I look up from the laptop. They are standing in the bedroom door. Mare looks righteous. Ren looks happy to be out of bed.

I decide to take a pass on the fact they’re supposed to be asleep.

“Ren,” I say, “did you break your word to sister?”

She nods.

“She promised she would jump off the top bunk onto her bed and SHE DIDN’T!!” Mare says.

Oh.

“Ren,” I say. “Is that true?”

“Yeah, I was scared. That was too high. And I too little.”

I stare stupidly.

Had they come in and started speaking Aramaic I would have been less destabilized.

“Well done, Ren,” I say. “That’s just excellent. Don’t you ever do anything that feels unsafe.”

“I know,” she says, hopping up next to me on the bed.

Mare is sobbing. (”Sissies keep their promises to their sissieswaaaaaa!!”)

Gwen Steffani comes on the radio singing Sweet Escape. Renny starts to wiggle happily to the beat while Mare weeps.

Seriously, Lord, how do you expect me to keep a straight face?

“It was a bad promise, Mare,” I say. “Renny can’t promise to do something that’s bad. She has to break that promise. Renny, can you say ‘I’m sorry I made a bad promise?’”

“I sorry I made a bad promise, Sissy,” she chirps.

Mare, of course, weeps.

How did I get here?

I send Ren to their room. She bursts into tears and cries for Sissy. I tell her she’s not in any kind of trouble, and close the door on her wails. I turn my attention on the older one, who is carrying on like there’s a corpse.

“Ren was right,” I say. “I’m very proud of her,” (and stunned beyond expression) “she is too little, and she knew it, and she stopped. She did the right thing.”

Mare is wailing. Ren is wailing.

Cute Husband is standing in the doorway, silently accusing me of making our offspring insane.

Finally, we settle it. I agree to help Ren make the jump, but we all agree she’s too little to do it otherwise. She flies off the top, I catch, it’s all good. Before they settle back to bed, I take her aside.

“I’m very proud of you,” I say. “Never ever do something that feels not safe, no matter who tells you to do it.”

“I know. I was right. Sissy was wrong.”

“Yes. That is the staggering part of all this.” She shrugs and kisses me.

“I kiss you, Momma!” she laughs. Cute Husband shudders audibly.

I’m sleeping in the cool dark bedroom. Not-sleeping. Watching A&E’s Intervention .

When I first started watching this show, it felt voyeuristic, sick. The show is about addicts and their families, and always ends with an intervention and a bottom line by the family: go to rehab, or we’re done.

At first, the sickness of the families, the sheer misery the show depicted horrified me. But I was drawn to it, and changed. I found comfort. Raw humanity, the core of us all ripped open to see: dark and confusing and sick and alive and good. There was something to love about all of them, and all of them were there because they truly loved someone else.

I find the feelings I have toward the alcoholics are all the same: intense sorrow and remorse on their behalf; total irritation. Unspeakable things have happened to them, brought them to this point of nightmarish despair. Abandonment, abuse, rape, loss. But they suffer from an ugly self-pity, and use it as license to abuse the people who love them.

And then the enablers: bless their sweet generous sick little hearts. I watch as they allow themselves to be pulled along by the people they love, propping up the paper thin walls of their delusions because they are so desperately entwined with others they have lost themselves.

The drunks have the alcohol, the enablers have the drunk.

Tonight’s episode is about a woman named Laney, who brings her cat with her everywhere and won’t fly. She’s taking a limo between Boston and Kansas, cat in the back, drinking herself obliterate on cheap rum. The cat uses the litter box at her feet. The ride goes on for days and costs $10,000.

She gets wind of her family’s planned intervention and holes up in her mansion, calling the cops when the people who love her arrive. The cops send her family to the street, where they wait in the cold in a rental van.

Such misery. Such abject darkness and loss.

Finally a quiet-faced African-American woman in a sleek black leather jacket knocks on the door and smiles kindly.

“I am the woman who will be your counselor if you go to rehab,” she says. “I have twenty years in recovery, and your family has a message for you.”

Go to this rehab in Florida. Or we’re out of your life.

Not without the cat, she answers.

No problem, smiles the counselor.

And then they’re in the limo, making the drive to Florida. The repulsive litter box is back there. So is the rum.

Laney drinks, cries, listens to her music, talks to the cat. The counselor rides quietly along beside her, in the clothes from days ago, a pink blanket pulled to her chin, down the road and the days in that car with the drunk and the cat and the rum.

It is an astonishing ride — literally, a cruise to rock bottom, a staring contest to see if this woman can make herself so unlikeable that no one will make her face herself.

They arrive, and the alcoholic’s bravado is gone. Her face is contorted in fear. She knows. It is literally the end of the road.

“I’m not staying,” Laney says, “turn the car around.”

“C’mon sweetie,” the counselor says. These are the first words the documentary has credited to her since the Midwest. “We didn’t come all this way, along all these days, to have you quit. I kept my end of the deal. Now keep yours.”

I am in awe of this woman who has ridden all this way with a repulsive person in a repulsive situation. Stripped of sentimentally, bare to the world, generous in its days and miles and quiet company with the grotesque — her gift is stark.

I did this for you. Earn it. Do well, come on, you can do it!

She says none of that.

“It’s time, now,” is what she says, sending Laney into the building to face herself.

Laney checks out after two days. The ending credits say that she claims to be sober, but her family has refused all contact because she did not complete rehab. My little enabler heart shatters. Poor thing. Wherever you are, Laney, I hope you get help.

I want to know what happened to the counselor, although expect I do know: she kept traveling the road, her blanket to her chin, looking out the window. Not the catcher in the rye, reaching desperately for the children to save to ease his own sorrows. Just the woman with a little health she’s grateful for and wants to pass on if she can. She doesn’t know this woman she has ridden with, but she knows the disease and she wants to do what she can.

I am droopy-faced in the dark bedroom with the TV on. Tired, a little scared. But I’m determined to keep on with my life and give this as little of myself as possible. And as my little village kicks in — “We’ll take the kids, we’ll feed them, we’ll love them and we’ll clean your kitchen … JUST KICK THIS THING’S ASS” — I think that this is love.

We all have our own journeys of misery — our moments of being the lunatic with the cat and the rum — and no one can take our seat.

But, oh how divine it is when someone is willing to ride along and see us to the door.

I am sure they taught him this in med school — and he has delivered far worse news to others than he currently is delivering to me, so obviously he’s the pro. But I don’t want to be managed. I want to be told. And the fact that he is calling personally, that he has left voicemails at all three of my numbers, that he is speaking with great deliberation tells me what he is taking forever to say.

The test was positive.

But I had already guessed that.

I dragged the kids to Wal-Mart this morning, buying Mare’s costume for High School Musical, and some more short sleeved shirts for her to wear to camp. Picking out things for Linds’ baby shower. I made a show of how great it was to have Momma back, how wonderful it is that that bizarre little blip-on-the-screen virus thing was so well behind us. The kids skipped along the aisles. Sheesh, of course it’s hard to keep up, I said to myself. You’ve been in bed for two weeks. Plug along, it’ll feel better.

Funny how my head still hurt after two triple lattes. But, hey, at least they helped, and there are worse things to be prescribed.

I am sure my face feels funny from all that lying down. My tongue isn’t really numb, I just haven’t eaten much, so things taste funny.

But it sure was oppressively hot in that Wal-Mart. Was the a/c broken or something? On my way to checkout, I picked up a digital thermometer, ripped open the package, crammed the metal tip into my mouth. A fun feature: it glows red when you have a fever.

Bright freaking call-out-the-cavalry red with flashing digits: 101.4!! 101.4!!!

So when I see on the voicemail that the doc has called, I know. I hadn’t gotten a test result in the hospital, so had asked the GP for a re-test Tuesday, to be super-sure. It was the only test we were waiting on.

“You have Lyme disease,” he finally says.

I am mindless with fear. Instantly, just like that, I want to crawl out of my own skin, run somewhere, change the storyline, backup, do something.

Son of a bitch whore on a cracker.

“I think we caught it really early,” he is saying. “The test was negative in the hospital. They re-ran your spinal fluid and the Lyme antibodies were not in there yet. So I really think you’re on top of it. This isn’t something where you’re suffering for months and no one finds it. When it’s caught early, the chances of full recovery are very high.”

I sit down, rest my elbows on my knees, head in my hands, breathe. In through my nose, out through my … holy shit. I hike my shorts hem up.

On my thigh, unmistakable. The bull’s-eye rash.

I have Lyme disease.

I thought the scariest thing was to be sick and not know what it was. But that carries an inherent hope: you don’t know, you’re equally likely to have good news as bad.

But then you know, and you Google, and there are associations for people with your disease. There are information boards and horror stories and petitions to Congress.

The numbness in your face is Bell’s Palsy. The pain radiating in your joints is the effect of a bacteria crawling around your central nervous system. The Chinese woman in the gothic condominium was an hallucination and if things keep going, you’re going to start suffering memory loss and declined cognitive function.

“I’m telling you,” the doctor is saying, “we’ve caught it early, and the course of treatment is simple: Doxycyline for three weeks. And it’ll be better. You’ll be okay.”

The first night on Doxycyline is the way it has been described to me: the Lyme fights back. I’m sprawled on the bed, pillows under aching extremities. I have taken Percocet for the pain, Phenergan for the nausea, Tylenol for the fever. A thunderstorm. The power goes out. The window a/c unit stops buzzing. I am alone in the hot dark, thinking about the bacteria running through my system, doing battle with the big blue pills I have swallowed to kill them.

I take my temp: 101.6!! 101.6!! Two more Tylenol, some gulps of warm fizzy water. The girls shove open the door and throw themselves into bed beside me. I feel like I should break into “Raindrops on roses.” Instead I mutter, “Be good to each other. Snuggle each other. Sisters always make it better.” My tongue is so thick, I’m lisping.

The laptop battery is charged. I flip it open and cool blue fills the room. I read Amy Tan’s essay, pore over the Lyme Disease Association page. I obsess with guilt and fault — I was not cautious enough. The kids will be sick next. No one will want to visit me because they will be afraid that they will get Lyme in my back yard.

I never want to go outside again. The Swingset that Blocks out the Sun is in the middle of a warzone. Nothing is safe.

Thunder cracks over the house, a flash in the room, the faces of my sleeping babies. Another temp-check. The red flashes: 101.7!! 101.7!!!

The rain patter starts, and I wish myself soaring out into it, arms out to the water and the heavens, ecstasy in humanity and universe and wind. A flash and I am hit, fall to earth, split open with lightning, spyroketes spilling out of me. Sublime, gross humanity.

A long day in the cool of the bedroom. More Percocet, Tylenol, Phenergan. Doxycyline.

At 7 p.m. the fever breaks (a happy green 98.2! 98.2!) and I am hungry. I eat chicken and potatoes, and it tastes good and I ask Cute Husband to do a tick-check on the kids before he puts them to bed.

“The size of a poppyseed,” the doc had said. The period at the end of this sentence.

I sprayed, and I checked, and still it got me — that tiny little speck has palsied my face and wracked my body.

There’s a cute Gwyenth Paltrow movie on — about flight attendants. Cute Husband brings me a latte, and then I listen to him putting the girls to bed. I feel sad and scared. But I am sitting up, the latte is helping my head, and the movie really is cute.

My eyes are watering. I squeeze them shut. Bell’s Palsy is reversing a lifelong quirk: I’ve only ever been able to wink my left eye. Now it hangs dumbly open while the right one pinches obediently. I run to the bathroom and experiment with facial contortions in sick fascination. My left side is flaccid and unresponsive.

It is ironic that it is Lyme — I’ve been afraid of it for years. I have called the doctor twice in the last two months when I pulled ticks off the kids. I goop them up in bug spray, and I tick-check them every night.

I do it all because I believe it constitutes choice. But here I am anyway.

I can’t keep the kids inside forever, and even if I did, something could get them there, too. There’s just a certain amount of bad luck in every life.

The lack of choice always brings the rat of panic scampering through my brain, but then I think a bit. It is nice to be powerless. Less work. Less responsibility. I don’t have to know whether I will still have this in ten years. I just have to do the best I can with it today.

I will hope that the blue horse pills kill the buggies dead and that this episode is behind us without further fuss. Or maybe I will suffer with a constellation of symptoms for many years. Who can say?

Besides, some people think crooked smiles are sexy. Although, droopy eyes really aren’t. So let’s hope that one goes away.

And Mare is not in her pajamas.

I WAS SO FREAKING PROUD TO GET HER DRESSED. She’s in a totally acceptable outfit — skirt, sparkly clogs, peasant shirt. And it’s all clean (to which we credit Cute Husband. I don’t do laundry when my spine has not recently been punctured, and I sure as hell don’t do it when it has).

Mare walks into the auditorium where all the other campers are dressed in flannel and bunny slippers, registers the problem, turns on her heel and heads back out the door, tears of embarassment and disappointment on her little red face.

How could I freaking forget pajama day?

Moment of choice: do I fix it? Make her suck it up? Send her in, bawling, in front of all those kids in the wrong outfit? Is she spoiled or do I owe her one?

Which lesson is right, what will make her strong and good and confident?

“Stop crying,” I tell her. “You’re too old. Deep breaths, in through your nose, out through your mouth.” I hate me. I want to put my arms around her and tell her I am sorry.

But I am not raising wimpy girls.

“Follow me. I mean it — STOP CRYING.” She staggers behind me, gulping, doing her best. She buckles herself into her seat, wiping her face with her fist.

I hit the gas and the Looser Cruiser peals out of the lot and bombs down the road toward TJ Maxx.

“We make this choice in fifteen seconds,” I say striding toward the girls’ section. “No whining, no fuss. We pick, we put it on, we go.” I pull a Supergirl pajama set off the rack. Pink, brown, loud, splashy. I rip off the tags and teach my daughter the Super Sacred Woman’s Trick of changing her clothes in public while revealing nothing.

I toss her a pair of sparkly flip-flops. She lights up, slips them on, we pay and she follows me silently out to the car. She looks as she should: a mini teenager, blonde, absent, pretty.

We’re now an hour and a half late for camp. It’s snack time, the kids are gathered in the courtyard under the trees. Mare shuffles her flip flops over to her group of friends, sits, pulls an apple from her bag.

“Why are you so late?” — The speaker is an older girl, hostile, with long blonde hair and a Hannah Montana nightshirt. Her voice is contorted in a nasty little sing-song.

I want to pick up my baby and run her home.

“Why didn’t you have your pajamas on? Were you crying?” The sing-song is eerie: wicked, high-pitched.

Mare bites her apple nervously, and I wait, frozen, for her to cry big baby girly tears.

Instead she tilts her head and looks at the girl quizzically. “Why are you talking in that voice?” she asks.

It is classic of her mother — of the best her mother can be, but did not learn to be until much later in life than Mare is doing it. She has refused to be baited, has dropped the ball dead in her opponant’s corner and forced her to run for it.

I am devestated with happy: for the first time I see myself in my daughter, see something good and decent and strong and powerful that I have given her that can’t be denied. If I had died in the hospital Friday, she would still be as she is, chewing her apple and studying that girl with a mercilessly blank face.

“What voice?” the girl asks in her normal voice. But it’s too late. She looks dumb, and she knows it, and so do the other girls who subtly turn themselves toward Mare, chatting about other things.

I can’t get my laundry under control, I routinely screw up the bills, I’m never on time, can’t freaking remember pajama day and often wonder if I am just a big stupid kid who really shouldn’t be in charge of anything.

But then the universe chucks me one.

What if I had chosen never to be a mother?

Then that damned fine human being would not be sitting under a tree, eating an apple and daring anyone to make her apologize.

A tiny Chinese woman sits on a bench with a lapful of towels. Water is running down the walls, soaking into the floor.

“The heating system,” she tells me. “Men came through and mopped. I gave them one yen, each.”

A yen can’t be very much, but I’m grateful, and make a note to reimburse her. And then wonder … why is a Chinese woman giving out yen? And why is this apartment so freaking ugly?

A hard tap to my forehead. I blink and bright blue eyes are peering in at me.

“Don’t worry, Momma,” Ren says. “If you die, you will go up to Heaven. And we will get a NEW MUVER!!” I stare at her a few long seconds before whimpering:

“Do you want a new muver?”

“Liz, Sunbeam is here,” Cute Husband says. I sit up, swallow a few more Tylenol, and step gingerly into the corridor. Sunbeam is digging through drawers, stuffing things into bags.

“And we’ll have a sleepover at my house!!” she is saying. I am jealous of her energy, that she can pack stuff up and move painlessly and she will be spending the day playing with my kids and nothing will hurt.

And then I just love her so much for being there, for being Safe.

The kids take her hands and smile at me bravely and I blow kisses and drag myself out to the car.

Before long I am curled up on a plastic couch in the Emergency Room, my head resting on Cute Husband’s lap while he reads something about war crimes tribunals, but the text runs together and I close my eyes and want to throw up.

Finally, we are taken to a room. They put me in a bed and promise me they’ll wheel me around from now on. That’s so nice. I get an i.v. — a bag of fluids, a dose of morphine and some anti-nauseate. I’m still in pain, so I get another dose of the morphine, and they comment on how high my fever is.

I curl onto my side and hold Cute Husband’s hand. The morphine burned going through my veins and now I feel relaxed, but I still hurt, and I know something is Wrong.

“If something happens to me,” I say.

“Stopit.”

“I know, you hate it, but I need to, so listen … whatever else, just make sure they get educated. Okay? Sell anything, sell Grandma’s ring, sell the house, sell whatever, make sure they get educated.”

“Grandma’s ring wouldn’t pay for a semester of books.”

I am panicking. If I die, how will I be sure they go to college?

I have three things going on: a sore belly, a high fever, bad bad headache with stiffness from my neck into my jaw. It feels like all my teeth are going to fall out, and it would maybe be a relief if they did. It has been getting progressively worse for days. They take me into a small sonogram room where a girl who looks like she is about twelve digs a transducer into my belly. Hard. Right on the spot that hurts.

“Here’s your gall bladder!” she chirps. She rules out gall stones. Yay. ’cause for some reason I find the word “gall bladder” to be humiliating and don’t want to tell everyone I am here because of a little old man disease. No offense to galls, bladders, little old men anywhere.

I get a CT scan.

“Scan’s clear,” the doctor says.

“It’s not a toomah,” Cute Husband says, drawing absolutely no laughs. The doctor is leveling me with a stern look and telling me I have to do what I have said I will not do.

“I’ll get a spinal headache,” I tell him. “I had a spinal tap in college and the headache lasted six weeks.”

“You can have a patch. And you might not get a headache. But we have to do it. It looks too much like meningitis.”

And then I am folded over a pillow, a nurse is holding my arms. I breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth, in through my nose …

“A slight pinch,” the anesthesiologist says.

(Okay, I’m going to interrupt here with a special word to the medical profession: It’s not a pinch. I’ve had two spinal taps and four epidurals and you always say, “Slight pinch” and that’s just freaking bullshit.

What it feels like — and I’ve put some thought into this, so pay attention — it feels exactly like a large spikey needle slipping between two vertebrae. Of course, I suppose, “You’re going to feel a large spikey needle slipping between two vertebrae” wouldn’t exactly qualify as good bedside manner, so I understand why you go with “pinch” but I just want you to know, it’s not accurate.)

“You are fierce,” the doctor says when he is done. “You didn’t even flinch.”

I straighten up, flattered. He notices my name and asks if I am related to the man who taught him medicine twenty years ago. My Granddad. What a thing.

He walks off with three vials of my spinal fluid and they give me more morphine — can’t believe that I am completely unaltered — give me some more. CSI: Miami is on and Cute Husband pulls a large cold fizzy water out of the backpack.

I really love him.

We sit in the dark in the hospital room, watching Horatio and his Humvees solve crime, sipping fizzy water, thinking about nothing, not the vials of spinal fluid or how to pay for college or what we will do if I can’t work. Yesterday is gone. Today is all that matters, and tomorrow never comes.

“Tap’s all clear,” the doctor says.

We’re both startled. And then the hospital is suddenly unsympathetic, they need the bed and we’re wandering around looking for a pharmacy to fill a Percocet prescription at all ungodly hours of the morning. I’ve had enough morphine to stop a prize fighter, but all it’s done is make me vaguely hungry.

Cute Husband gets me home, makes Ramen noodle, changes the sheets and sleeps on the couch. I sleep splayed across the bed, hips on a pillow, hoping to avoid the Spinal Headache.

No such luck. By morning It’s here. My cranium feels loose. Whenever I stand up, I wonder if I’m going to be that grinning man in the movie who smiles and nods and then his head falls off. Don’t ask me what movie, we’ve graduated past water running out of gothic walls, movie identification seems a bit ambitious, you know?

I am in so much pain. I take Percocet. I lie in a cold dark room, hips on a pillow, begging the little hole in my back to fill. I listen to bad television with my eyes closed and have dreams of crazy brides with hairy chins shrieking at their mothers. (You seriously have to watch that show.)

Cute Husband takes the girls to a carnival, and a ball game, and they bring me souvenirs and I keep my hips and my hopes up, up, up — this has to end some day.

Back on the phone with the hospital.

“I think you should call an ambulance,” says one call nurse. “You need a blood patch,” says the other.

I lie in the cold dark, hips, hopes propped on a pillow, wondering, seriously, what the fuck to do next.

My phone rings. “This is Allison,” says a cool friendly voice. “I hope you don’t mind my calling. I’m an anesthesiologist at the hospital. Your primary care physician gave me your number and told me you’ve got a spinal headache to beat the dickens.”

Beat the dickens. Ha. And she called me. Light through the clouds, angels begin to sing.

“I don’t want to go back to the hospital,” I say. “If you really think a blood patch will do it, I’ll come, but I …”

“Yeah, I think it will, but you know what else will do it? — Caffeine. No, seriously, just pop back a couple of triple shots.”

“Are you freaking serious?”

“Mountain Dew, whatever you’ve got.”

“Am I being medically advised to drink latte?”

“Yep.”

And so here I am, hips, hopes planted firmly in a couch at the coffee shop. My cranium is reattached, with only a vague whisper of ache. I am walking, slowly, but surely. In a little while I will hit the market for some supper igredients and then go back to bed while Moonbeam takes the kids to the beach.

I am on my second triple shot. I am typing very very quickly.

And I am grateful: for Sunbeam and Moonbeam and Cute Husband; Mare and the Doodle who didn’t really want a new muver and was just comforting herself. Grateful that we don’t own a gothic condominium, and that the nice Chinese lady has taken her towels and moved on.

And for putting my feet on the floor in the morning, hips, hopes moving forward, just as they should.

I had a terrible habit of putting my hands in the chemicals when I was developing images. I liked to rub the paper and make the silvery faces and trees and odd shots of the cat appear.

Behind thick glasses and awkward clothing I had peered apologetically at the world and the artist-athletes at my Boston prep school. I took my pictures and then buried them in a big acid-free box I never opened, but never ever not in 15 years and 8 moves did I lose.

Last February I found the box of black-and-white images, soggy in the flotsam of the post-flood basement. I laid the photos out a screen door across two box towers. They dried crinkly, but they dried.

The Pentax K-1000 is here, too. I think it is broken. I have considered having it repaired, finding a few rolls of T-Max and having a go. But practicality has to come in somewhere — I don’t have access to a darkroom, and Wal-Mart-developed T-Max is garden-ripe strawberries dipped in margerine.

I’ve gone through five digital cameras in as many years. They froze mid-video, chewed through batteries, and were left out in the rain by my children. They took only so-so images, which I instinctively angled for maximum interest, even when it was only a 6 year-old’s gymnastics show.

Who would I have been, what would have Mattered, if I had chosen not to have children?

So it was that I wandered into a small local camera shop and wandered out with my first real camera since 1992.

It comes with an instruction video.

I don’t have time to watch instruction videos.

So instead I brought the camera with me.

We went to the Pops Goes the Fourth Esplanade dress rehearsal. Behind a stroller, the Diaper Bag on my back, the Running Dialogue of Maternal Instruction going, the constant head count to be sure I left with as many children with which I had arrived, I kept one hand on my new Olympus E-410, braced carefully against my hip.

The first shots felt the first steps out of bed after a bad stomach bug.

Maddening. Just freaking maddening.

And then a gem:

Another gem — two kids in a First Aid tent, being given popscicles by Red Cross volunteers, all shadows and smiles and untied shoes and rubber-gloved hands offering treats. I snapped the shot, admired it on the tiny screen.

“Delete it,” said a hostile woman, a Mother Who Knew Her Rights. Thank God this function I had figured out: Delete. Yes again. Gone.

(Can’t let strangers take pics of the kids IT MIGHT END UP ON THE INTERNET.)

A failed picture of a long line of ducks, mothers and babies, paddling toward the Hatch Shell in an etheral blue-gray of water, mist, shiny feathers.

And then this, which I couldn’t resist:

Mare had tried to look sad in the shot, but the grin was irrepressible, and she begged me to let her try again.

“Sad, Mare,” I said. “C’mon, really sad.”

“Lady,” grinned a passing Massachusetts State Trooper, “that’s just sick.”

I went to get cotton candy for the girls. A few shots of the candy makers: too dark, too blurry. Delicious - I delete, it’s gone, doesn’t crowd my conciousness with its imperfection. Dangerous– IMPERFECTION IS OKAY.

Shoot the shot and don’t worry about whether it’s any good.

I gave the girls their candy and then took endless pictures of them eating it, fiddling with the flash, making our neighbors on the green nuts. I deleted, set the camera aside, promised to stop.

The 1812 Overature began and I caved, taking the camera to the water’s edge to try out the zoom.

Nothing like a few rounds from an M-198 Howitzer to scare the shit out of a couple of ducks.

The show was over. We got all the gear into the backpack, the wet picnic blanket (more laundry) into the stroller, the kids shoed, clothed, snapped-in, secured to a grownup. I took hip shots at anything that looked interesting. Nothing worked out until a vintage shop on Charles street, the window decadent in rhinestones and feathers and invitation.

She did not need to be asked twice:

The Broadmoor — it just calls for a lady in a hat, don’t you think?

Never let a hat hold you back.

… or, like, all logic and reason and the fact you’re only two feet tall.

And always share your hat with your sister. Especially when it goes so nicely with those shoes.

My brother, Mare and me, riding up Cheyenne Mountain in the mist.

“Hey, can you get her for me?”

My head perks up. I haven’t slept well the past couple of nights due to a pinched nerve in my shoulder. It’s almost 10 a.m.. and I’ve been dozing off and on while the kids watch Noggin and eat dry cereal.

Now, they are talking to someone through the downstairs window.

“Can you tell her she needs to speak to me or I will have to turn her electricity off?”

I’m awake.

I pull on a heavy terry cloth robe and stagger down the stairs. My hair is in a cockeyed ponytail, pieces in every direction, and already I am starting to sweat in that heavy robe in the morning heat.

My children are happily leaning out the window. Ren is wearing a light-up Dora shirt and nothing else.

I stagger out my front door, babbling. “You know, I’ve never gotten a bill from you guys? I’ve lived here nine months and I’ve never gotten an electric bill, and I keep thinking I have to look into that. See, it’s on my list, look, here, ‘FIND OUT WHO IS PROVIDING YOUR ELECTRICITY AND PAY THEM’ — but you never sent me a bill. Not once. No bill.”

He nods, says he believes me and speaks an obscene dollar amount while I pat my hair, adjust my robe, avert my eyes from the pile of dishes in the sink, the trail of cereal on the floor.

“I’m a good person Mr. Electricty Man, I swear I am. I feed my children — I don’t beat them despite all provocation — and most days I hit the ground running at the crack of dawn. But I have this pinched nerve, see ..”

I write the check. The government-freaking-stimulus-check — and he leaves. I want to call out: “I TEACH AT THE COLLEGE! AND MY CHILDREN FREAKING LOVE ME!!”

Yes, that’s me, fighting the urge to chase a bill collector into the street, shouting in my bathrobe so I can convince him I’m a class act. While my toddler, her Britney all hanging out, shouts “COME BACK SOON WE BORED!!!”

FYI — for the record, I called the electric company and they confirmed my bill was going to the wrong address. So. Like. Hah. HAH MR COLLECTION MAN.

There was a gigantic pink-white-purple swirled paint puddle dripping from the art table, smeared along the floor in a trail to the bathroom. Siwrly paint covered the bathroom floor, the cabinet, the toilet. There were pink footprints on the floor, pink hand prints on the wall.

It looked like a pink elephant had been beaten to death by a monkey with control issues.

Renny, tucked naked into her doll-baby’s pack and play, was pink. Top to bottom. Like, seriously, I was wondering whether her skin could breathe under all that.

At the sight of me in the doorway — bearing two plates of blueberry pie and ice cream for breakfast — Renny broke into dramatic preemptive wails.

Aha! You say. Now our action hero will cave! She will place a swat on that pink-painted bottom for all that is good and decent in the world.

And oh, how I wanted to. I wanted to pick her up, swat her, and tell her I was tired of the bullshit and if she puts one more line on a wall in this house she’ll never forget it.

But I didn’t do that. I didn’t even yell.

I put her into time out.

No, really, I did. I placed her on a chair in the bathroom and told her to stay there. I didn’t even raise my voice. Quite the opposite: in a low whisper against her ear I said, “You’re going to be very sorry you did this. But if you move off this chair you will be even sorrier.”

She sat riveted to the chair, naked and pinky-purple, howling for about an hour while I scooped paint up with rags. And her sister ate pie. Two servings.

After I had gotten most of the paint up I ran water into the tub.

“I sorry,” Renny whispered. I checked the water. It was just one degree cooler than she likes it. I plopped her in, ordered her to close her eyes, dumped water over her head, scrubbed.

She screamed.

“I don’t have time to be nice,” I said. “I spent my free time this morning cleaning up paint.”

I handed her a towel, and ordered her to dry herself off. She whimpered and dried. I brought out the garbage bag I’d used to toss paint-soaked rags in. She saw the bag, and her eyes widened.

“Oh no,” she whispered.

“Oh, that?” I asked. Protruding from the top of the bag was the doll-baby’s pack-and-play, Renny’s faorite gift from Santa. Covered in purple-pink paint.

“You ruined these,” I said, lifting the pack-and-play to reveal underneath it: Ren’s favorite wooden birthday cake game and her silver hairbrush. Soaked with paint. And at the very bottom, the doll-baby herself: Baby Callie, face down in sticky pink puddle. I sealed up the bag and took it out to the bin.

A large sad tear dropped down Ren’s cheek. By the time I came back, she was sobbing in heaves.

“You threw Callie away?”

“You threw Callie away,” I said. “It was a bad choice to play with paint this morning.”

I wrapped Ren in the towel, placed her on her bed, shut the door. She lay there crying for the better part of an hour. The rest of the day she was quiet. I won’t say meek, exactly, but she basically did as she was told. When I put her to bed, she cried for Callie. I went down to the trashbag, pulled her out, and ran her under the sink.

The quantity of pink paint that ran out of her cannot be overstated.

I swaddled her tightly in a dishcloth and brought her to Renny, who put a happy arm around her and cried from relief.

Callie is a real person to her, and that price was too high to pay. The silver brush I’ll sneak out, too, although I won’t give it to her until she is an adult. It was her gift from Gigi when she was born.

But the rest of the bag will go to the dump and Ren will have to live with the results of her actions.

Because some day this little person will be a grown woman with the capacity to smile politely while she rips the testicles off anyone who crosses her. I like that, and I want to make sure she uses those powers for good instead of evil.

It’s my job to make sure she doesn’t grow up to be a complete bitch.