These past few weeks have been chaotic and crazy. Closing a chapter on your life is always bittersweet and our move out of our old home is no exception. We’ve made countless memories between these walls, and I will hold them in my heart forever.

Through sweat and too much heavy lifting for people close to 40, Vince and I managed to empty our home into two storage pods and a 10×10 storage unit, defying the law of gravity and personal safety with Tetris-like packing skills.

We’re exhausted but not broken.

Lice.
This was not good.
This was not good at all.

This was not good because I immediately recall that my daughter, Scarlett, had been complaining for the past two weeks about an itchy head. I did check her scalp back then when she complained, but I didn’t see anything. However, I realized as I was looking at my phone screen that I likely didn’t check as good as I should have. Scarlett tends to be sensitive and make minor ailments into major issues. When she complained of an itchy head, I had rolled my eyes internally and checked her head out of duty, not diligence.

I realize two things at this moment. First, that I should have been more concerned a couple weeks ago and not dismissed Scarlett’s itchiness. Second thing I realize that the itchiness I felt in my own head for the past week or so was not dry scalp. Not dry scalp, but most likely lice.

Not good.
Not good at all.

I’m in the kitchen, getting ready to make dinner. It’s my least favorite thing. Cooking is not my passion. My teenage daughter, Gianna, is at the table, doing a school project. She’s trying to construct a roller coaster out of a matchbox car track, various pieces of cardboard, and tape. I can tell the project is not going her way by the tenseness of her shoulders and the look of exasperation that is forming on her face.

She’s a volcano on the verge of eruption.

As I begin to walk away to preheat the oven, she lets out a quiet scream of frustration and starts to cry. Angry tears are probably the worst kind of tears, because they piss you off when you were already pissed off to begin with. You’re not sad yet your eyes insist on leaking.

Out of instinct, I go to hug her. Tears equal hugs to me. Plus, mother hugs are supposed to be magical after all. As I go to wrap my arms around her neck, she pulls away. She. pulls. away. Like she was on fire and I was a heaping bucket of ice.

We were making steam and she wasn’t having it.

On the top right-hand corner of my glowing screen, it reads:

“3:06am”

WTF? That can’t be right. My phone needs to resync or something. Then I look at my laptop screen:

“3:06am”

I’m losing my mind. Why am I awake?  Why did I wake up? I had to have been up since 2:30am based on what I accomplished so far. The bars just closed and I woke up. I’m not Mark Wahlberg. I shouldn’t be out of bed at this time. Maybe I dreamed I heard my alarm and woke up not realizing it was a dream?

I recount the time I actually had time to myself during the day, away from my clingy 1-year old. Sure, my legs went numb, but those 10 minutes were glorious.

I’m sitting in the guest chair of the dimly lit optometrist room watching my oldest daughter, Gianna, prepare for her exam. Gianna, at the perfect age of 14, is sitting in the patient chair directly across from me, getting ready to cover her eyes and read the first line of bold capital letters. As I watch her there, my mind snaps back to a time when she was much younger.

In my mind, I see Gianna as she was almost 10 years ago, dressed in her signature style leggings with a short jean skirt over top, her thick blond hair framing her cheeks that still had a little bit of baby chub left in them. She wasn’t a baby anymore, but the whispers of that time were still there on her little face. She was sitting in the chair, reading that same row of black letters.

Seeing her there, my heart squeezed. Like her little hand came out from that memory and grabbed my heart like she used to hold my finger to fall asleep at night. It wasn’t just the memory of her being smaller. What tugged my heart was the specific memory of her legs.