November 19

In a rare moment when I’m in my office, I hear a knock, then see a head peeking around the opening door. “Do you have a minute?” my daughter asks. I’m sitting at the computer tapping out words that I can feel are all wrong.

“Yes,” I say. “What’s up?” She puts out her arms as she walks to me, then we’re embracing, my head on her chest because she’s tall enough now that when I’m seated, I fit snuggly below her chin. Her heart is beating loudly in my ear, which has become one of my favorite sounds—the sound of closeness, a signal that she’s still mine.

She wants to talk about tomorrow and ask me a question about knitting. Why she’s really here is she’s checking up on me, making sure I’m not too far away, in body or in mind.

I rarely sit at my desk these days. I have worked only a handful of days since March, instead collecting unemployment and contemplating the shape of things. Unemployment is a gift. But work is good too.

I write but not as often as I’d like. November, with all its good intentions, whooshed in and turned all the tables on their backs, legs in the air kicking like turtles who need a hand.

Who can flip them back over? Where is the reset button now?  

I don’t have time to search. I’m too busy teaching my kid or counting how many days until the milk runs out. My husband is coming and going and every conversation this month has been about managing our lives and home until I finally break and call him at work in tears. “I just don’t know what to do anymore,” I tell him. “Everything seems okay until it’s not.”

He reminds me that we are okay. We’re healthy and faring well. We’re exhausted and so is everyone else. Don’t be so hard on yourself.

And I think, ‘Is there any other way to be?’ Then, immediately, I chastise myself. The back-and-forth between the disparate selves exhausts me. I miss my easy life. I miss being myself, a complete person who didn’t question every little thing.

What I need is a hug, and here it comes from my sweet daughter who checks in to see that I haven’t wandered off. I’m here, fingers at the keyboard, trying to find the right thing to say and realizing the right thing doesn’t exist.

There is no right thing. There is only right now.

The heartbeat, the pulse. The rhythm of a sentence butting against another sentence, then another and another. Until—whoosh—every good intention has a seat at the table, which is legs down, back sturdy to the sky, the armory of the beloved, legs tucked underneath.