“I don’t want to go,” the child declared defiantly, and his mother felt her headache ratchet up another notch.
“I know you don’t. And I understand why. But we still have to go, so please find your other shoe and put them both on.”
She was almost entirely successful in masking the strain in her voice, a talent she had developed by necessity over the last several months as she navigated single motherhood with her son and his newly-diagnosed autoimmune condition. But now, there were only twenty more minutes before Mass was scheduled to begin, and they were still not in the car, and she was starting to lose her grasp on the threads of her rapidly fraying patience.
“But why do we have to?” whined the boy, bottom lip thrust forward, grubby fingers clutching a single shoe. “Why can’t we just stay home?”
The woman, fully occupied with brushing cat hair from the child’s dress shirt, sighed deeply and paused in her grooming. She wracked her brain for
