never meant to see.
I was twenty-three when my whole life changed in the space of a single afternoon.
I’d just finished college that spring, and a job offer in Chicago was waiting for me — the kind of offer I’d spent four years working toward, the kind you don’t turn down without a very good reason.
I came home early that day specifically to tell my mother I’d gotten it.
Instead, I heard her screaming before I even made it through the front door.
She was stuffing clothes into a suitcase when I found her, moving fast, sloppy, nothing folded the way she usually insisted on folding things. Down the hall, my three baby sisters three months old, all three of them born the same spring — were crying in their cribs, the kind of crying that had clearly been going on for a while.
“Mom,” I said. “What are you doing?”
She kept packing.
“I can’t do this anymore, Micah.”
She looked up at me then, and something in her face had already gone somewhere I couldn’t reach.
“I already spent my whole life raising one child,” she said. “I’m not starting over with three more. I want to live while I still can.”
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