A Story Led Me Home Again

“Sorry I’m late but I swam into a fishing net. I managed to escape, and I swam away and hid. I was lost, I was scared, but a story led me home again.” — Tiddler: The Story-Telling Fish, by Julia Donaldson

* * *

I pulled the sheets of my three-year-old’s bed up to the headboard. I yanked too hard and pulled them out from under the mattress. With tears brimming in my eyes, I shoved them back under the foot of the mattress. Deep breath. I didn’t have time to cry—I still had to make my bed and finish boiling eggs for my husband and my son. Then I had to feed babies—again. After that, I’d prepare and clean up from lunch. I’d eat. I might have five minutes before the babies would need to nurse again.

That’s if they slept that entire time. Usually, they slept for twenty minutes on a good day.

I swallowed against the jagged bump in my throat and walked out to the kitchen. I flicked the burner dial off and carried the tiny pot to the sink. I poured out the eggs and bent over the sink to cry.

“What’s wrong, Lara?” my husband asked.

I watched the cracked eggs roll and wobble into the drain as steam escaped past them. “I want to be human,” I murmured. “I don’t want to be a milk machine anymore.”

* * *

I crossed the threshold of my office. A thin layer of dust coated my laptop, desk, and bookshelf. I lowered myself down into my chair in front of the antique desk.

My husband and mother-in-law agreed to get me a sixty-minute break every day to do whatever I wanted. My husband often suggested I sleep, and my basket of laundry and dirt-sprinkled floors bellowed to me, but I sat down to write as my eyelids drooped. Whatever the cost, I had to write, because I didn’t know what to think or how to function otherwise.

I gently lifted the top. I squinted at the brightly lit screen. I opened Google Docs and poised my fingers above the keyboard as an infant screeched in the background. 

For an entire hour, I stared at the blinking cursor. It demanded words. It threatened me. Finally, it resolved to mock me.

I had no words in me. 

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