I am very late to this post, really TOO late for practical purposes—but I was distracted by college-selection stuff and then I was out of town (my brother and I went on a fun quick trip to see our parents), and so it is only now I have thought to say this: If you are someone who would normally think of Mother’s Day as a special day for yourself, but your family has historically been…lacking…in celebrating that day, this is your reminder to lay in some supplies.

What I personally like to do is buy some Plausible Deniability Items. Perhaps a can of Pillsbury orange rolls from the grocery store, or a nice box of pastries from the grocery store bakery! Why, we might have those ANYWAY on a Sunday! Perhaps a box of See’s chocolates—it’s not for Mother’s Day, no, it’s just that I like to collect the pretty SPRING FLOWERS TINS they normally have around May! Maybe I buy something that’s been in my online shopping cart for a long time; the early-May timing is merely a coincidence. Anything where, if the family DOES in fact take action this year, I won’t feel silly for having made these purchases I might easily have made ANYway.

If you’re like me, you might feel silly no matter what. You might feel self-indulgent, or self-pitying, or over-reactive, or like it’s Worse Than Nothing if you have to do these things for yourself. You might think, “This is ridiculous: I don’t REALLY CARE about Mother’s Day!” Well then, isn’t it nice that you didn’t buy those items with any special day in mind, but instead just happened to buy them in early/mid-May! But what I have learned is that when Mother’s Day actually arrives, I am very glad to have a few things on hand, even if ahead of time I thought it was worse than nothing.

This year I bought the full-ounce bottle of Pacifica French Lilac perfume that LAST year I bought the .33 roller size of. (It smells like if you had a lilac bush growing right outside your open window, or I guess growing right outside your shoulder.) It was on a sale, so I might have bought it anyway.

(image from Target.com)

And I finally hit the buy button on the lilac cotton sweater I’ve allowed to linger in my Amazon cart forever, despite already owning the same sweater in green and knowing I love it; I got the green one on some $15 flash sale, so for some reason was balking at spending $25. (For sizing purposes: I wear an XL Tall in Old Navy, and I like this sweater in XXL—but I do not like FITTED clothing. I like to be INSIDE a sweater.)

(image from Amazon.com)

At the grocery store today I bought a Cadbury Caramello bar and a Cadbury Fruit & Nut bar, which I might have bought anyway, as they are some of my favorites and they were on sale. I bought the tube of Pillsbury orange-iced rolls, which I might have bought anyway, as a nice treat for any Sunday morning. I bought a pot of sprouted tulip bulbs, which I DEFINITELY would have bought anyway, ever since finding out that if I then carelessly flung those tulip bulbs (after the tulips wilted) into a carelessly shoveled hole in the ground at ABSOLUTELY THE WRONG TIME OF YEAR (spring), they would COME UP AGAIN THE NEXT YEAR, LIKE FREE BONUS RERUN TULIPS.

Also: if you normally do chores of any kind on Sunday (grocery shopping, bathroom-cleaning, laundry, changing the sheets, etc.), may I suggest you plan to do those things sometime between now and the end of the day Saturday? It is very nice, on a Sunday that is just like any other Sunday, to not have any chores to do. If you normally make dinner on Sunday, plan to make a dinner you personally like best, even if (especially if) other people don’t like it as much as you do; or, spontaneously, for no particular reason, plan to order take-out from a place you like, just on a whim because you don’t feel like cooking that particular evening.

Well! Elizabeth decided on a school: she chose the art college within a university, rather than the only-art-college.

THE MOMENT AFTER WE PAID THE DEPOSIT, her whole mood changed from morose to perky. She started filling out the roommate-selection application, complaining perkily the whole time about the dumb questions. She started talking perkily about which things from her room she planned to bring to college, and which she planned to leave behind, and which she planned to use the transition as an opportunity to cull. Her voice stopped doing that about-to-cry thing. She went from looking unhappy to looking happy. She started shopping for Senior Prom.

I was very relieved, because up until that point, my main concern was her despondency about the choice: I wished we had tried harder to find a place she Really Wanted; I felt bad that she felt like she was choosing between two such imperfect options; also I felt a little irritable because I TRIED to help her find more appealing options but she kept being so meh about everything and rejecting my attempts!! Anyway, it was good to see her perk up.

Now we wait to hear from Edward’s first-choice/waitlisted college. They say they don’t have a ranked waitlist; instead, they reconsider the entire waitlisted pool again, for the remaining available slots, like a microcosm of how they consider the entire pool of applicants for the original available slots. I wish I had ANY IDEA how many waitlisted students there were, and/or what Edward’s chances are. Are we talking a 1 in 100 chance? a 1 in 1000 chance? a 1 in 2 chance? Is Edward a shoo-in as long as the expected number of students decline their acceptance, or is he a long-shot even if there are record-setting declinings?? We just don’t know. We also don’t know what the financial-aid situation will be, but it seems like it would be less for a waitlisted student than for a first-round choice.

I have had a very happy thing happen at work. I don’t know if I have complained often enough about the situation: it was weighing me down, but I didn’t have much of an urge to discuss it. The main issue was that I was making less than $10/hour in a job I love and which comes with many other benefits (almost no commute; flexible hours and easy to get time off; a pleasant and interesting working environment; I like my coworkers; I like and respect my boss, and I like the way she bosses; etc.), but also I have twins heading for college, and the McDonald’s/Target starting pay in this area is $15/$17. I didn’t see how I could continue justifying working in my current job once the twins had left for school. I was feeling pretty upset about this for many reasons, ranging from small whines to large ones, and I was not looking forward to the change from a pleasant job to a miserable one.

The only way to increase my pay while still working at the library would be to get promoted to checkout desk (a position they’ve offered me, so I knew it was an option)—but the last time I worked a customer service job, I left it thinking NEVER AGAIN. (Well, with the automatic footnote that of course I WOULD if I HAD TO.) And if I’m going to hate doing customer service for, say, $13/hour at the library, I might as well hate doing customer service for $17/hour at Target, or maybe even more than that at a pharmacy.

In the meantime, though, I’d come up with an idea: I would learn to work at the check-out desk at the library A LITTLE BIT. Customer service in small quantities is vastly different from customer service forty hours a week. And that way I could cover other people’s shifts sometimes, which would increase my take-home pay if not my hourly pay. So I did that: I told my supervisor I’d like to know how to work the checkout desk at least enough to give my co-workers their breaks, and she JUMPED on that, because SHE’S been covering their breaks and she is almost always interrupted/inconvenienced by it.

But this led to a fresh issue: I ended up getting asked to cover the desk QUITE A LOT—like, sometimes for half my shift or more. So I was falling behind in my own work and getting stressed/overwhelmed by that, and also it turned out I did not cope well with making MUCH LESS MONEY than other people who worked the checkout desk. And I didn’t like that my boss didn’t seem to be noticing any of this as a problem. And it made me even more certain that I was going to have to leave this job and get a new job.

I was experiencing some significant misery over it.

Then I had my annual performance review. I was ALL GEARED UP to say something about the situation (in fact I rehearsed it unstoppably at 3:00 a.m. most nights)—but my supervisor beat me to it. She brought it up first and said OBVIOUSLY I could NOT keep working at the checkout desk for page wages, and then she talked on the topic at some length, in a way that indicated to me that she has not only been noticing the problem but also thinking about it and working at it: she said the problem is that the library wages are in some sort of wage-table, so if page wages are increased, they also have to raise everyone else’s wages. She said she was working on an idea to bring to the director, and that I should hold tight. I went away from this meeting feeling like IF NOTHING ELSE, my respect/like for my supervisor was once again justified—which was one of the list of things bothering me before, when I thought she wasn’t noticing, and I was feeling disappointed about that.

Today the director came to me with paperwork to sign: a position-title change, and a significant wage increase. She said my supervisor said there should be no difference between a page and a checkout-desk employee in terms of pay, and that all of us should have the same job title—which means they can pay me more, without having to increase the entire wage structure. I will still MOSTLY page, since that’s what I like doing, and I will also work sometimes at the desk, which so far I am finding pleasant, and nice for job variety; other employees will MOSTLY work at the desk, since that’s what THEY like doing, but will also start doing some paging. My supervisor said, and the director agreed, that it benefits everyone to know how to do more of the tasks at the library. And now I will make $16-something/hour, so I don’t have to quit this job I love and go work at McDonald’s/Target instead. AND I can increase my hours if I feel at loose-ends (and at low-bank-account) when two more children are living elsewhere. This whole thing could not have gone better.

We are in the last few days before the College Decision Deadline of May 1st. Edward has submitted an acceptance/deposit to his second-choice school, because he is waitlisted for his first-choice school, and waitlisted students don’t find out if they’re In until after the decision deadline. All of us feel content with this situation, except for the part where we can’t really tell anyone where he’s going yet, and we might lose a multi-hundred-dollar deposit. But his second-choice school and his first-choice school have been VERY CLOSE in his personal rankings, and in fact they swapped places a few times during the decision-making process, so what I mean is that we’re all content with the idea of him going there. And he knows that if he continues to yearn for his first-choice school, he can re-apply there next year and would very likely get in, assuming his grades at his second-choice school are good. (One of the main reasons he didn’t get into his first-choice school, we believe, is that he wants to major in computer science, and our high school’s computer science teacher left because of the pandemic, and so the high school did not have computer science classes or a computer team as they usually would; the first-choice school is very selective for computer science majors, and didn’t have much to go on when evaluating Edward’s application.)

Elizabeth is still unsure. She has run into that thing many of us run into with many of life’s decisions, which is that there is NO WAY TO KNOW what would be best/right (or even what she might PREFER) on SO MANY FACTORS OF THE DECISION. Right now her essential decision is between: (1) a stand-alone art school and (2) an art school within a university. The stand-alone is about two-thirds the price of the university, after scholarships and financial aid; it is not THE name-brand art school, but [editing this part of the sentence, because the guesses are indicating to me that I gave a misleading description; it is not the one in Georgia, because Georgia is not currently a safe place for a person with a uterus to have a medical emergency; but:] it was her clear favorite of all the stand-alone art schools we visited. (She got into THE name-brand art school, but we visited it and she disliked it.) (Not to mention the COST, which was BEYOND BOGGLING.) The stand-alone has hundreds and hundreds of students; the university has thousands and thousands. The stand-alone is further away (“plane ride” distance), and in a pleasing and interesting city; the university is nicely far away (“8-hour drive” distance), but in a depressing strip-malls-and-oversized-parking-lots suburb of a city (but with several interesting cities nearbyish). The university would give her the ability to do/create a combined major, or do a minor in a non-art field; the stand-alone would not. The university would provide fellow students who were not art majors; the stand-alone would not. Those are all the issues she has mentioned that are relevant to her.

At this point, after talking with her about it for hours and hours, my feeling is that she is going to have to get to the last minute and then just PICK ONE. Both schools are great choices in their own ways, and neither one of them has ALL the things she wants, and on some issues she doesn’t even KNOW what she wants—nor does she know HOW to know. She and I are both feeling some regret that we did not successfully find a university she felt more enthusiastically about than this one—but we DID LOOK QUITE A BIT, and she just never had a “WOW!!” reaction to a university, which she knows doesn’t mean a university isn’t the right decision.

A lot of college-choice stuff is framed as if it’s a romantic movie (find The One!! and you’ll Just Know!!), and it IS that way for some people, but it wasn’t that way for me and it hasn’t been that way for Elizabeth, and that’s normal too. It’s normal not to have all the information you need to make a decision, and yet get to the point where you have to make a decision anyway; it’s normal not to find one single college that has everything you wanted; it’s normal not to know what you like until you try; it’s normal to need to switch, once you have more information.

I have two books to recommend.

The first is called The Country of Ice Cream Star, by Sandra Newman, and I will tell you that initially I struggled to make it through even the first paragraph (it’s the kind of book that starts out with nothing making sense, AND it’s in a dialect, AND the main character’s name is “Ice Cream Star,” which, no) and closed the book and thought “Nope.” And yet it has ended up a leading contender for My Favorite Book of the Year, which is a decision we take very seriously at the library where I work. Also, I ended up finding the dialect charming/delightful to the point of being TOUCHING, and I enjoyed the sudden little epiphanies of where certain words came from.

(image from Amazon.com)

And so you know I must have opened it up again at some point after originally closing it, and indeed, that is what happened: I opened it up again because it’s a post-apocalyptic type of book and I was really in the mood for one of those. I struggled through the first page or two, and then stopped and consulted William, who is majoring in linguistics along with computer science, to see what he thought about whether the dialect was racist; and he read the first page or two, and got out his laptop and went typey-typey-typey for awhile, and then he said, “Without spoiling anything…I’ll say it looks like she knows what she’s doing.” He said there was a lot of talk about the dialect being racist, but it seemed to be from people who had my first reaction: feeling it MUST BE racist, without knowing much if anything about the topic. I realize this was (1) the quick assessment (2) of a blonde white guy, so I wouldn’t call it conclusive if I were researching for anyone else’s purposes, but it was enough to let ME keep reading, at least for the time being.

I don’t know how to explain the book to you. Can you maybe get it from your library so you can just TRY IT without it mattering if you don’t like it? Because I’m worried that anything I say about it will talk you OUT of it. For starters: it takes place after a pandemic that killed almost everyone, and continues to kill people before they reach full adulthood. You know me as someone who cannot tolerate Child In Danger stuff, and all of these children are in danger, and there is, well, there is a lot of dying in this book. And yet.

And as I mentioned, it’s in a dialect, William said it looked like it was a creole, and I am not generally interested in wrestling with that. So this is a book that, if YOU had described it to ME, I don’t think I would have read it! And yet! I loved it so much! I just loved it so much!

SPEAKING OF WHICH, the second book I want to recommend, which is also a contender for My Favorite Book of the Year, and which also is a book that if you described it to me I don’t think I would want to read it:

(image from Target.com)

We All Want Impossible Things, by Catherine Newman (Target link; Amazon link). I pre-ordered this not once but twice, by accident. I ordered it (twice) because Catherine Newman is on my very short list of authors whose books I will always pre-order.

But maybe you’re noticing this was published in November of last year and I’m only mentioning it now. Well. The thing is. It’s about a woman whose best friend dies in hospice of cancer. And each time I looked at my To Read pile, I thought “I’m not up to that right now.” And then I finally depleted my To Read pile to the point where I thought “OKAY LET’S DO THIS.”

And I loved the book so much, I want to tell everyone I know to PLEASE PLEASE READ IT, because YES, YES, it is about a woman’s best friend dying in hospice, and YES it is so so sad, you are NOT WRONG to think you will cry numerous times—but it is ALSO such a funny and delightful book, much funnier and much more delightful than you would expect considering the subject matter. And I think it wonderfully demonstrates many of the things I love about having teenagers. And if you are already a fan of Catherine Newman and her Ben & Birdy blog from long ago, you will recognize so many true things! And, combined with the fact that this is a fictionalized account of the actual death of Catherine Newman’s actual best friend, you will nosily wonder what ELSE in it is true, if you know what I mean, and if you read it YOU WILL KNOW WHAT I MEAN.

So this is a recommendation of TWO BOOKS that BOTH have plots that may make you think you don’t want to read them, but I am telling you (1) I FELT THE SAME and (2) BUT TRY THEM BECAUSE YOU MAY FIND YOU END UP FEELING AS I DO ABOUT THEM. I have already given one or the other of these books as birthday gifts, and I plan to keep doing that all year.

We had a slightly funny thing happen just now, which is that Paul and I were out on an errand, and we came back into the house in the middle of a conversation, and we started putting things away as we were talking, and it took us more time than you’d expect to realize that some of the teenagers in the kitchen where we were talking and putting things away WERE NOT OURS. I noticed first and said “Aaaa!” and then Paul looked up and noticed and said “Aaaa!” It’s not that we forgot how many children we had, it’s that we apparently forgot how many of them could conceivably be in our kitchen. Eventually my brain did the math (“Wait: COULD there be four teenagers in your kitchen right now??”), which is when I looked up and said “Aaaa!”

I bought a new mug, even though I seriously, honestly, truly need to buy NO MORE MUGS—and since that purchase, I have several times MADE MYSELF SAD by thinking “What if I hadn’t bought this mug?”

I bought it at…let’s see. It was either Marshalls or HomeGoods. I drove Henry and his friends to the theater to watch the Dungeons & Dragons movie, and the theater is too far from home for it to make sense to drive back home and come back later to pick them up, so I narrowed it down to three options: I could read my book and play on my phone in the car for two hours; or I could watch a movie by men about how some men at Nike got a sportsman to work with them on a shoe for men; or I could go shopping and see if I could spend the $14 movie ticket price on something more interesting. I bought a mug and a small lidded saucepan, which together came to two cents less than $14, and I had a nice time shopping, too.

I relearned, however, that I Do Not Like To Be Out After Dark. I do not like it! I think I am…scared of the dark? I realize that sounds silly, but I think that’s what it is. If I am out even just as the sun is starting to go down, I start to feel A Foreboding. If I am out doing errands in the dark, I have to literally talk myself through it: “This is fine! It’s just dark out! But this is the same normal familiar HomeGoods parking lot that gives you no Bad Feelings when it’s daytime! You are going to walk to your same normal familiar car and nothing bad is going to happen! And then you are going to drive to Marshalls and have some fun shopping THERE! It’s fine that it’s dark out! It makes no difference!” It’s mostly if I am BY MYSELF in the dark, but it’s ESPECIALLY if I am doing Normal Daytime Things (like going to stores I normally go to in the daytime) but it’s night. There is something very creepy to me about being in a familiar daytime store, and seeing the dark outside the windows.

I was thinking today about how very many of the things I CRINGE about are the things that, when OTHER people say/do them, I totally understood what they meant and don’t give it another thought, except for the thoughts I think about how interesting that is. Like, yesterday: I was wearing a t-shirt with daffodils on it; a library patron’s little daughter said she liked my flower shirt, and her dad said something like “Oh, yeah, that’s nice, isn’t it? with the…sunflowers…on it!” He hesitated; he was uncertain; the word did not come immediately to his mind; and maybe he will NEVER THINK OF THIS INCIDENT AGAIN. Many people (hard as it may be for some of us to believe) DON’T GIVE IT ANOTHER THOUGHT when such things happen! They probably think (I am just making it up here, because I do not know from personal experience) something like, “Ha! Silly mistake! I’m sure she knew what I meant!,” and then they GO ON WITH THEIR LIVES. I’m going to pause for a moment here so we can attempt to imagine what that must be like.

Because if it were ME, I could EASILY be wincing/cringing about accidentally referring to daffodils as sunflowers, and I could easily still be doing it YEARS LATER—not, like, DAILY or anything, and not in AGONY or anything, but as part of my rotating reminders of embarrassing moments. I would be imagining the scene, with me saying my wrong thing, and perhaps I would envision myself saying it in an exaggerated SpongeBob kind of voice. You know, when I type this out, it looks simply deranged. Who would care if they accidentally referred to daffodils as sunflowers in front of someone they don’t even know? WELL THAT IS EXACTLY MY POINT: NO ONE CARES. WE ALL KNOW THEY KNOW WHAT A DAFFODIL IS. AND/OR IF THEY DO NOT, WE DO NOT MIND OR CARE. And yet! When it is me making the mistake, I wince/cringe, sometimes for DECADES, and I KNOW AM NOT ALONE! I am not saying I think that is the correct reaction, and yes I have tried therapy, I am just saying I DO sometimes have that reaction!

Oh gosh, the time a teenaged boy at the Target check-out told me to have a Happy Mother’s Day and I said “You too!” (And why SHOULDN’T he have a Happy Mother’s Day, celebrating with his mother or the other mothers in his life?) Oh no, the time the clerk at the pizza place said “Enjoy!” and I said “You too!” Oh no, the time I said that weird thing that didn’t land right, and everyone just kind of looked at me because they didn’t really get what I meant! Oh no, the time I said something that could have sounded like I meant something I would NEVER HAVE MEANT!

What I am saying to you right now is that in most cases THE OTHER PERSON MAKES NO FURTHER NOTE OF IT. Which we TOTALLY UNDERSTAND when we are the other person! That teenaged boy at the Target check-out knew exactly what happened; he did not think I thought he was a mother. The clerk at the pizza place knew exactly what happened; she did not think “WHAT?? But I am NOT going to enjoy that pizza!! SHE is going to enjoy that pizza! Her response makes NO SENSE!!” That library worker at my library (me!!) knew exactly what happened: I did not think the patron did not know what a daffodil/sunflower was, or that it mattered if he didn’t, or that any part of that interaction had any significance or importance.

And the time I was at kindergarten drop-off and I was chatting with another mom for the first time, and as we parted I said “See you later, bye!” and she said “Bye, I love you!”—well, I CERTAINLY HOPE she is not cringing years later, as I would be, because I ABSOLUTELY UNDERSTOOD WHAT HAPPENED. I think of it years later not because I am thinking “Why on EARTH would she have said she LOVED me??” or because PEOPLE REALLY DO REMEMBER YOUR MISTAKE YEARS LATER (I realize it SEEMS like I am saying people really do remember your mistake years later, since I remember this mistake years later, but stay with me), but because I feel so warmly affectionate toward her for making such a completely understandable and relatable mistake! MAY WE FEEL THAT SAME WARM AFFECTION TOWARD OURSELVES, WHEN WE ARE LYING AWAKE CATEGORIZING OUR COMPLETELY UNDERSTANDABLE MISTAKES!

This is my coffee pot:

(image from Amazon.com)

Thanks to the power of blogging and the power of order history, I can see I bought it in January 2019, and that I paid $75 not $99. According to the U.S. government’s currency converter (also very useful if you would like to see if your raise was actually a raise: I recently got a nice raise that means I now make almost as much per hour as I made when I was hired in 2019), $75 in January 2019 is roughly $90 in April 2023, so I did not get quite as much of a deal as it might appear, but still a little bit of a deal.

For over four years, then, I have had this coffee maker, and I have been happy with it overall. It is of course rusting (the heating plate and also the metal plate on the underside), because what regularly-water-contacting item (shower curtain rods, bathroom light fixtures, coffee makers) is NOT sensibly made out of metal that rusts when it comes in contact with water? But my only OTHER complaint is that every single day when I go to fill the water reservoir, using the coffee pot, the water sloshes simply everywhere: into the part where only the filter and coffee grounds are supposed to go; all over the counter; etc. I have tried MAKING REALLY SURE the coffee pot lid is on securely. I have tried CHANGING THE POURING ANGLE. I have tried BEING LESS IMPATIENT WITH THE POURING SPEED. I have tried PULLING THE COFFEE MAKER WAY OUT AWAY FROM THE WALL to make sure that’s not the issue. I have tried saying “GODDANG IT WHY WON’T THIS STUPID THING POUR RIGHT!!!” really loudly. I have tried everything.

Well. I have tried everything except USING SOMETHING OTHER THAN THE COFFEE POT. Last night for the first time it occurred to me that I don’t need to use the coffee pot to measure the water. I can use, say, a large plastic cup. Which, as it turns out, works SO MUCH BETTER. It does mean I need to check the side of the coffee maker to see when I have put enough water in, and it means I need to refill the cup multiple times instead of filling the coffee pot just once. But ALL THE WATER went INTO THE WATER RESERVOIR, so.

A long time ago I read the book Quarantine, by Greg Egan, and if I’m thinking of the right book (and that is called into question approximately once a year when I try to refer to the book and I get it confused with another Greg Egan book called Permutation City, which seems like the right name for the book I read but apparently is not—and in fact, just now, the way I recalled both titles was to say to Paul “What is the book by Greg Egan I actually read, the one I can never remember the title of because it doesn’t seem right?,” and he said “Quarantine,” and I said “And what is the book I always think is the one I’ve read, because the title makes more sense?,” and he said “Permutation City”)… …I have lost the reins of this sentence.

A long time ago I read the book Quarantine, by Greg Egan. What I remember about that book is that the plot revolves around a man who can do a particular trick: he can split himself into EVERY POSSIBLE TIMELINE, and then CHOOSE THE ONE HE WANTS. So for example! Let us say he wishes to break into a secured building. He splits himself into every possible timeline, and then he chooses the one where the security cameras happen to be malfunctioning at the exact moment the guards happen to be distracted by something in another direction, and where the last person to have left the building happens to have left the door just barely ajar so the lock isn’t engaged—and so he walks right into the building, just as if it were unsecured.

This is where we are starting: with the amazing concept of splitting timelines and choosing the one where everything goes right. (In all the others, he fails.)

A number of years ago, I was in a store with Elizabeth, she was about ten years old I guess, and she asked to go off to look at something on her own, and I said she could, and then after she had been gone longer than I felt comfortable with, I went looking for her and I couldn’t find her. I looked through what I thought was the entire store and I couldn’t find her. And what I was thinking, as my mind became increasingly detached from my body, was that probably I would find her—but that if we could split the timeline into all the possible timelines, there was at least one timeline where I would not find her. That that is exactly what happens to some parents: they think “Ha ha. She is not actually gone. It feels like she is actually gone, but that is because I am being extremely silly and I am panicking right now, but I will in fact find her,” and then they do not, and they never do; at some point they end up calling the police; the police come; that timeline continues in a surreal episode of what must feel like a TV show but is not. And after I found her, I continued to be affected by that realization: that the nightmare scenario that everyone thinks is ridiculous to panic about, is the same nightmare scenario that DOES IN FACT HAPPEN to some parents. It really does happen to them. That’s why the rest of us panic; that’s why it’s not silly.

I had another example of that this evening, when Elizabeth went out to pick up trash along the side of the road to fulfill a volunteer-hours requirement, and she said she would be gone an hour, and I almost offered to go with her but then I didn’t; and after about an hour and a half I realized it had been longer than an hour but I told myself not to worry, and then it had been about two hours and dinner was past ready and she was still not home, and Paul was starting to say he should maybe go out in the car and just sort of drive randomly up and down the streets looking for her. And part of me was telling myself not to panic, because everything was going to be fine and she would soon walk in the door and then we would eat dinner and I would feel silly; but part of me was seeing again the timelines, all split, and how some of those timelines involved her not coming home. She did come home. Nothing had happened, she was just gone longer than expected. She was fine, and I was silly to have worried. We ate tepid dinner. It was one of the good timelines.

It’s tempting in these situations to feel embarrassed: oh, I panicked over nothing, of COURSE nothing happened; oh, I over-reacted, I let my imagination run away with me; oh, I’m so silly, why does my mind always have to go to the worst possible scenario?? But it’s clear from the news every day why we do that: so many parents panic and then it’s not nothing; so many parents imagine terrible things that turn out to be true; so many parents end up living the worst possible scenario. We’re not wrong to understand that it’s an option. We’re not wrong to notice and be grateful for our lucky timelines.