“I’m fine,” Kate said, taking her seat. “I took Marah to playgroup this weekend. All the kids were sick.” She waited for her mother to respond. When the silence went on and on, Kate finally looked up. “What?”

“Mayonnaise,” her mother said. “It made you sick when you were pregnant with Marah, too.”

It felt as if the chair beneath Kate just evaporated—poof! disappeared—and she was falling fast. Several annoyances clicked into place and became clues: tender breasts even though she wasn’t having her period; trouble sleeping; exhaustion. She closed her eyes and shook her head, sighing. She’d wanted another baby—she and Johnny both did—but it had been so long, they’d given up. And now everything was going so well with the writing. She didn’t want to go back to sleepless nights and crying babies and days that left her too tired to answer a question at the dinner table, let alone write a story.

“You’ll just take a little longer to get published,” her mother said. “You’ll be able to do both.”

“We wanted another baby,” she said, trying to smile. “And I’ll still keep writing. You’ll see.” She almost had herself convinced. “I can do it with two kids.”

On Thursday, two days later, she found out she was having twins.

PART FOUR: THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Part Four

THE NEW MILLENNIUM

A Moment Like This

some people wait a lifetime

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE

By 2000, Kate rarely paused in the whirlwind chaos of her everyday life to wonder where the years had gone. Contemplation and reflection, like relaxation, were thoughts from another era, ideas from another life. The road not taken, as they used to say. A woman with three children—a ten-year-old girl who was fast approaching puberty and twin boys under two—simply didn’t have time to think about herself much, and the number of years that separated her kids’ ages created almost two families. She knew now why women had their children closer together. Starting over doubled a mother’s exhaustion level.

Her days were consumed by details, and this surprisingly sunny morning in March was no exception. The chores stacked up, one on top of another, until she found herself running from sunrise to well past sunset. The crappy part was that she never seemed to accomplish anything substantial, yet she almost never had an hour to herself. The at-home mother’s life: it was a race with no finish line. That was what they talked about in the carpool line as they waited for their kids to leave school. That, and divorce. Every month lately it seemed that one seemingly solid marriage had shown its crumbling clay foundation.