I obediently follow her down the stairs. She flicks on the light in her office, and we enter the small room. Her desk is so organized that it looks like the distances and angles between objects were measured. Everything is neatly filed, and anything too big to fit in the filing cabinet rests on a big bookshelf beside it. School papers and stupid drawings I did as a kid are all lined up in chronological order on the middle shelves. Photo albums are on the bottom, also in chronological order — starting with her childhood and ending with mine. She quit bothering to print photos years ago, and any she’s taken since then are probably filed away on her computer in equally meticulous order.

She sits down on the floor in front of the shelf of photo albums. “Do you remember these pictures?” she asks, pulling out a blue one.

“Yeah,” I say. We’ve looked at these together a thousand times before, and I’ve looked at them on my own a time or two as well. She hands the book to me and I flip through the familiar photos of me doing stupid little-kid stuff: Wearing my mom’s giant sunglasses. Sitting in my dad’s lap trying to grab his baseball cap. Petting a cat at someone else’s house. Standing outside on a summer morning with my arms outstretched like I believe the world has promise, not knowing just how wrong I was. I wish I could go back in time and warn my younger self that her world is going to unravel and she’d better prepare to try to hold it together.

But the thing that strikes me most are the pictures of Mom: her and Dad at their college reunion, smiling with glasses of champagne in their hands; Mom laughing, on the floor in one of Dad’s old shirts, splattered with paint, her roller poised to cover another wall in robin’s egg blue (a color I don’t even remember seeing in our house); Mom eating corn on the cob at somebody’s barbecue, her fingers covered in butter.

This is not the mother I know now. The mother I know now is counting under her breath beside me: one-two-three-four, the rhythm of a song I would like to never hear again.

“What do these photos have to do with anything?” I ask, confused.

“Sometimes I just need to remember what it was like before,” she says.

“Before what? Before me?” If she tells me I’m the reason she is how she is, I have no idea what I’m going to do. I can’t help existing.