And she sees her mother.
I want to say that carefully, because it’s the part people get angry at me about in the comments.
It’s four times a year, supervised, at a facility in the county seat, for ninety minutes, arranged through a counselor named Noor Haddad who has worked with Emma since the November everything came apart.
I was against it. I was against it hard, for about eight months, and I said things in that counselor’s office I’m not proud of.
And what changed my mind was Emma, who was eight and a half, sitting at my kitchen table working on a word search, who said, without looking up:
“She’s still my mom, though. Even if she’s bad at it.”
And I sat there with a dish towel in my hands and I understood that I had spent eight months protecting myself and calling it protecting her.
And the Last Thing Is a Saturday in October That Looked Exactly Like the One That Started This
