That’s what being a mother is, I’ve learned. It’s falling apart in the parking garage and being a rock upstairs.
The first year home was the hardest thing I’ve ever lived through, and I say that as a woman who’s buried her own parents.
Because the injury was only the beginning. The wheelchair, the ramps, the way we had to tear apart our own house and rebuild it around her — all of that was hard, but it was practical-hard. You could measure it. You could order the equipment and pour the concrete and check the boxes.
What you couldn’t fix was what it did to Mia inside.
She stopped smiling. My chatterbox, my little narrator who couldn’t get through a car ride without three stories — she went quiet. She’d sit by the window and watch the neighbor kids play in the street, and I’d watch her watching them, and neither of us would say anything, because what was there to say.
