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It has been a horrible day, fraught with rage and tears and fear and anxiety, filled with noise that I want to run from, conflict that shatters my soul. And yet, in the here and now, lying on the couch half asleep while my son chatters in Japanese about memes and my daughter browses candles on Bath and Bodyworks, I don’t want to be anywhere else. I don’t want to leave tomorrow. I don’t want to have to wake up and do it all over again – take my daughter two states and twelve hours away from the only home she knows for medical treatment we fought for in our home state for over four years, medical treatment that isn’t all that revolutionary or even risky- just not taught or widely researched, so the majority of medical professionals don’t understand it and choose ignorance over education.

Three months before, finally reaching a wall we could not scale in our home state, and with my daughter at a peak of desperate need for medical treatment, we left home to live in a rental house in San Francisco. We spun it as an adventure, a chance to live somewhere different, to experience new surroundings, maybe even to meet new people, if that was possible in the midst of a pandemic that had most states under social distancing advisories. My son stayed behind. As much as I wanted him to go with us, at twenty, he has his own life, and he never liked travelling anyway. We had spent the year before in a rental fifteen minutes away from our home because of a housefire. My son had longed for the day we would return home and, now we were there, he wasn’t budging. Besides, as he pointed out, then I wouldn’t have to pay to board the two cats.

Often, my teaching him to think logically and critically from the time he was a toddler backfires on me.

My daughter and I had been gone since October. It was now “Winter Break,” and she had desperately wanted to come home. But once we got there……all the things she had been and done “before” came rushing back the moment we reached our home. She had fooled herself into thinking she was “better” then when we had left. She was, in comparison to what she had been that previous summer. But not in comparison to the highly spirited, energetic, firecracker of a person she’d been before she got sick. And that girl–she was everywhere in our home, everywhere in our town. Much like when I hadn’t realized how much cigarette smoke hung over my childhood home until I’d lived smoke-free for three months in my college dorm, she hadn’t realized how much she’d been living with a ghost until she’d lived free of that ghost.

And that was when she broke.

When I break, I crawl under a blanket with a tumbler of vodka and soda, watch movies about hopeless situations until I cry and then sleep for fifteen hours. I project inward. My daughter projects outward. She would not be the one ensuring everyone got off the Titanic before her. She would be the one making sure everyone went down with her.

That was how it had been from the moment she was born. Her brother and I loved her dearly, as one loves an amazing fireworks show. But we’d long known the ramifications of what happens when too many fireworks are lit at once. And you are also standing within arm’s reach of the fireworks….

It had been a long couple of weeks. We were leaving for San Francisco earlier then we had planned. It was best for everyone. I knew that. But in this moment, when everything was calm and for just a long second I could pretend our lives were exactly as I had envisioned them once–peaceful, calm, consistent–I didn’t want to do what was best for everyone. I wanted to do what was best for ME. Even if I wasn’t quite certain what that was.

My son stopped his rambling in Japanese to glance at me. “You OK, Mom?” he said.

I met his gaze. “I wish we didn’t have to leave you.”

He nodded. “I know. I wish I could come with you. But it’s better for you two and for me this way.”

“Yeah,” I reply. “I know.”

“Mommy is the best mommy in the entire world!” my daughter says without looking up from her online browsing.

“I’m any mommy,” I say, as I’ve done a thousand times before. “What else would I be doing?”

“True,” my son, the rational one, says.

“Having the wild sex,” my daughter, the firecracker, says. “Going out every night and getting drunk and dancing.”

My son is laughing. My daughter is dead serious. It’s totally what she would be doing if she were a healthy 17 year old. She has always been very clear about that. One of her favorite games with her best friend as a 4th grader was “Sneaking Out,” in which they had me sit in the living room or the kitchen while they tried to find ways to get past me to the front door quietly. “Practicing for when we are teenagers,” they both said.

At least Lyme disease has relieved me of that particular stress…

“Believe it or not,”I tell her, “there is nowhere I’d rather be.”

It’s not always true, for her or me or any of us, and she knows that.

But in that moment it is, and she knows that, too. They both do.

And in this life that is wholly unlike anything I ever envisioned or imagined or expected, every moment counts.

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