My Daughter the Cat

I am going to tell you for moment about my ten-year-old daughter, my middle child – because I am deeply in love with her, and I am fairly sure that she keeps the world spinning. She has a tan, small face and tiny features like a mouse or a squirrel. There is a smattering of freckles across her nose like someone has been flinging wild oats out to the horses. Like her mama, she needs her quiet time. If she gets overwhelmed, she might really let you have it, yelling and screaming at one moment, then taking a moment alone to recollect herself and then reemerging moments later like some kind of beautiful, kind, sweet thing. A thing transformed. “Oh, hello. I love you,” she will say when she comes back to herself, even if she never left but has been...

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Do you ever feel a sense of longing?

I’m sure I’m not the only mother alive who has fantasized about just chucking it all and walking away, starting a new life in a new town. Remember that Anne Tyler book (I think it’s Ladder of Years) in which a middle-aged mom actually does it. She just walks into a new town and buys herself some pretty new dresses, rents an apartment, gets herself a job and carries on a new life. I read this book before I had kids and the whole time, I’m hoping against hope that the kids and her husband never find her, that she never has to return to her old life filled with dirty socks and sarcastic remarks. Fast forward about 12 years: I’m married to my best friend, and I have three kids who treat me with respect. They put on their own shoes, buckle...

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