A love letter to my neighbors in a small town

November, 2023

On an early summer morning in my new neighborhood, when my two boys were already riding their bikes about the gravel and purple chalk was already rolling down the driveway, my new neighbor Terri snuck through the line of pine trees that separated our two homes to say good morning. Her smile was cautious, and our small talk was brief. 

“So, where is your husband?” she chortled, innocently, neighborly, inquisitive. 

That month prior, he moved out, I told her. Without a neighbor noticing that he drove away along the country roads with no street lights, he left what would no longer be his home. Only I would see the bright stars at night now – the Milky Way hazy across the sky like the smoke trailing from a secret cigarette late at night – and the neighbors were none the wiser that my household had one less.

Fear came next. As I filled the spaces in my home where my first husband used to be, I longed for company. Maybe a relative would show up with banana bread and reassurance, maybe a friend would call to listen. But, for as much as external validation temporarily pacifies a wound, it’s the embrace of an environment around you as you make peace with your solitude that cures. 

I found my hug in a nearly invisible town in the southeast corner of South Dakota, where the stop signs are scarce and the lone gas station across from the greasy bar is also a grocery store, a pizza delivery, an ice cream parlor, a donut shop, a pharmacy, and an afternoon candy fix for the middle schoolers who walk there from school. The retirement home welcomes trick-or-treaters every October, the lifeguards lather sunscreen onto the elementary kids during their 10-minute pool breaks in mid-summer, and the football field every fall is lined with the entire population, which stagnates around 600 neighbors, all of whom you know by heart.  

And this was unexpectedly my safe space over the next four years. More safe than the reason everyone moves to a small town in the first place; safe in a way no one even knew they were hiding me. 

We moved there abruptly. After purchasing land atop a bluff just east of those Friday night lights I could see blazing after a long week, we hurried through blueprints so the boys could begin their education in a small town only to choke on a dissolving union and an omnipresent apprehension while picking out backsplash tile and door handles. 

“The big city is too stressful, too crowded, too loud,” we reassured ourselves as a pandemic loomed. We had a responsible plan until we shouldn’t have, a failed gambit in haste.

Then, when he escorted himself away from the plan as suddenly as it commenced, I surprisingly sought out a neighbor to tell me I did the right thing, and I admit I felt panicked: Why did I come here in the first place? I’m alone here – but they only listened, and that gave me my answer. They didn’t pry or judge or scold, or laugh or condemn or shun me away back into the asylum of my new home now more hollow by the hour, a tabletop set for three. They were the ones who showed up, with the banana bread I needed and more often cucumbers from their gardens. They had no idea I was crying in my bathroom ten minutes prior to their knock, but they were happy to see me, and I was relieved to see them. How nice of them to stop by today, I said to myself that night.

Unceasingly, my neighbors pulled out of their garages at 8 a.m., mowed before sunset, waved as they walked their dogs unleashed, invited me to barbecues in the middle of the street, and pushed the snow off my driveway before I awoke to the winter mornings. I didn’t even know there was that much snow to be moved, but they had the tractors and the weather trackers, and they did.

They knew it all for me; they kept me safe and sound – the way you love another. 

When an elderly neighbor was sick, I looked up a coffee cake recipe to bake and deliver. A sullen husband answered the door. I spent a good 30 minutes sitting in their living room, trying not to look too closely, and we got to know each other in a way that made me want to see her again. Their photo albums were on my lap, we toured their bookshelf twice and played on the floor with their Dachshund named Ivan. Ten days later, her husband called to tell me she died, and then he said after that, “She loved your coffee cake, thank you.” 

Two houses down from him are Sandie and Gerry, older neighbors who like to ride bikes and fix our kickstands and demand my boys wear helmets. To this day, the boys insist on remembering to grab them, “Just in case Gerry drives by.”

Heather shares her sourdough loaves and has a husband who still plays baseball for the small town 10 miles south, and Davis and Carrie have two loud dogs and a third baby on the way. The oldest isn’t even five. Lisa runs a daycare, Nate is a retired vet, and Terri – my Terri behind the pines – is a master gardener, a painter in her basement, and one of my closest friends who waters my flowers when I’m away. 

Two days after Terri prodded in my driveway, I snuck past our shared pines for more solace. She was tending to her garden as always, and she dropped her pruning shears and muddy gloves to come in for a tight embrace, the one you need from a mother.

“I’ve been married three times,” she said, one of the first things I ever learned about her. “Who cares what other people think! Do you want to come sit by our fire with us later tonight?” 

I brought a bottle of wine and a blanket for when it cooled down, and I did.

With neighbors, you develop an expedited kinship the way you start confiding in a desk mate at work you wouldn’t otherwise ever be friends with. If this is who surrounds you, this is who you love, and you never overthink this. 

We show up for our neighbors as fast as we would a family member. We prioritize our Saturday nights for them and are more vulnerable in their doorways than we are at family reunions. Our neighbors keep our secrets while our families shame them. They are the friendships we never saw coming and the ones we never feel obliged to keep. But it’s the love and affinity you end up needing and feel lucky to have found, and it is next door.

My entire life and future – as well as that of my children – shifted tremendously atop that windy ’ol bluff and within that little town I will always feel is mine in some way. It’s mine because it was a steady, reliable corner of the world to begin trusting myself and trusting the people around me, without anyone watching. Everyone knows most everything about most everybody in a small town, but they protected me anyway, accepted my boys anyway, and for this I am grateful. I broke and healed while they were across the street or picking up their kids after school, too, their mere presence the net they weaved under me as I free-falled into something new. 

The community you seek – or the one that sneaks up – will always have their arms open, and this is why we gather. 

I’m remarried now, to the one who moves the snow along with me, and together we gaze up toward the Milky Way on clear nights. We rebuild and make new spaces and ask what the other might need. I am not safe because of him – I was not safe because I had a neighbor – I am safe because we make each other feel safe together, in the same way a community simply ends up protecting each other, despite whether we know what we are protecting each other from. You just hold tight and trust. 

My two boys were held, too. They got off the bus to a familiar school every morning, with familiar faces that showed up even when they never asked for it. Their school invited us to music concerts, to Monday night board meetings and to help with concession stands at volleyball games. We visited the kids for lunch and drank from the mini milk cartons, and they stayed for dinner at their friends’ houses on Friday nights. All together, we were infallible, undamaged, and loved.  

As the years ticked quickly forward and one harvest after another clouded the fields in our backyard at the start of every school year, I realized what my neighbors might have known all along: Just like me in my corner, they were fixing themselves, too. Just as I needed them to go on with their daily routines – reassuring me that life indeed keeps moving, no matter how much your breath might catch – they needed to watch me cut my growing grass, too. We needed to see each other near. 

We seek when we don’t even know what we are seeking, we lean into that which we are yet to trust. And then we exhale and figure out how to impart the trust onto another, the way we pass around the cookie platter from neighbor to neighbor every Christmas.  

Our lives are never unchanging. There will always be unexpected newness, a need for a visitor more than you might admit. But this is how a community rescues, this is how you settle into something different: You look out the window, and you wave.

Mother delays acceptance of new life as a co-parent

March, 2024

“Just throw their clothes in the backseat,” he said like a grump. “And don’t forget their backpacks.”

“What a mess,” I said even grumpier. “There’s barely any room back here for their bags, let alone the boys!” 

I didn’t even greet him. He wasn’t my husband anymore, so now it was more of a side eye, mumbling of a pathetic hello, the one you give an ex-boyfriend at the Friday night football game, and all of your friends glare at him for you, in solidarity. Sometimes we never grow up. 

Our two boys jumped eagerly into the messy backseat and gave me a cheerful goodbye, not at all matching Mom and Dad’s attitude. We were new co-parents, and they were excited for a weekend at Dad’s. The spring weather matched their lightness. Their dad and I had worked hard enough that they were not nearly as consumed with the acceptance of an unexpected future as we were. We were haunted, they were doubly spoiled. 

You can only realize in hindsight that a child with two homes also has two bikes, two bedrooms, twice as many vacations, outfits, and holidays. We scorn a divorced family yet fail to realize the reprieve and the indulgence that comes from a choice two parents make to not stay in something that turned loveless. Boom goes the atomic family, but a burned ground beneath them is not dead. It’s another chance. 

“I’m so excited for you boys,” I choked with a heap of guilt in my throat that would take years to settle. “You’re going to have such a fun weekend, and I cannot wait to hear about it!” My lips puckered and my eyes twitched as I burped up the souring guilt and spent the next three days introducing myself to its taste in my mouth. I couldn’t believe my forthcoming weekend would pass without them, emptied because they were with him and not me, and every other weekend thereafter would be the same. 

At first, I calculated the hours they would be in my life moving forward. I counted the hours in a week and then the hours in a year and then cut it all in half and cried. Then I would pacify myself by counting the hours that another mother might be away from her own children whenever she traveled for work or took a weekend away. Maybe it was comparable? Maybe it would be ok? 

I also tended to the hours they were in my home like a delicate baby bird, never to be tousled. I was over-compensating, and it was unrealistic: I can’t clean my house in front of them; I'll clean when they’re at Dad’s. I better not discipline them, for I’ll turn into the lesser parent. I better always cook the most elaborate dinners and desserts that take too long, so they enjoy meals here more than there. We must always have the most fun, the best family activities, and I will exhaust myself, all in the name of atonement. 

I used to be so independent, so unbothered and willful in my motherhood. I would rock and nurse and sing to my babies, but then I was the one who took the weekend trip away and didn’t think to count the hours. I didn’t care if it was frozen pizzas for dinner or if I had to tell them no. I had a confidence my boys could aspire to until I glorified my motherhood so desperately that I was dependent on it to make me whole. How could I be anything without them?

To make a change in your life is either to veer left and let your hair down, or to cry in the car, persecute yourself every mile thereafter and never change at all, in the end. I took too long to learn the difference, which condemned me into this purgatory of transformation. I was hauling backpacks and snowpants and summer shoes and winter shoes to and from their dad’s house for months, but had I even made a step?

First, I fear I grieved wrongly, if there is ever such a way to get it wrong. Even in the hell of divorce, I made a fool of myself, nearly mocking my own suffering – my pain a farce. 

“How have things been going?” a friend said coyly, with a grimace and in nearly a whisper. Already, how could I not feel like I did something wrong? 

“Oh, things are going just fine!” I lied. “How are your kids doing?” Always revert the focus to somebody else, always wither privately. Be impeccable. 

I treated myself so poorly so as to pretend to be ok. I didn’t want my boys to see me unsure, I didn’t want anyone to think I was unsure, dreading humiliation. But there is no healing in impersonation, only someone else to please. 

To define myself as a co-parent took me years to say out loud. I would tense up in fear of judgment while in the meanwhile worry constantly whether my boys were ok. I lacked trust and acceptance and chose pity to start each day – What will they do without me! What will I do without them! – but to endure is not nearly as becoming as it seems. 

Like a grief that lives on, only changes over time, co-parenting is the most heartbreaking journey I have ever taken on. It is maximum effort, relentless respect for your parallel parent that you never want to give in the first place, exhaustive concession of control, argumentative text threads on coordinating, and perhaps the scariest clifftop I had dangled from in my life. That’s a long way down, I thought, and instead of climbing down gently rock by rock, I assumed I had to jump and die. But you can’t confuse grief with pity. You must wallow but then reap what’s still there. You can sob but then water the newness with your tears. I had to climb back up the other side of the cliff at some point. 

In the same way a mother could never fathom the nuance of raising an infant and then a teenager and the omnipresent worry that nags in between, the practicalities of co-parenting could only reveal themselves in real time, when there was no other choice but to figure it out and affirm the life you opened up for yourself. Just go in grace, even when it’s unpredictable, and that’s when everything will feel better.

When I stopped feeling sorry for myself, there were people around me. Friends were welcoming, understanding, respectful, and thoughtful. “Are the boys at their dad’s this weekend? Can I take you out to dinner?” Neighbors shoveled the snow off my driveway for me and brought bread to the door. I fell in love with a new husband; my boys fell in love with another dad. “I have two dads and one bruther,” my six-year-old wrote in his notebook. At parent teacher conferences, there are three chairs, and at basketball games, there are three grandmas. Divorce can mean more, not less. 

Eventually, I was compassionate toward the weekends they kept going to Dad’s, and I bathed in the weekends they were with me. My god, I felt blessed. These boys are so beautiful, so resilient and insightful, and would I have seen this beauty were it not for counting the hours I have left as their mother? Do I appreciate time differently? 

I take care of my children more slowly now than I used to – do not hasten the day – and I do the same for me. We are more than our motherhood, and I don’t think I knew that. It mattered most to me that I folded every shirt, that I made every bed, and that I helped with every math assignment. It is me, I am their only mother, and this is all I am. Now, I am privileged to be in their life, helping with their homework when I can, cooking their favorite meals when we are together, and watching them race from the school bus to our front door when it is my day. They are so happy, and I am so lucky. I am not less, their life is more.

I met myself in this renewal. A wife in me died, and I resurrected as a better mother, and that’s when I realized that I should welcome this kind of excruciating transformation one hundred times over. I think you really meet yourself when you’re mad about it – reluctant, fidgety, and annoyed by the responsibility you suddenly have to do something about yourself and with yourself and not for anyone else. Maybe I didn’t even know myself before, I was so faithful to a perception of me. Now I am bare, fallible just like everybody else, and I wonder what took me so long. 

I honor every way in which I have been a mother, sometimes going so far as to sneak in the guilt like a woman not quite yet sober from who she used to be. I drink from the trough of expectation and binge on the shame I once fed myself until I come clean again and say yes to that dinner with a friend. I’ve gotten the hang of it now. The boys go to Dad’s and then they go to Mom’s and sometimes we all meet for dinner and ice cream at Dairy Queen and laugh when our youngest gets a pretzel instead. Who skips a hot fudge sundae at Dairy Queen?

“Thanks for dinner!” Dad says to us as he gets into his car that’s still a pit. His parenting is not mine to judge anymore. It never was. 

“Thanks for coming! We’ll see you this weekend,” I respond kindly. Many days are not this buoyant, but today is, and that will do.

I am malleable and youthful and still getting to know just how many mothers I will be. 

‘Writing together’: They fell in love in a Google doc

April, 2024

The cursor blinked. Blink blink blink, like proof of a heartbeat. And that was when I knew he was there.

“Hi!” he typed. “Are you in here?” The sentence landed fast, like copy and paste.

“I’m here!” I said. “I’m so happy we’re here at the same time! How are you?!” 

It was grown-up instant messenger. No more staring at the speech bubble hanging at the bottom of the screen until your boyfriend hit the return key. Here, our cursors flashed on top of one another. Who could finish their sentences faster? “Wait, did you just type that, or did I?” Laugh emoji. We stayed in there for hours that night, in the same quiet place where only the click clack of our keyboards broke each of our separate silences in each of our separate lives. Click clack. Blink blink. Smile. 

He was the one who started the Google doc: An infinite love letter we could pass back-and-forth, a diary to relent to, a love song, a bedtime story, a comforting cup of tea.

“Let’s write together,” he said. “It can be a space to keep all of our ideas in one place.” I blushed. He wants a place with me? He wants to share anything with me? “Sure,” I shrugged cooly. He invited me into the doc on a Thursday afternoon, already filled with at least 300 words to greet me. 

“What should we write about?” read the first sentence. Then 455 pages followed, 232,102 words, all from a spring to a fall. It scrolled past conversations about sunsets and thunderstorms, memoirs and confessions, Joan Didion and Roland Barthes, Orson Welles and Félix Guattari and about how Francesca should have gotten out of the car at that stoplight in The Bridges of Madison County. “We’d already be in the car together,” he said. 

He typed out poetry from Maggie Smith and Emerson. He typed out lyrics from Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan.

Ramona, come closer

Shut softly your watery eyes

The pangs of your sadness

Will pass as your senses will rise

For the flowers of the city

Though breathlike, get deathlike sometimes

And there’s no use in tryin’

To deal with the dyin’

Though I cannot explain that in lines

In the fall of 1951, my grandfather sent a letter to my grandmother while he was stationed in North Korea. Days or weeks later, it arrived in her mailbox somewhere in the middle of South Dakota. She would sit at her kitchen table in silence, read the pages three times over and weep, and then she would write him back as quickly and tenderly as she could. Within a couple more weeks, her letter would arrive to him, already her updates of life at home long past. My grandmother wrote him 300 letters, each time a kiss on the envelope and a prayer for his safe return. 

“She wrote me a letter every day I was away,” my 96-year-old grandfather says today. “Every single day.”

In 1951, every word was so careful on the page. This was all they had when they endured each of their separate silences in each of their separate lives.

“Ping!” goes my phone notification 70 years later. A line or two was being written in our Google doc. I scurried to read it before his fingers even left his own keyboard. 

“Hey! You’re here!” he said. 

“I can’t stay,” I typed. “I just wanted to say hi!” Smiley face. “I’ll be back soon!” Then he awaited a ping.

A lover’s thoughts are so reckless now – it feels there is so little anticipation left in romance – while my grandmother’s careful letters are still wrapped in a red ribbon in the attic. Life was as slow then as the letters themselves still fade, but the immediacy of our Google doc somehow felt cherished like that, too.

“A treasure chest of secret correspondence,” he wrote. 

“Omgggg we need to sleep!” I said to him at midnight on page 338. “The last time I looked at the clock it was 10:04. How is that even possible?!” 

“I’m so sorry I kept you up so late!” he typed in the sentence that followed mine. “I love you!! Remind me to tell you about the surfing dream tomorrow.” 

I never did hear about the surfing. So much else to share and never enough time online, but even the trite was exhilarating. “I want to watch you brush your teeth,” I said on page 61.

“I just took the dog on a walk,” he said after I asked him about his day. “Then I went to the grocery store to pick up meatloaf from the nicest lady. What did you do today? I miss you, Angela.” 

Our thoughts were a witty banter, an untamed stream of consciousness, the way two teenage girls gossip on the way to the mall. “But there’s also an indescribable flow and rhythm,” he wrote. “You’re like the typewriter of my life. Every indentation on the page feels so special, so meaningful and lasting.”

He made me feel unafraid of my thoughts and emotions. I was awake and bare, for the first time purging fears and curiosities. Our Google doc was my confessional.

“You amuse my emotions, Bobby,” I wrote. “You don’t belittle them, and I think you’re the only one.”

He was a reprieve, a hideaway, a garden for only me to reap, and I wanted to protect all of it. But he wasn’t like that. I recoil in my fear, he bathes in the light.

“There’s a secret place inside of me,” I said. “It’s where you reside, where our love resides. Do you have a place like this, too?”

“It has nothing to do with secrecy,” he said. “It has everything to do with setting our love free, by accepting it, embracing it, and learning from it. Love sets us free.”

Fate snuck in, already on page 6. “I have this extreme conviction that something is emerging between us,” I said. “And whenever it does, I think it will be so subtle and gentle, as if to say, Of course I was coming. You knew me all along.” 

“I am unsparingly yours, Angela,” he wrote. “You are irrevocably mine, Bobby,” I wrote at exactly the same time. 

He pushed me and empowered me to not limit my thinking or my imagination. With him, anything was conceivable. “Let’s write about love to inspire more love,” he wrote on page 136. He was the romantic, I just asked a lot of questions. 

“But why should our love be for someone else?” I asked. “Why would someone else’s love be for me?”

“New love will find its own way,” he assured. “You and I didn’t need someone else’s words to find each other. We only needed each other. I read this from Deleuze and I thought of us: ‘One’s always writing to bring something to life, to free life from where it’s trapped, to trace lines of flight.’ 

“So I suppose the thought is,” he continued as I waited for his sentence to sprawl itself out on the screen, “how do we help people get to a place where they are willing to present themselves in a way that feels honest and deserving of love? Maybe it’s not our words that inspire love, but that they inspire the possibility of it. The act of writing,” he concluded, “usurps the writing itself.” Smiley face.

Our sentences trampled one another. We didn’t have the patience to hit the return key. I would set a thought free on the page, and he would interrupt to respond, in ways you wouldn’t even in person, but he wanted me to know he was there. We were childlike, wild for each other, a dog at the door. 

“Ok, I’m taking a deep breath,” I wrote. “And, hi!” Hug emoji. 

“Hi!” he said. “There you are! Where have you been for the past two days?” 

“DISTRACTED.”

“Ha!”

“Now I’m calm,” I said. “Listen to me.”

“I only listen to you, Angela. Tell me everything! I’m here.”

“The fact that we worry means to me that something is near. If we didn’t worry, or even feel overwhelmed, then perhaps this place would be merely indulgent, but the fact that we cannot leave here, that I long for you the way I do, means that I’m becoming someone I’ve never been before.”

“What does that mean!?” His cursor blinked impatiently.

“What I’m trying to say is that, unlike so many other tediums in life, this writing doesn’t distract me, it represents what I think is going to become the biggest thing in my life, and so whether that begins here or in letters or on a boat, I want to be there.” 

“I have so many smiles in my eyes, Angela. I’m so happy here, too!” he wrote. “This contentment is a stirring, an evocation of life – Live life! It shouts. Live it more! And live it with the one you love.”

On page 32, we wrote that we needed to trust each other, that we needed to “say more” to each other, to always be open, unarmed. “Say More, what a great title for the next great American novel!” he wrote.

Today, I wear a wedding ring he gave me – underneath an olive tree at Mission San Juan Capistrano on a Thursday – that is inscribed with the words “say more.” And we do. 

“Tell me more,” I say to him at the dinner table when he presents another idea. The laptop is closed over there. I don’t look for the cursor anymore. I see him across the room. A loyalty to a Google doc translated into a life.

“There are three of us in this doc, Angela,” he wrote on the second to last page. 

“What?!” I panic. Is there another cursor I am missing? “What do you mean?” I asked. 

“There will always be three of us here,” he wrote. “You, me, and us.”

“Goodnight, my love,” he says. “I hope you sleep and dream!” 

“Goodnight!” I say. “I love you!” 

The cursor disappears, and I sleep and dream.

Love as a responsibility: How I take care of my dad

January, 2025

After a blurry 40-some years, my dad had his last drink on Nov. 19, 2023. I believe he had a small panic attack that was perceived as a big heart attack that night, and it spooked him. But that’s his story. 

This is mine. 

Dad had achieved sobriety before, for a time in my childhood and sometime again in my adulthood, but only to be swindled. Sobriety might feel like a reprieve for the families of addicts, but it is never for the addict himself. Instead, it is to endure a merciless need of self-discipline and an omnipresent monster in the ear that’s mute to anyone else. My dad’s ears will forever be ringing. 

But his first day of not having a drink felt different to me. Perhaps a 64-year-old man could no longer exhale in the claustrophobia of his addiction, or perhaps he just got tired. Because after a blurry 40-some years, he coolly renounced a life of entrapment like the drop of a penny to the ground, not a meteorite to the earth. 

“Wow, Dad,” I said over the phone to him by Christmas. “I’m so proud of you! I think that’s really great.” I remained nonchalant. Encourage but do not create pressure, for pressure will create the meteorite, and the meteorite will leave a crater, and the depth of the crater will become the life. 

But everything was fine, he said. 

Come February, when a new type of claustrophobia ensued in the loneliness of his home and new monsters were screaming, I got a phone call on a Sunday morning.

“Don’t freak out,” Dad said to me. 

Meet me at the hospital, he said, and then he hung up. 

When you drink, the booze becomes the Band-aid, a tattered gauze bound tightly around fear, guilt, grudges, responsibility and pain. When Dad took off the Band-aid, his insecurities hemorrhaged. 

He still wasn’t drinking – it’s as if he forgot he ever did – but he was scared now and no longer equipped to face an unknown on his own. The hangovers were now anxiety attacks, but he couldn’t drink this one away, and Dad needed a new kind of help. I’m so proud of him that he sought it, and I’m so grateful he called me that day.

We admitted him to an in-patient behavioral health treatment program for three days. They were all so friendly, but Dad was terrified. He made the greatest choice of his life, a choice to actually live, and now he felt like he was dying. 

I visited Dad every day during his three-day program and then shook the doctor’s hand and the nurses’ hands and the hand of some new psychiatrist when it was time for him to go home. I was the daughter but Dad was the recovering drunk, so I had the paperwork now.

When you become a caretaker, you don’t deliberate one afternoon whether you should become a caretaker. You don’t even know what that means. You just do whatever may define the role on any given day until one day you realize you have your dad’s doctor on speed dial, his social security number memorized and can list his medications and each of their dosages by heart. 

“And who am I speaking with today?” the representative at his insurance company said after she finally picked up the line.

“Good morning, my name is Angela,” I said. “I am calling on behalf of my father.” 

“Are you his power of attorney, ma’am?” 

I am, I told her, and then she listed for me Dad’s options for a medical leave of absence when it became too difficult for him to work. 

My parents had divorced a few years prior, just in time for Dad’s drinking to defeat him. But that wasn’t my mom’s responsibility anymore, to help put it all back together, and I didn’t want it to all be his, so I made some of it mine. 

When I was a teenage cross country runner, Dad would run alongside me during the afternoon meets, shouting for me my splits before my coach even did. He was the first to the finish line and the last to leave his work each night. He ran his own business, gutted his own deer, cut his lawn with near obsession and helped to wrap our Christmas presents every year, all while being either a drunken dad or a sober one who wanted a drink. 

There were curious dents in his truck and empty beer bottles falling out the door like the sound of tin cans behind a wedding car. It was so much proof of failure. One spring his forehead was bruised from what he said was a bicycling accident. The blue and purple colors spread dreadfully from his eyes to his cheekbones to even his ears, like a lie slowly traveling down his face. 

Even still, his role as my father was constantly my reassurance, and now mine is his. 

“I’m going to bring you groceries, Dad,” I said shortly after he returned from treatment. I had a very vigilant eye on him now. I wanted to mother him.  

“I don’t need groceries,” he said. 

“Well you can’t just be drinking chocolate milk over there.” 

So I would bring him bread and sandwich meat, vegetables to heat up in the microwave and fruit to spoil on the counter. He liked the Dinty Moore beef stew and the protein shakes for breakfast.

“Is this a banana or a plantain?” My dad texted me one night, including three photos of the same fruit. “Whatever it is, it tastes like shit.” 

I would sweep his floors, fold his underwear, vacuum underneath his couch and encourage him to feed that neighborhood cat that would walk through his front yard every day. 

“We should get you a cat!” I said. Or maybe a dog? Just a fish?

“I can’t even take care of myself, Angela.”

A lot of Dad’s anxiety manifested in his lower back. So by late spring, there was physical pain on top of emotional trauma. At first I hoped the back issues would distract him from his anxiety, but this only compounded it. He was afraid to even turn on the TV in his home and now didn’t even have the physical capacity to leave it.

There was first the echocardiogram in April – maybe the fear was just stress? Nope – then peripheral nerve pathology in May – why are his legs numb? – then a spine MRI to approve a back injection by summer. Yup, that would help. 

The orthopedic doctor brought out a diagram of the spine to show us exactly where the injections would go. Ok, yes that makes sense, we both shook our heads in understanding. 

Dad was always so studious in this year of healing. He talked to anyone who could teach him something, actually called the helpline numbers I wrote down for him, showed me screen shots of self-help books he wanted me to order for him, read his Bible constantly, kept a calendar of his moods, and listened to what he called “tapes” every day, over and over: CDs with calm, narrating voices that would talk him through panic attacks and better define his anxiety as something real, like addiction, not as something he should have controlled by now. They equipped him, which thereby helped the both of us.

I drove him to many appointments, before one of which he threw up in the passenger’s seat because he would get so worked up, his fear had no place else to go. He would cry a lot, too, fed up with being somebody who was scared. Underneath the battered alcoholic was an innocent father who just wanted to fight and be better. 

I am so honored to love someone like that, someone who really, really wants to live. 

After all those appointments, his back improved, but his legs were still dragging so he went in for Cortisone shots in his knees by early fall. Another step, and it helped.

“Nice to see you again, Angela!” the receptionist would say. I sent my dad’s nurse a birthday card. 

Lastly, we went in for a brain MRI because he was becoming forgetful, confused, scared in his body. We sat in the private waiting room with his gown not tied right, and we watched HGTV at 7 in the morning. 

“What is this shit?” he said. 

By November, Dad’s one-year anniversary of his sobriety came and went. 

I wanted to celebrate somehow, but it was merely a mockery to him. He glorified Nov. 19 as this day he would suddenly “be better.”

“I will not go through this hell for another year,” he said. 

But then month 13 came along, and he was still going through it.

“I can’t … do this … anymore,” he said, as if scolding me. He was hysterical and angry in these moments, an overtired child in my arms, but he always made room to say he loved me. 

“You have saved my life, Angela, I need you to know before it’s too late,” he said, still wailing. “I am so grateful for you.” 

“I love you, too, Dad. I promise it’s going to be ok.”

When he’s having a bad day, he’ll grip his leathery hands tightly together, as if to lock himself up away from everyone, and will only look up to wipe his eyes, like a farmer in the dust. But when he’s having a good day, he’ll sit upright in the counselor’s office, resting his right ankle over his left knee, maybe even going so far as to lean back, be open. “It’s nice just to visit and BS for a while, isn’t it?” he would say. 

Dad went back to work in December. I can kind of see his eyes again.

I think he’s ready to start the year anew, sober and breathing on his own and maybe even recognizing a speck of confidence within him. 

But I’m still here, for the groceries and the doctor appointments, to count the meds and answer the phone and to tell him it’s definitely a plantain. 

Maybe it was too aggressive to call myself a caretaker, insulting even? So I’ll just say I am grateful to take care of my dad. 

He will outlive me, I tell him, the way a child usually outlives a parent, but I’m lucky to be next to him while he’s here, forever on the mend.

“Good morning, Dad! How are you feeling today?”

On stress

“Where do you feel it?” 

I’m in therapy now, because that’s what you do when you lose a sense of control. It’s where you go when it hurts, but it hurts anyway. Adulthood will always surprise you. 

At therapy, the therapist asks me this every time – “Tell me where the stress is” – and so I tell him it’s in my chest, to be a good student. He’s expecting me to simply express the ache, like what the tickle feels like when a lady bug’s legs meander their way up the back of my ankle and delight a pleasant afternoon picnic, or how cold and wet it might feel when a big raindrop plops onto my cheekbone and I intuitively blink and look up, as if the rain were to come from anywhere else. But it’s not tangible like that. 

If it is, I’m lying about my chest anyway. It belongs there sometimes, if our hearts could truly harden enough to crumble and feel like we swallowed a boulder that’s now lodged in our ribs, but it’s more a fiery, sludgy, cement-like lava slowly slogging through every vein, and I’m lying horizontally enough for the pain to more like float and stagnate and make me heavy rather than flow as a river from my neck to my toes. It’s a numbness, too, as the weight succumbs, that begins in my forearms – causing my wrists to limp and my fingers to twitch – and continues as a cycling of fevered panic that energizes itself as it taps every bone, yanks and snaps on every end of every muscle and then somehow manages to manifest a needle and sew my skin to whatever floor I couldn’t seem to get myself up from in time. I could lay on that cold bathroom tile or warm laundry room rug or dirty garage floor concrete, making love to my suffering, till hunger or exhaustion interfered, and even then, I’d stay sewn and bare, his simple “location of stress” enjoying a meal instead.

One time, I sunk so depressingly into the bed on an otherwise sunny Friday afternoon, not being responsible or productive or pretending for anyone for once, and I imagined the wood planks that make up my roof falling down onto me and piercing me one by one, cutting through the exhausted chest cavity holding all the stress, denting into my one face, nailing me to the couch arm by arm, leg by leg, until the entire house and all the love we built fell messy into my lap, at last making tangible the pain I try to decipher now, with my therapist every Thursday at 9 a.m. There, now you see me bleeding here, here, and here. Don’t ask me where it lives, there is now red on both our fingertips.

But that didn’t actually happen, and whatever he’s asking me to seek and mitigate is nowhere to be found or described or molded for him to diagnose. It’s lurking eagerly beyond the both of us – nowhere near this ever familiar office painted in gray, just like every other healer’s office painted in the same gray that is the antithesis of help or healing. It’s thriving instead, invisible and untouchable, in all my tomorrows and in all my intangible thoughts still mustering, and it’s playing a winning game of catch-me-if-you-can.

“Yes, I think it’s my chest,” I say matter of factly once more.

And we spend the next 50 minutes imagining together what it’s like to lift that stress ball out of my chest and ask it to leave while I simultaneously, secretly, tighten the thread to the floor. Name it what suits you, but lurking monsters can live for days, and I am always the gracious host. 

I left my first husband on a Friday, and that was the easy part. We even had lunch together and talked about the weather after we signed away a union that lasted for a little while. 

But, oh, the pangs lingered. Not because my weakness robbed me of the broom to shoo it out, but because I was too lazy to shoo in the first place. Why am I so beholden to this attention? I lugged it around until it got ahold of me, and now I’m strapped to the couch (his in therapy and mine in my house caving in.) 

Stress aches with its weight – a burden we cannot alone lift – yet it is almost always silent. Even if we do muster the energy or the courage to talk about it – to family or friends or, most often, the most distant person in your life so as to avoid judgment – it laughably isn’t even close to breaking the ice. This was my hidden talent. 

“Everything is great! Fine, the kids are lovely, how are you?” Divert attention, be impeccable. Stress can only feast in private. 

And so we find the most private environment other than the closed walls of our bathroom to break down alone, and we end up in therapy that is way too expensive, way too much gas money to get to once or twice a week, and, for me, I do my best to make conversation about him instead. 

I knew his dog wasn’t well and the renovations to his backyard and which plants he preferred in his office, both at home and at work. (Different plants for different environments, I learned.) 

I deflected enough that he was none the wiser and I was none the better. Maybe even worse? A weekly therapist visit in which we spent a good seven minutes of our fifty together having small talk was never going to cut it. 

“How do you feel now?” he closes after another session wastes away. 

“Better. Truly. Thank you, I’ll see you next week.”

Disney takeaways: Claustrophobia, nostalgia, and ice cream bars

In October of 2023, my family and I enjoyed our first trip to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fl.

One does not come lightly to this decision. Perhaps, you could purchase a park ticket and show up, and the spectacle alone is enough to satisfy you. But, if you want to maximize this (potentially) once in a lifetime experience at the happiest place on earth, you’ve got your work cut out for you.

I actually memorized the maps of all four parks. Isn’t that embarassing to admit?

Tips & Takeaways:

1. I did (A LOT OF) research, and I never came across the alert of how enclosed the majority of rides would be. I was not prepared to meet my claustrophobia on this trip! Despite how happy and cheerful the rides were (or scary, depending), experiences are in deep, dark, narrow caves. Although there are bright lights as you see the impressive beauty and work that went into the experience, there are a lot of dark tunnels, with no discernment of direction or how you’d ever get out if you needed to, and this was very difficult for me. (Boys? Absolutely fine. Nothing phases them, not even the 65mph rides in Tomorrowland. How though?)

2. Speaking of anxiety, remember to pack the Xanax and Tylenol from the sheer stimulation of it all. It’s a lot!

3. I couldn’t imagine not having Genie+ / Lightning Lanes. This ensures you skip the lines for rides. Even though it is an extra $10-$25 cost per person per day, it’s a necessary add-on for me considering I didn’t want to spend as much money as we already did getting into the parks just to stand around the parks and wait while hot and impatient. We spent more to experience more in a day. You spend less to experience less in a day.

4. We packed our own refillable Hydro Flasks to avoid $12 bottles of water every hour, only to carry around heavy flasks with no forecasted refill stations in sight. What the heck?

5. key ice cream bars and Disney balloons were unnecessary but so nostalgic. I had a damn ice cream bar every day.

6. Epcot as a nice down day, and I was not prepared for that. There are fewer rides than Magic Kingdom but an enjoyable, casual stroll through so many different cultures with great food and drinks. We loved the crepes and champagne in France, the gelato in Italy, the performers and steamed buns in Japan, the Mariachi in Mexico, and Paddington in the UK. What a thoughtful and well designed park experience! Also an incredible aquarium at the end of the Nemo ride.

7. Characters do not simply walk around the parks, and this was a misconception for me. We did stand in line for Mickey and otherwise the parade in Magic Kingdom was a glorious 30 minutes waving to every single character there. I get emotional just thinking about this. When it’s all going well, no one is an adult here. We are all the giddy children. I swear I caught my husband skipping.

8. The employees through the entire Disney experience are impeccable. Can you imagine if we all showed up to work like that? Each of them are high energy and delightful. Everyone is waving, genuinely smiling, and happy to see you. I feel like I would tire of listening to Disney songs all day every day, but instead you see employees tapping to the omnipresent music even when no one is watching. A man was cleaning up kid vomit and singing along to “Tale as Old as Time.”

9. The characters are (expectedly) just the same. I appreciate their talents and efforts so much! There would be a (FED UP) mother trying to drag her two-year-old screaming daughter in an over-stuffed stroller across the infamous castle with the inevitable Cinderella or Olaf blowing her a kiss nearby. Ignore the tantrums! This is the happiest place on earth.

10. I wore Teva sandals the entire trip. We walked nearly 30 miles over four park days and never felt any pain. Kind of impressed!

11. Ross (age 6) wanted all the damn trinkets and toys. Purchasing a Disney gift card for the kids allows them to buy whatever the heck they want, so long as they knew whenever the gift card emptied, so too did their bags with toys they’ll never use again anyway. (This was a tip I received and wished I could have implemented. Instead, I bought 700 toys that are now piling up in his bedroom.)

12. Fanny packs for everyone was necessary for us. The boys ended up carrying around their Magic Bands (an alarming tracking wearable but seamless, useful tool at the parks) that kept falling off (we still lost two), their sunglasses and snacks, and Air Tags for our peace of mind. For me, I also had the easiest access to my beloved map and damn phone, which I had out constantly to check into rides, order Lightning Lanes, and mind the ride order of the day. It’s overwhelming, but it also helped our whole family have a seamless experience (I still managed to look up and well up over it all. It is enrapturing everywhere you look.)

13. Lastly, I never felt more like a MOM than I did on this trip. With the fanny pack and the schedule and the sunscreen and the coordinating and the sensible outfits, I felt old for like the first time ever, and I simply do not plan on getting old. You just kind of always think you’re going to be the cool mom, right? And this week, I was very uncool. But so happy. We are so lucky to have had such a special family experience!

14. (And nah, I don’t think we will go back anytime soon. Beach next time is so in order.)