What I Deserve

N THE past two years I have opened a bookstore while keeping my day job; finished a novel draft and written another novel draft; grieved the death of a friend, and another friend; started and stopped multiple vitamin regimens; watched my mother slip further into the murk of dementia and my father strain to keep her, hold her; watch my older daughter approach the labyrinth of adolescence while I’ve strained to keep her, hold her; adopted two cats; started reading the physical newspaper on Sundays again. I have read countless books because I’m a person who reads a lot, but also because now it’s my job. With no previous business experience, I have shepherded a new business through a pandemic. I have shepherded my family through a pandemic. I have begun therapy in an effort to stop trying to shove my daughters back inside my body, to begin, maybe, to accept that they are not mine to keep, and, pointedly, to understand adolescence, my terror of it—both my own, the secrets, lies, shame, and fear that marked those years for me, and my daughter’s, now imminent, now happening. I don’t want her to feel alone, as I so often felt alone, and yet I know: She will feel alone. I’m trying to remember my mother in those years, Then I cry during every session, so I guess the joke’s on me.