on the way Grace Slick or the Rolling Stones comes on the radio you turn it up WAY UP and you sing loud and tell stories of drinking Southern Comfort with Janis Joplin.

I mean you sing it loud. In the mini-van, with the duct-taped window and black-spewing muffler.

You go to church on Sunday.

You start businesses and when they fail you start another.

You run out of money and get it again.

You lose your house and find another.

You give up 10,000 times for exactly 10 minutes.

You recast redefine reform and redesign 5, 10, 5,000 times to drive on, keep on, rolling on and making it. On.

(I have questioned everything in my life except the loyalty of my mother.)

When your daughter goes to rehab, again, you clean her apartment. You cry when you stand in it, telling her later, “I just knew how hard you were trying to be a mother, Janelle. And you just couldn’t do it.” You see what even she can’t see, and hold on to it like a trip to the ocean on a foggy cold Saturday. You see the orange pink of her face as she takes a drag off another cigarette and feel the cold sand between her toes until she can feel it again herself.

When your grandkids need you, you pull them into your home.

When your daughter gets well, you let them go again.

And you turn it up, loud, and you drive, and you love, and you become Nana and stay mom and sing, until every kid and grandkid knows the tune, and wonders where the hell we’re going this time, and how we’re going to get there, but only a little, because your voice is reminder that we’re already there.

You can forget, but not for long.

Get the duct-tape out. Fire it up, kids.

Mama’s home.

And damn. Look at those stars.