My vine, as it happens, has appeared in the form of a sling. All I can do is hope that it is strong enough to hold me.

Driving Teddy

It’s six minutes to morning meeting and the tapping of the peace gong, and of course we’re late. I hustle Teddy—almost taller than me, a bedhead of brown curls, and giant sneakers still untied—into the car on this sharply bright October morning, then tear down the street, looking like a Jules Feiffer sketch of modern frantic parenthood with my giant hair and furrowed worry-brow behind the wheel. I’m going to have to explain and apologize to Mr. Noah and his aggressively annoying Montessori man bun that it’s my fault, not Teddy’s, for being tardy on this day, especially on this day. The school seemed perfect for Teddy when he’d started in second grade after a few disastrous years at the nearby public school, but a month into seventh grade—in their newly formed middle school, only in its second year with none of the kinks worked out—it doesn’t seem to be the best place for him now.

Even though we’re late, I can’t help indulging in my daily habit on the drive to school: the Inventory of Other Houses, when I ogle all the well-maintained homes along our route that belong to other people. Ours, the one that the Bird book and series bought but can barely maintain, with its peeling shingles and broken gutters, is becoming the shabbiest on the block.

Five minutes to morning meeting and the tapping of the peace gong.

When Gary and I first moved to Cambridge, still in our late thirties with Teddy about to be born, full of stupid youthful optimism, fantasies of block parties and progressive dinners and neighborhood yard sales played in my head. I wanted community, and connection, and a sense of belonging. I wanted to carve pumpkins and drink eggnog and complain about shoveling snow, then extol the virtues of the miraculous New England spring—daffodils and tulips and those tiny blue flowers I’d always loved but had never known the name of pushing up through the barely thawed earth—with everyone. Not anymore. That openness is long gone. I’ve moved from outgoing young mother and children’s book writer to invisible middle-aged content-generator and dog-wearer. An irreversible trajectory, I’m sure of it. If only I could have squeezed out another book before writer’s block set in, Gary and I would have enough money to separate like normal couples instead of having to live in the same house and pretend for Teddy’s sake.

Four minutes to morning meeting and the tapping of the peace gong.

I look at Teddy sitting next to me in the front passenger seat—because he is old enough to sit there now—I can’t remember the last time he sat in the back—and wonder again as I so often have since the transparency of childhood and boyhood gave way to this—this brutal teenage opacity—what he is thinking. I don’t ask anymore and he never tells me. My eyes leave the road for a second or two to search the flat surface of his profile, but it’s like a stone skimming water. He gives up nothing. Every day I try to square the fact that I don’t know, can’t know, will never again know everything crossing his mind the minute it crosses it the way I used to because he used to tell me—trains, dinosaurs, baseball, LEGOs, skateboards, chicken, pizza, chips—but doesn’t anymore. Sometimes even the dog isn’t enough to keep those molecules from coming apart.