I have been absent. Those of you who follow closely will have noticed the silence and drawn your own conclusions. The conclusion is this: my body staged one of its more dramatic rebellions in the form of a kidney infection serious enough to take me entirely off the board for the better part of two weeks. I do not get sick quietly or briefly, apparently. When I go down I go down with the full commitment I bring to everything, which I would find more admirable if it were not so thoroughly inconvenient.
I am on the other side of it now, or near enough to be upright and writing, which I am choosing to count as a victory.
While I was ill, someone broke into my home.
I want to let that sit for a moment because I am still sitting with it myself. I was sick, my children were unsettled, and someone decided that was an acceptable time to violate the space where my family lives and take what did not belong to them. They took the children's gaming system, which in the grand accounting of what could have been lost is not the worst possible outcome, and I know this, and I have said this to myself many times. It does not make my children's faces easier to look at. The specific devastation of a preteen who has had something taken, not misplaced, not broken accidentally, but deliberately stolen from their home, from the place that is supposed to be safe, is its own particular kind of heartbreak to witness as a mother. They were crushed. I was furious on their behalf in the way that only a mother's fury operates, which is to say completely and with no available outlet.
I handled it alone. As I handle everything.
And this is where I find myself needing to say something I do not say easily, which is that my resilience, that quality I have always counted on, felt genuinely shaken this past week. Not broken. I want to be precise about that because I will not be imprecise about myself even when honesty is uncomfortable. Not broken. But shaken in the way that a foundation shakes when too many things hit it simultaneously, the illness and the violation and the children's hurt and the daily weight of a life I carry without assistance, all of it arriving at once while my body was already at its limit.
I had hoped, by now, to be in a different chapter.
I had hoped, genuinely and specifically, to be in conversations about sharing a home with someone actually prepared to show up for this life. Someone whose service was not theoretical, not a future intention, not a beautiful idea that dissolves on contact with the reality of what showing up actually requires. Someone who would have been here during a kidney infection that left me barely functional. Someone whose presence would have meant my children came home from school to a stable and managed household rather than to a mother running on empty and a space that had been violated.
That person does not currently exist in my life, and the disappointment of that is not small. It is not something I can dress up into acceptance without first acknowledging that it is a genuine and specific grief. I built a vision. I know what I deserve. I know what this dynamic looks like when it is real and functional and inhabited by someone with actual capability and actual commitment. The gap between that knowledge and my current reality is something I feel most acutely on the weeks that ask the most of me.
I am resilient. I will return to myself completely, as I always do.
But this week the crown was heavy.
I wanted to tell you that honestly, because this space has always been about the full truth of this life, not only its beauty.
More soon. I am still here. I am still unserved. I am still waiting and wanting.