My mother used to tell me, “Marry a man who’s thin. It means he’s a hard worker.” As she predicted, my husband turned out to be a lot like my father. Not only were they both thin, and coincidentally hard workers, they were equally tough. My own prediction was that their thick skin was birthed from the hearty leather of bulls slaughtered by their own swords in past lives. Men like them have been around before, perhaps returned to this earth to learn a new lesson. Perhaps to walk the earth in softer-soled shoes.

My twelve-year-old son is conducting research, interviewing as many people as he can at the Hugo’s Supermarket downtown. He’s on a mission and there’s no stopping him. His statistical analysis involves the following variables: person, car driven, and favorite soda. I’m not sure which is the dependent variable, but I’m sure he’ll correlate vehicles with soda type soon. Maybe make a discovery he can sell to Pepsi. That’s his favorite one, after all.

Dear Doctor S.,

I can’t believe I wake up each morning thinking about how much I love my husband, instead of engaging in the mental gymnastics of how to avoid him for yet another day.

While the steaming hot water pelts my tired skin, I think of the Mother Orca Tahlequah of the Southern Puget Sound Orca Tribe. For weeks she has carried the body of her dead baby on her back. I feel the twinge in my stomach, that awful twisted wrench of a feeling. I imagine myself crouched down in the water, resting on my knees, and crying it out. I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to have love bring you to your knees, but my body can no longer go there. I don’t curl up in the right way anymore. My angles are off. I have no knees to fall to. Like Tahlequah, I must carry the grief upon my back. I must show it to the world.

I step outside to enjoy the storm’s reprieve from the scorching August day. Suddenly, a wall of rain advances like an army, the wind its battle cry. Phone in hand, I start to video the drama, but when whole trees hurtle past me like javelins, I run inside and cower in the basement. It’s brief—five minutes, maybe ten. Then, chirping birds signal the army’s retreat and I slink upstairs. The first thing I notice is water streaming down the interior walls under the closed windows, sobbing to release their fear.

Every day we wait outside for a package we never ordered. I use it as a distraction. When I am upstairs finishing an email, an assignment, or another Zoom meeting, I anticipate the screeching: “Help! Stop It!”I know at the bottom of the steps I will find a familiar scene.

That late-February day I checked me and the triplets into labor and delivery, it snowed six or seven inches, the world outside our room on the high-risk floor like a green screen, blank and full of possibility. Chad and I paid little attention to it—to its icy chill and constant shower of white—once we were inside the clinical ten-by-ten square room where we’d become parents.

On a hot summers day in June 1955 Molly, an unmarried mother, began bringing her child into the world. She cried bitterly whilst pleading to keep her child.  There were no words of sympathy she was told simply to go home and forget all about it. As Molly’s child was taken from her she vowed never to forget.

She said she thinks it’s terrible I don’t want to have children. Like being childless is the Plague or natural disaster. Maybe to her and to many others it is just that. It’s certainly not seen as natural not to want to do the one thing a woman’s body was built for.