If I just stand on the blacktop all day long soaking up the right now sunlight, well, I know the clouds will come and cover up the sun. But if I stand in the embrace of long friendship for as long as possible, I will be heard. I will know all this searching I have done my whole life can add up to this moment. The sun, warming me. My friend, warming my words, saying yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

After I tell myself no too many times. After I have sat in my anger without letting it reach sadness. Until it snaps and I see the sad fact that I am grieving my youth and my children’s growing up.

All I have is what I have done. I have washed my younger daughter’s hair and blown it dry. I have told her she is beautiful again and again, ignoring all the literature that says beauty is not a fitting compliment. But she is beautiful. And my work for the last 15 years has been to find myself beautiful enough to see their beauty, to reflect their beauty back to them. To show them this world and how they fit in it. I fit in their world.

I stand on the black top, wanting to hold on to the benediction of this warm sunlight all day long. To tell myself it has been enough to praise beauty, to remake myself into a mother while writing all of this beauty and anger and sadness down. My girls are beautiful. I am beautiful. I am angry that my time with them full time is coming to an end. I am sad, more sad than angry. But when I touch the sad, I worry that I will never get anything productive done again. And if I want to see Germany with my older daughter, I have to earn money to buy that ticket.

The clock ticks so loudly in my ears. The sun warms me. I will stand here on this blacktop and know my arrival in this life is enough. I cling to the sunlight. I hold my girls’ beauty up to the light; they reflect my beauty back to me.