Your child joins your life.
You don't join theirs.

I could not stay home. That was not a feeling — it was a fact, the way some things become facts when you stop arguing with them. My husband had died eleven months before and Christmas was coming and I could not sit in San Diego and do that. Not the first one. Not with the routines and the shape of everything exactly where it used to be. I had also started thinking about leaving. Not the trip — leaving leaving. Moving. Starting over somewhere that didn't know me as the person

I have never been particularly attached to Thanksgiving. The food, I could take or leave — it is the one holiday where the meal is somehow both the entire point and reliably underwhelming. The obligation to be somewhere specific for it, even less so. Thanksgiving week is one of the easiest vacations to engineer in a corporate calendar: take one or two PTO days on either side of the holiday and you have nine days off. Nine days. Most people spend them at someone else's table e

Columbus Day weekend. No PTO required. A ninety-minute flight from San Diego to Sacramento, friends who picked me up from the airport, and a homecoming game at Cal. I hadn't been to a game in years. My friends suggested I come up and finally see the new stadium and I said yes without thinking too hard about it. That was the whole decision. I went to Cal. When I was there, Cal football was genuinely good — the PAC-10 was something, the players went on to the NFL, I cared in th

In 2017 my husband and I ran SeaWheeze together. It's Lululemon's half marathon in Vancouver, one of those races that's become as much a festival as a finish line, and he coached me the entire thirteen miles. It was one of the best weekends we'd had. I got a spot in 2018 and was realistic about it. I had just had a baby. I deferred and told myself 2019 was the year. I won the lottery again in 2019. One year post baby, one year into all of it, and the race fell on my son's fir