She was stuffing clothes into a suitcase when I found her, moving fast, sloppy, nothing folded the way she usually insisted on folding things. Down the hall, my three baby sisters — three months old, all three of them born the same spring — were crying in their cribs, the kind of crying that had clearly been going on for a while.
“Mom,” I said. “What are you doing?”
She kept packing.
“I can’t do this anymore, Micah.”
She looked up at me then, and something in her face had already gone somewhere I couldn’t reach.
“I already spent my whole life raising one child,” she said. “I’m not starting over with three more. I want to live while I still can.”
