To Be Honest...

2024 started last January on the heels of a very strange Christmas of 2023 with my family. I was in the basement with my sister, cleaning things up as we both prepared to leave with our kids and husbands, and I saw my childhood Christmas stocking sitting on a dresser. It was curious—my stocking had always been hung up somewhere in my dad’s houses. In fact, it had been a topic in an earlier year when Sam and I first had our own house—the first home since I had last lived at home. I casually mentioned that I might bring my stocking to Vermont so I could hang it alongside Sam’s, and maybe Quinn’s too; I can’t remember the exact year. The idea upset my dad, and the question seemed to offend him. I had thought of the stocking as mine and hadn’t realized it meant something to him too—of course it did, I see that now. He told me that he thought our stockings from all those happy Christmases as a family should stay together, and with him, and we would see them when we visited. Fair enough. I liked that it mattered to him; I was happy to leave it. But in the Christmas of 2023, it was in a ball in a basement. I assumed they just forgotten about it as they unpacked all the other holiday decorations—no big deal. I mentioned it to him, joking around—something about my being relegated to the basement, or being chopped liver, who knows. But he froze. And he looked at Louise. And it was weird, for a moment.

A short while later, as we were getting ready to say goodbye, my dad tried to hand me the stocking. “Here, take it with you,” he offered, but I was confused. I didn’t want it. I was just joking about it. I liked that he had wanted to keep it all these years—no need to change that. We went back and forth awkwardly, as we sometimes do when we’re having a hard time communicating what we’re really thinking or feeling with each other. He was holding it out to me. I refused to touch it. My eyes started to water and I walked away—outside to catch my breath. I think he followed me. Said something vague about Louise not being herself lately. I was more confused and felt the expiration on our visit. I hustled Quinn and Sam and Buddy along to the car. Everyone came to the driveway, as they always do, to say good bye. From one to the other we move along, say goodbye, get one last hug. My dad. Amy. Scott. The three boys. Then Louise. I can’t remember where her arms were—either by her sides, or bent with her hands in her pockets—but I remember distinctly that she froze. I leaned in to hug her and saw her stern face out of the corner of my eye, felt the stiffness in her frame. It was brief, but undeniable. I got behind the wheel, confused and upset, and drove away in tears trying to breathe. Sam and Quinn rode silently while I experienced whatever I was experiencing.

Sometime in January my sister called. Somehow it was her job to tell me the news that Louise had been convinced, since October, that I had stolen something from her—a book…and maybe some other things…maybe a lot of things…maybe it had been going on for some time. My first thought was: WHAT!?! And my second thought was: Oh god! She must have a brain tumor. Something is obviously wrong. Amy agreed. We each talked to my dad. And I spent the next few weeks trying to figure out how to proceed—I was worried about her, even more worried about my dad trying to deal with whatever was happening on his own (as he insisted he try to do), and also worried about her perception of me.

Back in late October or early November, my dad had called to ask me, sort of casually, whether or not I’d inadvertently picked up a book of Louise’s when I visited for his birthday. “No,” I responded quickly, knowing I had not brought any books home, and knowing too that I would never borrow a book without asking. The book was Where the Crawdad’s Sing he told me and with that I was even more emphatic. “Oh, no, I hated that book and already have a copy; I wouldn’t have picked that one up.” Until January, the topic never came up again. But Thanksgiving had been a little bit weird, and Christmas had been very weird, so clearly the topic had been plaguing them. 

My dad and Louise had been arguing over this for months without my knowing, and the arguing continued. I felt glad to know my dad had never doubted me—he knows me well and knows that I’m a terrible liar (and therefore don’t lie), and I had never been a thief. The irony of the accusation is that for my whole life one of the criticisms I heard most often from people was that I am “too honest”—a concept that is hard for me to understand. There is honest and not honest, and I have always been honest. In relationships, both casual and not, both personal and professional, it turns out people prefer a little “less honest” or less eager for me to say out loud the honest thoughts I have in my head. In my good humored moments, I’m able to laugh at this irony. I’ve spent much of my life hearing that I’m too honest, and now I was being accused of lying. As much as I appreciated that my dad had been going to bat for me, trying to defend my honor, it was increasingly clear that doing so was tearing them up and apart, and I didn’t want that either. 

In the early part of 2024, I felt sad for him and for Louise. Dementia has long been among my top three greatest fears and I imagined it must be terrifying for her. In mid February, one day when I was in my cabin looking at my books, I spotted my copy of Where the Crawdad’s Sing. I really had hated the book, but I pulled it off the shelf to leaf through it. Inside the front cover there was a handwritten note from Louise, on Sugarbush stationery, thanking me for loaning it to her. I remembered the August a few years back (before Covid) when they had come up to spend time with Quinn as Sam and I started back at school. I arranged a condo for them up at the resort so they could spend time at the pool with Quinn and easily walk to restaurants for meals if they wanted to. She must’ve needed a book to read while she was here for the week. When I found the note, proof that her memory of my connection to this book in her life was confused, that I had loaned my copy to her, rather than stealing her copy from her, I almost drove to New Hampshire straight away, but I realized that it wasn’t going to matter. I did convince my dad to let me come down to try to talk with her though. 

I considered the idea that I might just tell her I took it by accident and give her my copy, but really I am not someone who can lie, and I didn’t think that would make things better anyway. Instead I tried to be compassionate, even while being honest, and in the face of that, sitting with her and my dad at their dining room table in the middle of a weekday in February, I watched her vacillate between anger and restraint. In the course of the conversation I reminded her of what she had once said to me when she and my father were dating, or perhaps newly married, and living in her condo. She told me I was a bad guest because I hadn’t adequately cleaned up after myself, and I tried to use that in my defense—to point out that I was never too casual or too comfortable in her house. She was shocked I would accuse her of such an ungracious thing, but it was a turning point in my life that I remembered clearly.

I can’t remember what precipitated her giving me that feedback, but I was caught off guard when it came—I always made my bed, but apparently she had expected me to strip it, or something more, and I had fallen short. When that “bad guest” accusation was delivered I realized I would never be “going home” to see my dad again; from then on I would just be visiting him—an invisible rubicon had been crossed. And ever since then I have been a somewhat neurotic guest, stripping sheets, bringing used towels (if I use a towel) to the laundry room, always jumping up to do the dishes, and being hyper-vigilant with my husband and daughter to be sure they don’t move or leave anything out of place. But my defense strategy didn’t work (likely too honest) and instead she accused me of having been stealing things from her for years, and even telling me I had a disease: “It’s called kleptomania and for a long time I have been thinking you need a doctor!” 

It was an incredibly tense conversation, but by the end she offered that we would “just need to find a way to move through it,” and I agreed. After about ninety minutes, it was time for me to go; I asked if I could hug her and she said yes. I told her I loved her. It was better than the Christmas hug and I left there feeling hopeful, though not exceedingly so.

As the year continued on, Louise underwent a number of doctors’ visits and cognitive and psychological tests. In all of them, evidently, she has passed with flying colors. She is intelligent and high functioning and, with everyone other than me, including my sister and even my husband, she is warm and sociable and charming. With me she is guarded and suspicious. We went from Christmas to Easter without seeing them. At Easter I brought Quinn and Buddy down for a visit. I have not told Quinn the extent of what’s going on, other than to say Louise has had a few confused memories, in an attempt to preserve her grandparents for her. But Easter was difficult. Louise barely looked at me and certainly didn’t speak to me. It was very hard to be in someone else’s home when clearly I wasn’t welcomed there. I tried to give Quinn and Louise space to enjoy each other’s company, but it was strained for all. My dad felt terrible and that was hard for me to see. Buddy stuck to me like glue and I was incredibly grateful for that. If I moved from the table to the sink, he moved with me. If I went to the bedroom, he went too. He was a sentinel at my side at all times—both a comfort and a validation that the energy in the house was indeed way off. 

The next date on the calendar was Father's Day. Amy and I talked about going to see him, just us, and simply taking him out for lunch—something simple that wouldn’t require work and wouldn’t, hopefully, upset Louise, but he asked us not to come. The price he would pay in arguing with her was evidently too high a cost. That is probably the time when my own perspective started to shift. The empathy and compassion I felt, for the most part, up until then, started to give way to anger. I’ve endured long periods of silence, and also surprise phone calls while I’ve been at work with her insisting that my dishonesty is ruining her life and my father’s life and their marriage and I had better fess up. For the most part I’ve stayed away and just looked forward to the clandestine phone calls I’ll get occasionally from my dad when Louise is out of the house for a short period of time. He calls whenever he can, but he’s warned me that with a shared computer, emails are not private and when she’s home he can’t speak to me openly. 

At the end of October, having missed his birthday, Sam and Quinn and I were driving by their house on a Monday morning, on the way home from a spontaneous concert in Boston the previous night, and I suggested we stop in to just give my dad a hug. I miss him all the time. He was surprised to see Quinn at the front door, but he welcomed us in for coffee and a visit. Louise was in the shower and he seemed nervous. I insisted we couldn’t stay and though I stepped inside the front door, I never left the doormat. After a few minutes, Louise appeared on the other side of the room. She was stern and never fully came into the room. Her hands were crossed in front of her hips. She was curt, told us she had to be on her way, she was headed to a doctor’s appointment. I ran out to move my car out of her way and left Quinn and Sam to try to insert something of a pleasantness to our surprise visit. Then I returned and rushed them out and we were on our way. Later that day, or maybe the next, I got an email from her—she couldn’t believe that I was unable to honor her “simple request” that I never show up unannounced…I only vaguely remembered that she asked for that and likely because I wasn’t thinking it applied to a “we were passing by and just thought we’d say hello” kind of visit. It was meant to be a nice surprise for my dad—an unexpected hug, a reminder that he is loved. Even that is no longer allowed. And while we just made it through Thanksgiving and Christmas relatively unscathed, at this point I mostly resent her and the fact that she is holding my father hostage. Rationally, I know this is a precursor to something difficult in her health, and I want to be compassionate. I also know that I have spent a lot of time wondering what I could have done, in earlier times, to plant this seed of distrust in her. She is not experiencing this with anyone else, so maybe it is my fault?

Almost two weeks ago Quinn and I were on the interstate headed north to walk around Burlington and take in the Christmas spirit. Sam was driving students to the airport for break, and it was snowing. We were going slower than usual—probably 50-60 mph—and driving in the righthand lane. Out of nowhere a white SUV came flying up on our left, swerved in and crashed into my side of the car with a sudden smack, and then went careening off the road into a deep ditch. I kept us on course but watched as the other car was about to flip over. I thought, oh no, that person is about to get very hurt! But then they didn’t flip, and the car somehow sped up, climbed back out of the ditch and came flying back onto the interstate like something out of a movie. It fishtailed for a moment, almost hitting us again, before straightening out and speeding up to take off out of sight. I flashed my lights over and over, no longer worried but now mad. Calmly I told Quinn to pick up my phone and write down: KKA 627. Then I was pissed. We drove to the next exit, in Williston, and went to the State Police barracks. From the parking lot, in the snow, I assessed my smashed mirror, scratched door and the small dent. I made the call and reported the accident. The police officer said, to confirm, “and you exchanged insurance information with the other driver, correct?” Ha! No. That maniac, I told him, never stopped. 

On Christmas Eve as we headed to Montpelier for dinner with Sam’s family, the state police called to let me know they had located the other car and they planned to knock on the owner’s door that evening; they would keep me posted. I hung up feeling terrible. What if the driver was the father of young kids? Why did they have to do it on Christmas Eve? Certainly it could wait a couple of days. I felt sad the rest of the evening, thinking about the other family. The day after Christmas my insurance agent called me to let me know the other driver’s story was a bit different from mine. When confronted by the police, he said I had swerved into his lane, knocked him off the road, and in spite of his having gotten to a safe place to pull over, I never stopped. He accused me of the hit and run! I couldn’t believe it! But Trevor, my insurance agent and a former state police officer himself for thirty years, said, “Ah, don’t be surprised. I mean what choice did he have at that point?” The choice to be honest, I thought. Honesty is always a choice. 

And yet, the following day, when I was driving to Burlington to get my haircut, I kept replaying the event over and over in my head. Had I swerved into his lane? Was I to blame? Did he stop? I did the forensics in my head for miles: did the marks on my car show that I hit him, or that he hit me? I’m not sure why I’m so prone to feeling guilty, but I am. Fortunately Quinn was with me and her memory of the event was clear. “No Mom, you didn’t hit him. He hit you.” In the moment when it happened, as she watched the road ahead of us, she asked “Did we just get hit!?” If I had swerved, my fourteen year old daughter, quick to be disgusted with me, would have told me so. 

2024 hasn’t been easy, but there has been so much more to it than these two things. 

Quinn finished 7th grade and started 8th. She has continued boxing with King, she had a good spring soccer season and was then invited to play on a select team in early summer. She has continued to spend time with a big group of friends and has started to see that group expand a bit (and evolve a bit) too. 

In April we watched the full solar eclipse from our backyard, as we were right in the line of Totality—an event that drew more than 160,000 people to Vermont. I took an exercise class in Stowe and met Tammy—my now physical trainer who is helping me move my body again. Soon after that, we went to Miami for a week and, in spite of all of my efforts to make it fun, Quinn mostly resented the fact that she was missing school to be there. 

In May I drove to Maine and bought myself a puppy for Mother's Day. Because we had a family of bears living on and around our school campus all spring, it seemed obvious to name him Bear.

In June, after another teary annual visit to the doctor, I finally started using an estrogen patch and for the first time in 8 years started to sleep again. In July, on the anniversary of last year’s devastating flood, Vermont endured another one—though this time the Dowsville headwaters (streams and brooks that surround our house) were among the hardest hit. We lost multiple culverts and bridges and about 20% of our road, though our house and our nearest neighbors’ houses were fine. 

Soon after that, Quinn and I visited Amy and the boys in Plymouth and then we took Quinn and 7 of her friends to a lake house in Quebec for 3 days…another thing that I screwed up, but that actually worked out alright. 

In August I spent time at Char's lake with Quinn (one perfect day) and with Char. 

In September Quinn turned 14 and had a house full of girls to celebrate her, and I was Char’s +1 for a beautiful wedding in the Adirondacks. I also managed to get both reluctant husband and recalcitrant daughter into a canoe for one blissful paddle on Green River Reservoir, that even they had to admit they enjoyed. Bear and I loved it!

October was a blur of school and Quinn’s soccer games, which culminated in a 2024 highlight: the spontaneous trip to Boston, on a Sunday night, to see David Kushner in concert—Quinn’s first concert of an artist she loves. And we loved it too—it was loud and exciting and packed with people and we ate tacos at 11:30 pm afterward. We sang his songs all the way home to Vermont the next day until we dropped Quinn off at school at lunchtime and made it to our afternoon commitments, smiling.

In early November I went to Colorado for school before returning home to celebrate my 17th wedding anniversary, and my 53rd birthday by going to Quebec City with Sam and Quinn…again, some resentment from the teenager, but also some brilliant and happy moments too. 

For Christmas this year I asked my family for coupons for family adventures and they both obliged. I’m determined to use them all—to force us to be together, if that’s what it takes, to make memories, to have some laughs in the midst of the crazy that the world is and will continue to be, and to try to enjoy the time we have while we have it. That’s what I’m taking from 2024. 

Process

I passed fifty almost two years ago and I won’t say it has been an easy transition. Unlike most other birthdays, fifty has felt like a process. In the lead up and initial days, it felt like grief—the official loss of the person I had always known, or believed myself to be. Someone young, strong, healthy, ambitious, attractive. Looking at the calendar, and myself in the mirror, I felt her slipping away.

I turned fifty the same year I got the position I had been aiming for in my work: Assistant Head of School. Not the top spot, where all of the pressure and responsibility lies, not the face of it all, but right behind her. Capable of doing the work, happy to do it just out of view, no longer feeling the need to be seen, credited, rewarded—just there to make a difference in ways that would make the school strong and improve the experience of students and staff, myself included. A fixer, a problem solver, a systems person.

That same year, Quinn entered fifth grade. It was rocky. But she got through it.

Sometime toward the end of that school year, 2021-2022, feeling irrevocably changed, I started to wonder what it would look like to stop dieing my hair. I had been covering up the emerging grays for more than twenty years. Brown hair, which I had looked at all my life, started to look strange. I found an app that allowed me to take a picture of myself and then change my hair color. I sent a silver-haired version of myself to my sister and asked her what she thought. “I love it!” she told me. “Of course you do,” I replied, “I look like your dead mother.” It was always going to be. When she died, at forty-six, hers was a beautiful silver—past the early, sludgy salt & pepper phase, and onto something shinier, more elegant. She was well into the process then at forty-six, and now I was four years past that time.

When I was younger, I imagined my transition: I imagined taking a long trip to Nepal, trekking in the Himalayas. I would shave my head for convenience and to avoid picking up lice when I slept in backpackers’ hostels. When I returned, forever changed by the landscape and the experience, I would let my hair grow out in its natural color. There would be no roots, no glacially slow process of transforming itself while others spectated. It would be the Himalayas or cancer—one or the other. That’s what I imagined. So like me: two extremes. I would transform either from an experience that was incredibly good, or one that was incredibly bad. And that’s how I’d enter the new phase, the years of my life marked by gray hair. 

I haven’t been to Nepal and I haven’t had cancer. Instead, the summer after I turned fifty, I just stopped adding color to my hair on my monthly visits. At first my hairdresser lightened it a bit, and we cut it shorter, and I told myself I could endure the process, that I didn’t look so bad. But some days I looked in the mirror and felt like I was looking at Alec Baldwin. I don’t know why him, but he was there. The process hasn’t been easy.

At the start of school last fall, students and families showed up and didn’t recognize me at first. I spent a lot of time having to talk about my hair—it was a subject I didn’t really want to discuss with acquaintances and yet couldn’t seem to let go of at home. At school, I just kept responding to people’s comments by saying, “Well, it’s a process!” At home, I just kept looking for reassurance. Was I unrecognizable to Quinn? To Sam? Was I an embarrassment? Did it make me look so old as to be in a different category now, separate from them both?

The more I looked at the evolution of my hair, the more I noticed the other changes. The weight gained, the dry skin, the wrinkles. I wasn’t sleeping. Hot flashes had been going on for seven years. I was drinking “with dinner” each night. I hadn’t exercised in years. My hips hurt—all the time. I was increasingly unhappy.

I was in a yoga class one morning and I was probably the youngest woman in the room by ten years or more. At one point, the instructor was talking about being kind to yourself and she asked “What would you say to your 40 or 50 year old self today.” A lot of women laughed. They  all agreed they would say things like, “hey, you look and feel pretty good—enjoy it!” It didn’t change how I felt about myself, but it registered.

Passing fifty is uncharted territory for me. My mother died before she got here, so I have had no clues about what to expect—what’s around the corner. Interestingly, I feel almost entirely disconnected from her, for the first time in my life. Until a few years ago, I felt a physical ache when I thought of her. I missed her every day. And I held her up in my mind as a flawless and magical person. In the past couple of years, I feel like I can’t quite grasp who she was. My memories of her feel more pixelated and she, as a person, is less tangible than ever before. Admitting this makes me feel guilty. And sad. And again, I feel like I’m walking down a path on my own.

Quinn is in a new phase too. Puberty, adolescence; she is now thirteen. And as I try to find my way through her moments, I find myself not thinking so much about what I can learn from my mother, but thinking more about what I can learn from the person I was at Quinn’s age. I was not easy. And I did not make it easy for anyone else. And Quinn is a force, like I was, but she is also not like I was. The day I got my first period, I hid in my room, trying to convince my mother, and myself, that I had just injured myself riding my bike. I refused to wear a bra for a long time. I really couldn’t accept or talk about any of it. Quinn, on the other hand, was the one to process the facts as facts. Just as she did when she was little, when she told me that it was time for her to stop wearing diapers—a fact I found difficult to accept—she asked me to buy her a bra. And on the spring day when I picked her up from the bus and she told me, casually, that she’d gotten her first period, I freaked out while she casually coached me on what to do. She had soccer practice to get to, and then her first ever school dance, and she needed me to take her to the store so she could get supplies—supplies that I should have had ready for months. And when we got to the store and I asked her what she thought she needed (pads in what size or shape?) so I could go in and get things for her, she looked at me confused: “Can’t I just go in and pick out what I need?” I honestly don’t think I bought my own supplies until I was in college; how was my fifth grader able to?

My fifth grader is now a seventh grader. She has a broad group of friends, and many talents and interests. She is incredible in every way and I love her more than life itself. And she also still struggles to manage her emotions when something sets her off. I’m smiling as I type this. Just this last week I lashed out at my boss, a few colleagues, my husband and new neighbors I haven’t even met (who are considering building not one but two houses on the other side of our stone wall, directly in our line of sight, here in this small wooded sanctuary that is the only thing that keeps me sane). The older she gets, the more I recognize the rage she expresses, and the way she fights rather than flies. When I think back to my version of thirteen, and compare it to her version so far, I can only be thankful. She is so much more reasonable than I was, so much less destructive.

Quinn on cousin Rob's sailboat in June 2023

And maybe this is why I feel so distant from my mother right now, because when I was thirteen, I didn’t like her much. She was doing everything in her power to save me from myself and I hated her for it somehow. She saved me of course, at the expense of herself, but at that time she mostly just disgusted me. For no reason other than that she was my mother and I was trying to be myself.

This past summer the mother of two former students was asking me about Quinn and I told her that Quinn was about to turn thirteen. “Oh,” she said, “well, she is about to enter a very dark tunnel, but in a couple of years she will come out the other side. Just hang in there!” I suppose I can’t reference my mother right now because I was in the tunnel during this phase. It wasn’t a warm time between me and her, and I don’t know how she navigated it or what she thought—she was on the outside.

When I think back to that time, I have only these two primary reference points:

1. Seventh or eighth grade: I thought I hated my family. I was filled with anger all the time. They took me to a therapist. I hated her too and refused to speak. I ran away one day, spent the afternoon and evening at a friend’s house. We were out walking around in the village in the dark and all of a sudden my mother’s car pulled up alongside us. The passenger door opened. She looked straight ahead and said nothing. I got in and said nothing. It had been hours. I can’t even imagine how I would feel. Actually, yes I can. Panic. My mother was steely. I’m sure I was secretly relieved. I don’t think we spoke on the way home.

2. Eighth grade: I was skipping school, stealing alcohol and getting drunk, getting into fights. My mother drove me to the high school pool where the local swim club practiced. She walked me in and handed me over to Marcy, the coach. The coach was a drill sergeant. My mother left. I got in the pool and started to swim. I was a lake swimmer in the company of pool swimming machines. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t flip turn. I didn’t have a choice. I had to keep swimming. I think of this now and wonder what my mother had to say or do to convince the coach to let me in. I didn’t belong, but I needed to be there.

I don’t really remember family vacations, or holidays or birthdays, or much of anything other than being alone in my room, but I did eventually come out of the tunnel, and thankfully it was before she died. By my senior year in high school, I thought of my mother as my best friend. That lasted throughout college. I could tell her anything, and I told her everything. But looking back, I realize we never had time to talk about those dark spots. I never thanked her for saving me. I never asked her questions I would now ask. And I don’t have her to call when I’m adrift as Quinn’s mom, trying to figure out what she needs from me.

13th birthday

Fifty and the beginning of fifty-one were difficult. I can’t say I have been fully happy or healthy. There have been plenty of happy moments, but I think I’ve mostly been disoriented. My habits and perspective have become calcified in the past seven years. I took on more responsibility at work the year Quinn started kindergarten. We had a new head of school when she was in first grade. In her third grade year, school shut down in March. In her fourth grade year, she was able to attend in person only part time to start the year, and we ended it standing outside her school, six feet apart, to watch her “graduate” in her mask. As we were trying to help her navigate this altered life, I was also trying to help 130 students, fifty staff, and all the associated families at my school to also try to navigate. Quinn entered middle school in fifth grade in a mask, the same year I became the Assistant Head of School. Kids in her school, and ours, were off the rails.

Late last winter I was at an annual doctor’s appointment, feeling pretty good about the fact that I actually scheduled it and managed to make time for it. But, feeling increasingly alien in my own skin, run down by life, and menopause, and feeling disoriented generally, I started to cry when she greeted me with a casual, “How have you been?” I had been sleepless. I had gained weight. I had started looking forward to my evening glass of wine too early in the day. I had been disgusted looking in the mirror. That’s how I had been. But crying in front of that doctor, and admitting all of those things out loud was the beginning of something. Another annual appointment a couple of months later, with another doctor, was similar but less emotional. And that was at the beginning of summer. And summer equals time.

As I approach fifty-two, I think I’m experiencing some sort of cracking open. My hair has finally emerged fully and has grown back to a length that feels like me. On good days, I think it’s beautiful. And when Quinn comes up behind me and buries her nose in my hair and breathes in, she tells me I have a smell that is always the same and is unique to me. And she likes it. 

I’ve been drinking less—almost not at all—and sleeping more. And instead of trying to fix everything, for everyone, all the time—because I realize it’s not my job and no one actually wants me to—I’ve been going for walks. Sometimes, they are long. Sometimes they are emotional. Always I find myself walking forward toward the person I used to be. 

At home, at work, and in my own life, which is a distinct thing in the midst of these other roles, I feel myself cracking off this hard shell. I don’t know what I’m doing in my marriage or in my job some days, but I do know that I’m not striving the way I used to. I’m not aiming for anything, other than good health, more time, more acceptance, more ease. Yesterday, while Quinn was warming up at her boxing lesson, her coach looked at me with a smile and said, “You’re glowing today. Why?” I laughed, told him “It’s just the white hair.” But then I thought about it. Maybe I was glowing because I was with my kid. And she was happy. And in spite of what else was going on in the background at school, or at home, or on the calendar, I was just trying to be in that moment, in my own skin. Probably it also has something to do with the detox I’ve been on for the past four months. The weight I’ve lost, the alcohol I’ve skipped, the miles and fresh air I’ve consumed. Maybe I’m really coming out of the sludgy phase, into something shinier? The silver lining. The chrysalis shed. I can feel Quinn rolling her eyes at these dramatic metaphors. It’s okay. For now, it’s all still okay.

On the train in France, April 2023