Stray Sentences

Safety, and Malice

April 1st, 2026
When we are home together, I am still for her. I learn her thinking.

I am so good at it I become an extension of her mind, like she’s invented me.

That’s how I reach the fifth dimension — a shared space between her mind and mine.

In the fifth dimension, she and I become untethered from time, distance, events, cause and effect; we do not label hurt feelings or observe personal boundaries.

My consciousness becomes split into two timelines.
1. November –, 1985-present
2. The fifth dimension
In the fifth dimension, my mother likes me.

In the fifth dimension, I disappear.

When we are home together, the television is always on.
The morning news when she wakes up.
The evening news if she is home from work.
Primetime shows before bed.
Judge Judy in the afternoons.

Soon I have a tv in my bedroom. Before I have a calendar or a computer, I have a tv.

In the summer, I wake up to the last half hour of Martha Stewart and devour hours of Wimbledon.

After school, I watch Captain Planet and X-Men, then Family Matters and Full House, then Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dawson’s Creek.

On Saturday mornings, I wake up to Duck Tales and Chip n Dale.

We eat dinner in front of the tv.
If I don’t like what she’s watching, I eat dinner in front of my own tv.

The tv is my company and also my excuse. Because if she’s not watching the tv, she likes to talk to me about work and the gall of whomever provided her customer service that day. She tells me her co-workers are tapping into her landline and listening in on her conversations. She recounts rude Target employees who deny her the right to return barely used items.

I must listen to all of it.

Sometimes we laugh together at her stories. She can really tell a story.

She goes on much longer than I can bear.
I itch for her to leave me be.

I learn to turn my head back to the tv when the commercial break ends.

She teases me for some of the shows I watch.

Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Star Trek.

But she takes an interest in Dawson’s Creek. We watch a few episodes together.

She complains about each of the characters, and how unrealistic it all is.

She only likes or dislikes. There is no in between.

I stop watching shows I like with her.

I begin spending more time at the public library.
It’s quiet. The air is cool and steady. The librarians smile at me.

I am dropped off alone for hours at a time.

Since I am a good, quiet kid who follows rules, I can pick out any books I want.

The promise of discovery; new ideas; verified facts. I thirst. I take home way more books than I could ever finish.

In the library, I forget about the fifth dimension.

At home, while my nose is in a book, I forget about the fifth dimension.

I am reading a case study when my phone lights up with an unknown number.

My mother is in a hospital in New Jersey.

“For up to two weeks. Maybe longer. We’ll see how she does on the medication,” the nurse on the phone tells me.

What medication? I wonder, but do not ask.

I notice as if from another body: my heart is pounding.

The drumming pulls at me until something old and forgotten happens.

It’s my heart.

I am ripped from the fifth dimension.

The four walls around me take on a clarity I have become unaccustomed to.
My body feels distinctly and uncomfortably solid.

“How did she get there?” I finally think to ask.

The nurse sounds like she is reading. “The New Jersey police found G- wandering the train tracks. G- would not open her mouth until she was forced to by the officers. G- was sucking on a rock. G- explained it was a love charm to summon her boyfriend,”

I am numb. “She doesn’t have a boyfriend,” I say.

The nurse is silent.

“What should I do now?” I ask.

“You can try to speak with her tomorrow. Take care.”

The nurse recites the hospital’s phone number and the extension to the psychiatric ward, and then hangs up.

I am unmoored.

In the weeks following my mother’s hospitalization, I reach out to many different organizations. I read a lot of websites. I find the family member support page on NAMI’s website.

I drive 8 hours to my mother’s apartment and pack her things into storage. I drive another 8 hours home and complete my finals.

All of that is easier than contending with the open tabs in my browser.

Why don’t I contact NAMI?

I am not ready to inhabit my timeline.
Legal Alien

March 26th, 2026

L– scoots off the waiting room chair and feels her mother’s attention on her immediately.

“We have to wait here,” her mother says.

L- climbs back up on the chair.

L- wiggles her toes and then her hips but she stays in her seat and waits. Her mother returns to her own thoughts, or wherever it is she goes when her attention is not on L-. L- stays quiet too, asking her questions of the insides of her head. Finally, the loudspeaker calls the number on the ticket G- has been squeezing between her fingers.

“Come on,” G- says.

Wordlessly, L- follows her mother through the swinging door separating the waiting area from whatever is behind the vestibules where the people who fill out papers behind glass windows sit.

A man in gray slacks appears before them. “G- M-?” He stumbles over their last name, putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable and then trying to fix it. G- doesn’t correct him.

“Yes,” G- says.

“Good,” the man smiles warmly, and then clears his throat. His face returns to stone. “Please follow me,” he says.

He leads G- and L- through a gray hallway lined with framed pictures. Bright orange flowers on the walls give L- cheer. She wishes she can stop to look longer at the birds with the white heads and curved yellow beaks. She recognizes the flag with red and white stripes she’s seen everywhere lately.

Mid-hallway, the three of them enter a room together. The man takes a seat behind a heavy wooden desk and gestures for G- to sit across from him. L- climbs into the seat next to her mother’s.

The man pushes his wire rim glasses further up his nose. He rifles his fingers through several pale yellow folders stacked on their spines in a desk organizer sitting atop the desk. He chooses one and flips it open.

“Ms. M-, the State of California acknowledges your petition for citizenship to the United States of America,” he says. His tone is neutral; businesslike. L- wonders only one thing — the thing her mother has worried over since they landed — will we get to stay? She listens for that word, which she only recently learned, from his mouth. Stay. She wants to become an Alien of the United States.

“To ensure your loyalty to the United States of America, I will ask you a series of questions,” the man says. He opens a second, worn, pale yellow folder already lying on the desk, and places his middle finger on a line of text at the very top of the topmost paper.

L- listens to her mother answer the first question and then the second. By the third, her hips are wiggly all over again and she can listen to nothing else except her own voice that insists she stay still, quiet, and small. She thinks of a mouse. She thinks of crumbs. She thinks of the picture taken in their Moscow apartment where she is beaming at the camera and throwing her arms open in a proud, “Tada!” Only two of those images make her feel small so she chides herself for remembering the third. She doesn’t know why she thinks of the third but it seems to bubble up without her permission.

L- squirms and tucks her legs beneath her butt. Stay put! She rocks ever so slightly on them and silently chews her lip. She concentrates on keeping still until she hears the man ask, “…just you and your daughter?”

“Yes,” G- responds.

The man and G- do not look away from one another while they’re talking. L- puffs her chest. She is getting good at invisibility.
The End To My Family Legacy

March 19th, 2026

Suddenly “schizophrenia” is something I say.

The word and the story it tells is spilling out of me.

I tell my boss; my father in law; my neighbor; my daughter’s new primary care physician.

Each time I say it out loud, I think,
“Should I have?”

And then I am enraged.

Why shouldn’t I say it out loud?

My mom hid it her whole life.
From me most of all, and the secrecy drove us apart.

We were living in Sherman Oaks when the ‘94 Northridge earthquake struck. I was sleeping.
My mom threw a blanket over my head and dragged me out of bed.
I woke up disoriented. Not because the earth was shaking, but because I was shrouded in muffled darkness I didn’t understand.

That’s how it was.

I tried to talk about my life to friends’ parents, but I did not know how to explain her.

It all came out as complaints.
A child complaining about her parent.
A daughter complaining about her mother.

The nearly universal refrain I heard over and over from anyone I told:

“She loves you so much. You are her whole world.”

I didn’t want to be her world.

I didn’t want to hide with her.

I wanted to feel light, and alive.

In law school I befriended a Russian classmate. We chatted occasionally about being daughters of Russian mothers.

“She wants me to be a lawyer and make children in the same breath. ‘When, when will I become a grandmother??’” Maria rolled her eyes and giggled. “I’m like, ‘Mom, I just graduated, take a breath!’” She looked to me for a knowing smirk.

The last conversation I had with my mom was about the detective work she was doing to spy on rapists.

“No pressure from my mom about kids yet…” I said. “I’m sure soon though,” I laughed, uncomfortably.

“Just a matter of time!” Maria assured me. “Russian moms, right?”

My mom did not pressure me.

My mom was never her whole self with me.

She compartmentalized, and she managed.

She found she could manage parts of her life where her mind did not betray her, and I was one of those parts.

I asked my mom so many times, “Why did you want to move to the United States?”

Her answer was always the same.

“For you. To give you a better life,”

I never believed her.

She could be so mean to me.

She wouldn’t let me in.

She told me I didn’t know anything about real life, and that I never would.

Even now I am uncertain about the details of my mom’s life. She had a way of talking that made facts feel fluid.

Once she sent me an email, so I know this:
“My dad’s name was Vadim Alekseyevich M– , he passed around 1983. His mom’s name was Polina M–, I never heard or met his father, like he didn’t exist.
“Babushka’s name was Varvara M–, maiden name K–“

I have a few other facts I’ve more or less corroborated through old family photos.

My grandmother was an engineer.
My grandfather was a general in the army.
My mother was born in Kiev. She had an older brother.

My uncle also suffered from schizophrenia.
My mom told me about it during a day trip. We were walking along Pier 39.
“Babushka was taking him to all kinds of institutions when we were growing up,” she said.

That’s all she had to say about it.

There was one other story she’d tell about him.
He liked to read in the bathroom.
“Always he was in the bathroom…” she’d say, and then she’d laugh.

She talked of her brother lovingly. Alyosha.

Her brother may have been the only one who could understand her.

I asked my mom once if she wanted to contact him somehow. She was Facebook friends with his daughter. Couldn’t Alyona let us know where to find him?

“Find Alyosha?” she asked. “He probably died already.”

I snooped through my mom’s email while I was packing up her apartment in Southern California.

The notepads on her desk were scribbled over with sentences that didn’t make sense.
Her Draft folder read similarly.

I read an email she wrote about the day I was born.
She recounted holding me in her arms when several KGB agents barged into her hospital room.

“They wanted to take you,” she wrote.
Then my father, who was in the room with us, convinced them to let her keep me.

A different email draft explained more. She was a KGB agent before she got pregnant with me, she wrote. She did not want to be a KGB agent anymore but they would not let her go.

Ah.
Was this the explanation I’d been looking for?
Did my mother flee from the KGB to the United States?

I spent three years of my late twenties researching the Soviet Union.

Immigration from the Soviet Union to the United States from 1985-1991.
Life under Khrushchev; Brezhnev; Gorbachev.
Soviet cuisine.
American presence in the Soviet Union.
Russian-American immigrants in the United States.

Who am I?

I am someone who has never been good at keeping secrets.
If I Am In a Room, You Are Somewhere Else

March 11th, 2026

Before I turn five, you are restless. You are always coming back from somewhere and rarely staying.

I play the piano at your friend’s house, and spend the night there without you.
I don’t remember your friend’s face, or her name.
She lives in an apartment building.
You and I go up in the elevator together, and then I stay and you leave.

Your other friend lets me sew with a needle. I don’t sleep at her house.
She has heavy, burgundy drapes, and a sister. Yellow morning light filters in through her window.
She gives me a swatch of satin to poke the needle and thread through.

A man comes to our apartment with a bear rug. He can draw. He copies the bear from the rug onto a piece of paper.
He sits with me in our living room. He draws and I watch, delighted, as his hand makes lines on the paper with a pencil.

Another man, my uncle, fills the door frame of our apartment. He watches me as I look at a book on the floor.
I watch him back.
My head is hot with a fever.
He doesn’t say anything.

I hardly remember you.

One time we woke up early and stood in line together outside a grocery store.

The night before we left, you threw me a birthday party.
You had my hair cropped to look just like yours.
Our apartment was bare but for a table and an armchair.
I chased my friend under the table, and begrudgingly posed for a picture in the armchair. You made me wear a red flamenco dress. I didn’t like how poofy it was or how ridiculous it made me feel.
Adults crowded around the table when it was time to cut the cake.

My grandmother, my Babushka, put me to sleep that night.
My room was dark. She sat on my bed.
I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear her say,

“When you arrive in the United States, your mother might leave you, and you might live in an orphanage.”

I dreamt you left on a train without me. I stood on the train tracks, small, distressed, and watched the caboose, and you on it, disappear into the distance.

You woke me while it was still night out.
You said the taxi was outside.

Babushka stood at the door. I watched as you hugged goodbye.

The driver helped load our luggage into the trunk.
The street lamps were yellow and bright against the black sky. Snow was falling.

The airport was crowded. You had a lot to carry.

You were distracted.

I stayed close by.

A snowstorm grounded our plane in Khabarovsk. We could not stay in the airport. No one was sure how long the storm would last.

We walked to the nearest hostel, dragging our luggage through the snow. There were no beds. The man at the desk said everything nearby would be full.

What else could we do? We walked to the next hostel.

The second walk was harder than the first. The sky was darker. The luggage was heavier.

At the second hostel, you pleaded with the woman at the front desk. We will not take up much room. Please, she is too tired to walk anywhere else.

We were given a bed in a room already occupied by two other women. Traveling sisters from Turkey. You made conversation with them while I explored the dark hallway outside our room. I walked past people sleeping curled up on the cold laminate floor.

The storm blew over and we headed back to the airport with our luggage.

We had to get your Egyptian rug through customs.

Security wanted to unravel it to make sure there was nothing unsafe in the middle. They wheeled the 8 x 10 sausage roll over to us on a dolly and made you untie the rope binding it together. You muttered frustrations under your breath. You’d rolled it so tidily, so perfectly, the first time.

You rolled it back together when they were satisfied, but in a rush this time. The inspection took so long.

You and I ran through the airport to the next terminal.

At our next layover, I could not sleep. You said I’d been awake for over 12 hours. The trip was nearly finished. Our next stop was San Francisco.

In the San Francisco airport, I still could not sleep.

We ate popcorn in an airport pub.

One more flight.

Ed Asner picked us up from LAX.

I crawled into his limousine and lay my head down on the leather seating. When I opened my eyes, we were at the hotel.
My Body Keeps The Score

March 5th, 2026

Who am I most days?

I wake up to a mental checklist. My shoulders are already tense.
I numb out the dread I feel upon waking.
I execute my morning routine quickly and efficiently.

I walk fast wherever I go, even if it’s from my cutting board to my toaster oven.

I eat my breakfast at my desk, in front of my computer, while I work.

I am the only child of a single, mentally ill mother.
I have always been the only child of a single, mentally ill mother.
It’s been me and her, forever.
Even when I got married, had two step-kids in my home, and then two more of my own kids in my home.
It’s always been me and her.

Not because I wanted it to be.
I’ve tried to escape her so many times.

But my body keeps the goddamn score.

In the immediate moments that follow waking,
before my adult consciousness comes online,
I am the child I was,
and I am first scared,
then numb,
then resolute.

I will get through my day, even if I don’t enjoy it.
I will survive until it is time to sleep once more.
I will do what is asked of me and I will not complain.
I will disappear.

I grew up in Sherman Oaks.

I loved my elementary school.

I played, and laughed, and taught myself to read in English.

On the drive home from school one day, I taught myself to breathe quickly.

Breathing in and out distracted me from the nausea, which crept up on me at the stoplight of Kester and Ventura.

Every day, from the passenger seat of my mom’s car, I stared up at the AT&T building and inhaledexhaledinhaledexhaled.

I did it quietly so my mom would not hear.

I’ve always lived two lives.

1 — The me I cherished and hid away from her.

2 — The me that lived for her.

They had to share my body.

My body has never felt big enough for both of them.

There were times in my early twenties when I nearly blacked out.

Sitting at Andrew’s desk in the back of Diedrich Coffee with an In-N-Out burger in my hand.

Driving home from Behnam’s apartment at sunrise, the freeway mostly empty at that hour but not completely.

Reading Nietzsche in my dorm room before an afternoon class.

I thought I was just falling asleep.

When I was in the hospital recovering from the birth of my daughter, I went to the bathroom to relieve my bladder. I was escorted by two nurses who helped me sit down on the toilet. I peed, and everything went black. When I came to a few moments later I apologized.

“Sorry, I just fell asleep for a second,” I said.

“You passed out, honey,” the nurse on my left told me. She was holding me up so I wouldn’t fall over.

In my last year of college I needed birth control pills. The doctor at the clinic insisted I get labs done. It might have been the first labs I’d ever gotten. I didn’t understand why anyone would make such a bother over me.

He told me I had elevated TSH.

I didn’t know what that meant, and I didn’t really care. I was fine. No one needs to worry about me.

My second year of law school wasn’t as hard as the first, but I was struggling to keep up with all the reading. I kept falling asleep.

I had labs drawn for the second time in my life. My TSH came up elevated again. I was told to find an endocrinologist, which I immediately confused with an oncologist.

I was scared.

Also during my second year of law school, I got a call from a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey. My mom was being treated there.

In New Jersey??

The story took awhile to piece together.

The psychiatric hospital told me what they knew. The NJ police found my mom wandering out on the train tracks. When they spoke with her, she initially refused to open her mouth. When eventually they convinced her to, she revealed a small rock that she claimed was a charm.

The hospital could hold her for two weeks. She was receiving medication.

My mom called me the following day. She said she was fine. She did not mention what was to be done with all of her belongings in Southern California. I asked her if she would be returning. She talked about needing coins for the pay phone.

I drove eight hours to Huntington Beach, to pack her apartment into storage. At a rest stop, I called the hospital to see if they had a release date. I was told they could no longer release information to me regarding my mother.

That was the first of several public psychotic episodes.

For nearly a year, my mom wandered between Northern California and Southern California, homeless, carless.

I heard from her whenever she chose to call me. She was rarely coherent. She did not ask about me. Eventually I stopped picking up the phone. She left me voicemails about the important work she was doing chasing down rapists. She visited me once for a couple of hours.

Each time she disappeared, I grieved.

I made an appointment with a therapist. Her office was dim.

I took a seat on the dark leather couch. She introduced herself.

The tears came before I even said my name.

“I feel like I don’t have a mother,” I wailed.

The therapist asked me in our third or fourth session, after I had relayed all of the NJ events to her: “Would you say you feel more stressed than usual?”

I had just told her I was having trouble concentrating on my reading and felt anxious about the upcoming finals.

“I don’t think so,” I answered.
My mom died last week

March 4th, 2026

She was 67.

She fell.

She lived alone.

The medications she took made her dizzy.

She suffered from schizoaffective disorder.

Her property manager called to let me know. The residents in the building had seen her with less regularity in the last week. She would take daily walks. She promptly brought her packages inside. In her last week, she was not around as often. Packages collected outside her door.

Her IHSS provider called the police to do a welfare check the morning of. It was already too late. They didn’t come, anyway.

Her property manager entered the apartment to check on her in the afternoon. She called me, the emergency contact, at 3:30 pm. The maintenance man called an ambulance.

I arrived with my husband at 4:30 pm. The paramedics had come and gone. They determined her expiration ordinary, and left the body in the apartment. I had to decide what to do with it.

I did not understand where she was when I walked in. Her apartment was clean, quiet, empty.

The bathroom door was closed.

Her body was in the bathroom, behind the closed door.

My husband went into the bathroom before I did. I can’t remember exactly what he said after he saw her. I braced myself and slowly opened the bathroom door.

She lay face-down on the laminate floor. One of her feet was purple. The rest of her just looked like her. She was wearing olive green joggers and a long-sleeved cotton shirt.

I touched her cropped hair. It felt coarser than I expected. When was the last time I touched it?

There was nothing of note around her really. She fell and landed face-first.

I shut the bathroom door behind me. We called a local funeral home to come pick her up. We would have to wait an hour and a half for the driver to arrive.

There were a lot of prescription pills in orange bottles on her kitchen counter. There were more inside one of her cabinets. More in her medicine cabinet.

She kept a calendar on a small writing desk near her kitchen. She had labs drawn earlier in the month. Her IHSS provider had last come in January. She had an upcoming appointment with her doctor on Thursday.

Her phone was on the counter next to her prescription bottles and her emergency contact sheet. She didn’t have a passcode so the phone just let me in. I checked her WhatsApp. The message I wrote her late the night before was unread. “Hi mom :). We miss you. Do you want to come visit sometime in March?”

I will be writing about her for the rest of my life.
Gripping Water

February 18th, 2026

I think about cancer a lot.

It scares me.

So many I know have been touched by it in some way or another.

A girl I went to school with died from a rare form of it.
A childhood friend’s mother died from it.
Another childhood friend’s father-in-law and brother-in-law died from it, and her father is battling it.
Then of course there are the celebrities, who presumably can afford the best possible care to cure it. They still die from it.

It lurks.
It strikes without rhyme or reason — it seems.
We haven’t pinpointed what causes it. We don’t understand why sometimes it goes and sometimes it comes back. I have friends who have beaten it. Did they get lucky, or did they do something right?

I want not to think about cancer.

It’s not like I’m going to find a cure by thinking about it all the time.

I just really, really, want to make sure I don’t get it.
If I think about it a lot, if I’m aware of it all the time, it can’t blindside me.

Right?

I have these two beautiful children to look after. I want to see their whole lives. I am not giving up that privilege.

I felt this way about our infertility. This all-consuming way.

First I thought I didn’t want children.
I was still a child when I made that decision (25).

Then I found a man to love, and quickly my body insisted each month that I did very much want children with this man I loved. Some months the yearning felt suffocating and all I had to hold on to was my faith in him, us, and biology.

We didn’t start trying until nearly 8 years later (33).

There were obstacles.

Sperm antibodies. Endometriosis. An over-active immune system. Stress.

That I was getting up in age was a constant worry.
I didn’t know how to battle the passage of time, or how to convince my vigilant immune system to stand down.
I did a lot of online research. I joined a lot of Facebook support groups.

I rolled my eyes a lot, primarily at the suggestion that I let go.
There are a lot of blog posts out there written by women who suffered with infertility and came out the other side with babies. So many of them got pregnant after they “stopped trying.”

I couldn’t figure out how to stop trying.
I could pretend I didn’t care anymore…but I knew I was pretending.
I still cared.

Finally, I succumbed to my doctor’s recommendations.
We started IVF.

Ugh, the high stakes of IVF.

I felt each step of the process deep in the bones of my soul.
It was the very last possible resort so it begged the question:
What if this doesn’t work?

The first transfer resulted in a chemical pregnancy. We found out on Christmas Eve.
Was that hard?
Not any harder than everything we’d been through to get to this point.
No, fuck that.
Yes it was goddamn hard.
I was lovesick for our baby by then. I was desperate for the relief of a resolution.

The uncertainty ate at me.

What if this doesn’t work?

Shortly after my son turned 1 year old, I discovered I was pregnant for a second time.

Becoming a mom for the first time turned me inside out.
Also, post-partum hormones.

When a woman becomes pregnant, parts of her brain re-wire so she can be more attuned to the baby. The acuity with which she can make connections between seemingly random things sharpens.

I was never better at NYT Connections than when I was post-partum with my second.

But also I suddenly really connected with this: I was taking a huge risk.

I was pregnant at 37 — a “geriatric” pregnancy.
Another eye roll — except…

What if something did happened to me?

All the clinicians make sure to let you know right away: there are real risks.

I had a little being I loved more than life itself dependent on me. Who was I to put him at risk of losing his mother?

Something very real could happen to me, and the brand new life growing inside of me, and my growing son, and the husband who would be left to pick up any pieces.

Nobody tells little girls they can die from a pregnancy.
Or, little girls don’t know to listen.

In the first trimester of my second pregnancy, I internalized this:

Life is not guaranteed.

We are all just fucking lucky to be here most days.

When my son was about a month old, I placed him in his stroller and took him for a walk through the vernal pools near our home.

The December air was chill, but the sun was out and the day was clear enough that I could see the hills beyond us.

My son, who came out restless as my spirit, fell asleep.

We were alone together amongst the naked trees, beneath the warming sun, and I thought — FINALLY, breathlessly, tearfully — I got him here.

I can let go.

When you feel things deeply, everything means a lot to you.

Living means so much to me.

But I’ve learned this after two pregnancies (even though I struggle when I’m in the thick of my feelings to remember it):

When my knuckles are white from the strain of holding on to water, it is time to let go.

Let go of all of it.

Open your arms to the sky and say, Go ahead, do your worst.

And don’t wait around to see if it will.
Spillway.

February 14th, 2026

Why am I here?

I want to be honest.
I worry a lot. Deeply.

I worry about the state of the world.

The planet is aging.
We are, as a species, going through growing pains (to put it kindly).

I live in a small corner of the world and yet, thanks to the internet, I bear witness. I see a lot, and I feel a lot.

This is my fortieth spin around the sun so I’ve collected some things.
(Not actual things — not sustainable.)
I’ve collected experiences, and they crowd the inside of my cranium. Especially lately, because the world is uneasy. I stuff the world’s stuff inside my cranium too, even when I don’t want to.

I think: if I start letting my insides spill out, maybe some of the pressure will give.

I am a mom.
I am a stepmom.
I am a wife.
I am a daughter.
I have senior dogs.
I work full-time, in an industry that gets no love.

I’ve been working up the courage to speak up my entire life, “to put myself out there.”

Have you ever seen a dry spillway after a deluge?
This dam is bursting at the seams.