I could pick up the pace, but I couldn’t go on. 
I just wanted a place, but I ended up gone. 

Aimee Mann, “Goose Snow Cone”

It started with a fight.

No, it started long before that. When I opened my eyes that morning, or the night before, maybe.

It started with that awful lonely ache at dawn, and K’s birthday party hours away, and a thousand chores to cross off before the kids arrived at 11. There was a shitty headache behind my eyes and a sense of wrongness about the day ahead; a mix of obligation, resentment, and guilt for feeling this way over a children’s party.

The looming dread settled over the house while I barked orders at my husband and cleaned the bathroom and chopped fruit and yelled about the uncut lawn. I sprinted around, setting up the sprinkler and sandbox and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. The muggy heat made me feel like I was losing my mind. I fastened balloons to the clothesline and put out bowls of chips and platters of finger snacks. All of this, fueled by a seething fury in my chest while Mike dashed around the yard with the mower, finally getting to the job I’d asked him to do days before, and goddammit, I should have just done it myself. I might have muttered this aloud, because at ten minutes to 11, he sensed my outrage and made the grave mistake of asking what I wanted him to do.

It was all I could do not to get in the car and leave.

I spat something about maybe not asking me ten minutes before the guests arrive, when it’s too late to do anything or be of any use at all. I used my whisper scream because I think it makes me less of a monster. He stared at me from the half-cut lawn. Sweat was dripping down the sides of my face, I was panting like a freak, and I swear that if I hadn’t heard the doorbell just then, I could have divorced him on the spot.

Somehow, the party was a success, but as I handed out loot bags and waved goodbye to the last guests, I felt spent and lost. I’d missed the whole thing, missed it to the rush and scurry of party games and wet wipes, to gentle reminders about the bathroom down the hall, to small talk with parents and the frozen smile I did not mean or feel. And as K settled down with a cartoon and Mike retreated to the garage to do whatever cliched things men do after parties, I looked around at the discarded paper plates and ransacked gift bags, and I just wanted to sob.

This is how I feel most of the time: like I’ve missed something terribly important, and the only thing left to do is cry. I don’t know how it is for others—whether it’s my age or my independent struggles with life, and motherhood, and the relentless stress of the pandemic. Maybe it’s all of that, or something else entirely. Something that makes me less cut out for things that should come easy. I don’t know what to do with this energy, so I keep my shoulder to the wheel and pray that something changes. A shift in the winds. I’m waiting for Mary Poppins to float down from the clouds and whip me into shape.

Later, the boys decided to take out the new kite. Uncharacteristically, I left the remaining clean-up and decided to join them.

We took the kite to the field behind the school. The sun was in that perfect position when it’s just thinking about setting, and every tree and rooftop and blade of grass are cast in gold.

I listened to the boys debate the direction of the wind while I held the kite aloft, waiting for my cue.

A breeze kicked up.

“Let ‘er rip!” K hollered, just like my dad used to, and I wondered where K learned that as he took off running.

“Let GO, Mommy! Let go!”

I threw the kite high into the air and the wind swept it right into the sky, and as I watched K run, I laughed, and Mike laughed, and I looked over at him and saw him for the first time that day. He looked back at me with the sun in his eyes and his mouth wide with laughter, and I was struck dumb by the ease of his forgiveness, by his big white teeth. And as K’s strong little legs carried him farther away, I caught the sound of his laughter, too, and some invisible fishhook snared deep inside while we laughed and watched the kite unfurl, up and away.