The Lasagna
For the person who became the home they needed before they knew what it would cost them.
During the pandemic, my family had just done something utterly insane. We bought a new house, a larger lot we thought was the pinnacle of success, with an in-laws suite that my mother and step-father would move in with us. Friends would ask me if I was sure about what I was doing, whispering bets on how long it would take to fall apart. But I had no fear, no concern. My husband and I were both former military pilots. We had planned every possible outcome. What if we could not sell. What if the loan needed this. We ran the risks and accepted the tolerance levels.
What we did not anticipate was the airlines freezing and losing the only career I had ever considered. Or the baby being so difficult. Or the child inside me being woken from a long nap when suddenly my mother was there with me. Eventually, we would sell that house, move back home to the Bay Area and never look back.
I could say a million things about who I was and was not the first day I walked into our new construction house, herringbone French Oak floors because someone I could not even reference had recommended them, but what is there really to say that matters? What did driving by that same house today inspire in me now that’s worth remembering?
We had lived in the same neighborhood since my eldest daughter was six days old. We considered ourselves originals to this new construction paradise, a place with a park named for freedom. Everything about it felt perfect, its name, its orderly streets, the illusion of permanence. It was everything I thought I needed and more, where I envisioned some movie ending to raising a family.
But that original story was short sighted.
It started with me meeting my husband in college, joining the Marines, and pursuing the quintessential American Dream to a tee, white picket fence and all. What I forgot was that my story started a lot earlier, and had a lot more characters that I just had not been writing about.
My mother and my step-father now living with me. My father having moved in down the street just before. I had left home at eighteen because I could not be home, but suddenly I was home. I was the home.
And somewhere along the line, I was still tethered to a past I could not let go of, and had no way of understanding.
My children grew, and each day I remembered when I was their age. My earliest memories correlating to my daughters and not wanting to relive a nightmare no one had ever acknowledged as being fact, not fiction. Silence at the dinner table while small talk went on about the collapse, the divide, the fear. And inside, I felt utterly alone.
About that time, I met my neighbor. A woman with a daughter the same age as my eldest. Postpartum, and trying too. We would do play dates when the children’s daycares would close again. We would hold space for work life balance when we felt equally matched by the weight we were carrying.
She would cook dinner while I did the dishes and she put the baby to sleep. One night, she pulled a lasagna from the oven and set it in the middle of the table, steam rising, the children already circling. No one said much. We ate standing, sitting, passing plates, moving around each other in a kitchen that was not mine but felt temporarily shared. We never named what we were holding together. We just did.
We never told each other the full details, but the feelings were always mutual. We needed each other, as women who showed up in a time when nothing was working.
Our dreams stretched thin between stucco, saltwater pools, and a dynamic tied to a past we both knew was lurking.
It is still difficult to write about that time in my life. I have written chapters on it, about collapse that has no grounding, about heartbreak that has no origin, about loneliness that feels like it has no hope, but I struggle still sharing them. Because it is all predicated on a past that was so convoluted for so many years.
Why did I fucking do what I did? Why did I put my family in that situation? Why did I hurt them?
In so many ways, it could have been unforgivable.
And yet, here I am. In my dad’s guest room, holding him when everything he has feared comes true. Typing on my Freewrite my husband got me for my birthday because he believes in this story. My daughters sleeping in the living room on the couch and a cot, like I used to when my dad was just a weekend dad and I was just a daughter wanting a home.
My mother and my step-father parked in their RV in the driveway, here in a family time of need, to return back to our property in the Santa Cruz mountains, back home, back where we all originally left.
But I am bringing us home.
This journey has to have some purpose. And sometimes, I forget that it does.
Being back here, I made an effort to reach out to the few people from my past I still keep in contact with, my old neighbor being one of them. We met at the park, like we had a hundred times before. Our daughters picking up play like no time had passed, us slipping back into a conversation cadence where the important things could be said indirectly, where enough context existed to read between the lines of where someone is really at in life.
When I told her my side, the heaviness but also the peace, she saw the accomplishment. She had seen the journey. She had been there for it.
