Free Out of the Woods by Lynn Darling Page B

would be different. It was always a tricky transition, however, and sometimes the lie didn’t take—I knew that tomorrow wasn’t going to be any different, and I would spend the evening writing long journal entries about what a failure I was while listening to old Cowboy Junkies albums.
    But that evening, I was simply relieved to have the day done, and I went outside to sit on the stoop and play with the sad-faced puppy. He was worrying a bone I had given him earlier and ignoring me and my efforts to interest him in a game we could play together. So I decided to take the bone away—a move, had I known anything at all about dogs, I would have executed with extreme caution (if at all), but I didn’t know anything about dogs. Besides, the dog-training book said it was important to establish dominion over your puppy or he would always be the master, and thinking of the lamentable Rosie, and also perhaps of my inability to establish any dominion over myself, I was determined to do just that.
    I crouched down next to the oblivious ball of fluff. Drop it, I said, in the low tone of command I was instructed to use in puppy-training class. Henry didn’t look up. I said it again and again, and of course he ignored me. Finally, determined to exercise at least this much authority, I grabbed the bone to take it away. Henry snarled as savagely as something that looked like a stuffed baby polar bear could snarl, and bit me.
    For a moment I just stared at the puppy, who looked back at me, his head slightly cocked, endearingly, infuriatingly indifferent. I had been trying so hard to make him love me. Then I sat down in the dirt and cried. That got Henry’s attention, and he stood up. But if I was expecting a Disney-esque moment where he loped over to console me—and of course I was—I was mistaken. Henry edged away, with a little frightened whimper, turned his back on me, and fell asleep.
    As I sat in the dirt, half laughing at the utter misery of the moment, a memory bloomed, of rolling around on the floor of the loft with Zoë after a checkup at the pediatrician’s. I hadn’t slept in days, Lee was in China, and I could not figure out how to get her out of the Snugli that bound the baby to my chest. She was crying and I was crying and I was pretty sure that in the history of the world in all its folly there had never been so spectacular a failure of a mother. Zoë’s arrival had changed everything, and I had wondered if I would ever be the same. I never was of course, a fact for which I am still stupendously grateful.
    Now, Zoë, by her leaving, had once again turned my life upside down. But if her presence had become, after our somewhat shaky start-up, the wind in my sails, her departure had blown away my moorings as easily as a child blows away the seeds on a dandelion, scattering everything I thought I knew, leaving an emptiness unlike any I had known. Why was I so undone?
    Because she was the only thing I ever did right.
    The idea came unbidden. I ran my hand through the dirt, feeling its grit on my palm, breathing in the dank air that smelled of the decayed fallen weeds, looking up at the opaque, tree-shrouded hills that seemed every day to grow closer and closer, making it harder to see the sky. Was it true?
    Raising Zoë had been the only thing I had done without design. As with Henry, I had read a million books about how to be a mother, but Zoë had thrown them all out the window simply by virtue of being herself. No book could tell me who she was, no parenting guide could tell me what she needed. Only she could do that.
    Being a mother was the only thing I had done instinctively, improvising, making mistakes, figuring out what worked and what didn’t. I had never set out to be a great mother or a good mother—I hadn’t even known I wanted children until I fell in love with my husband’s. I expected nothing from myself—I just didn’t want to mess her