What I had forgotten, while wandering in my own night, was that Asher was on his own hero’s journey. And although our journeys were intertwined, paradoxically, this particular moment was about us separating. Deep down, in his three-year-old heroic soul, Asher’s terror wasn’t truly of the toilet. What was happening involved the bathroom, but underne

let him out, and the whimpering soon turned to full-on hysterics. One by one, all of my planned tactics fell away as he resisted my standard pleading, cajoling, reasoning, and begging. It was as if we were in a terrible one-act play, with him perfectly cast as a three-year-old refusing to use the toilet and me horribly miscast as a mother. Various

I was resolved to be patient. Calm and clear. A rock. But the minute I told him he would have to use the toilet, he started clawing at the door and whimpering. I wouldn’t

I didn’t think Asher was paying attention when I told him what encouragement meant. But he was. He is paying attention to everything now. Everything I think he will miss, he catches, including the things I wish he would miss, like me glancing at my phone when we’re playing cars, or me using one tone too snarky with Mike, or me in general struggling

once a day, for me, there is some standard annoying little incident (nothing out of the ordinary, but when you have a child the ordinary has a way of feeling both insane and banal at the same time) that makes me fantasize about leaving the tube, the shoebox, my family, the whole thing. I mean, obvs, I would never actually leave—I’m just saying the

One of the staples of being the mom of a little kid has been that at least

Asher is a few months away from turning four, and for the last few years, I have been in the rather tubelike experience of motherhood. I am twenty pounds overweight, and I feel out of place in Los Angeles, in my marriage, in my house, in my own skin. Even though I’m home all the time, I rarely feel at home. I am a person fully in charge of a small

A mother’s heroic journey is not about how she leaves, but about how she stays.

inside. No one wants to think that their mother, that all-forgiving source of limitless unconditional love, occasionally, in a fit of rage or boredom, met her limits. And yet, of course she did. No one wants to know that after your mother finally placed you in your crib, she walked out of the room and screamed into a blanket, or cried in the bathro