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arts—everything tastes like ground shoelaces, except my salads, which you are years away from appreciating. Until then, we go over to Beth’s house and trade wine for dinner. It’s a brilliant solution but sometimes, on the way home, when you go on and on about how Beth is such a good cook and then Dad adds his accolades about Beth’s homemade red sauce and roasted broccolini and how you ate every bite, my mom-ego twitches and cramps, and by the time we get home I’m practically convulsing with animus.
    I used to be “pretty chill,” as I once heard Dad say to his friend Graham when I turned down a Corona at a two-year-old’s birthday party. For instance, before I was your mom, I didn’t have one of those plastic dividers for my silverware. I’d just take the basket out of the dishwasher and dump all the knives, forks, and spoons right into thedrawer. My friends Mike and Andy, who coached me through the last of my single years, still talk about it. I went around the world without a credit card or a cell phone or a plan of any sort, I hitchhiked a thousand miles, I went to Dead shows with people whose last names I didn’t know, I wore green Birkenstocks to the office. I thought I’d be cooler as a mom. But then I leaned back on the delivery table and Dr. Laura Statchel pulled out a baby, and somewhere between the precious bundle that was Georgia and the placenta, all that it’s cool, no worries, sure why not? stuff came out too.
    My default answer to everything is no . As soon as I hear the inflection of inquiry in your voice, the word no forms in my mind, sometimes accompanied by a reason, often not. Can I open the mail? No. Can I wear your necklace? No. When is dinner? No. What you probably wouldn’t believe is how much I want to say yes . Yes, you can take two dozenbooks home from the library. Yes, you can eat the whole roll of SweeTarts. Yes, you can camp out on the deck. But the books will get lost, and SweeTarts will eventually make your tongue bleed, and if you sleep on the deck, the neighborhood raccoons will nibble on you. I often wish I could come back to life as your uncle, so I could give you more. But when you’re the mom, your whole life is holding the rope against these wily secret agents who never, ever stop trying to get you to drop your end.
    This tug-of-war often obscures what’s also happening between us. I am your mother, the first mile of your road. Me and all my obvious and hidden limitations. That means that in addition to possibly wrecking you, I have the chance to give to you what was given to me: a decent childhood, more good memories than bad, some values, a sense of a tribe, a run at happiness. You can’t imagine how seriously I take that—even as I fail you. Motheringyou is the first thing of consequence that I have ever done.
     
    Every now and then there are victories, which is to say, moments when I let go, when I set aside all instruction and we dance. I remember the first time Dad played Van Halen for you. He’d just gotten home from work—it was a Friday so he was in an extra good mood—and we were goofing around in the living room, and he said, “Wait! I just thought of something,” and a moment later, “Panama” started. Georgia, you were on the coffee table and about halfway through the song, you said to Dad, with the signature earnestness of a three-year-old, “I could listen to this all day .” He tells this story a lot; I think it validates something for him, like you two have something crucial in common—or just a tacit, gut-level esteem for ’80s arena rock. Heturned the volume way up and when the song said jump , we jumped. You girls couldn’t believe how rowdy we were being, and I thought, They’ll remember this—someday they’ll be lying around a dorm room drinking Miller Lite and picking pepperonis off a cold pizza and say, “Our family used to have dance parties and my dad would play the music so loud we couldn’t hear each other