I'll Show Myself Out

And mostly—and this is the spikiest truth—it is the sword of rage: the rage and shock of how completely she must annihilate herself to keep her child alive.

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

child, out of nowhere, in the middle of an absolutely average day filled with building blocks, in which you are slowly evaporating inside from boredom, say to you for the first time, “I’m happy.” And you cry, because this is why you chose his name: Asher, Hebrew for “happy,” the emotion you’ve struggled so hard to feel your whole life.

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

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

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

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

years, what mothers do is seen as so unremarkable it’s not just an unimportant story, but not even a story at all.

The truth is that motherhood is a hero’s journey. For most of us it’s not a journey outward, to the most fantastic and farthest-flung places, but inward, downward, to the deepest parts of your strength, to the innermost buried core of everything you are made of but didn’t know was