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