more days of my first vacation in five years, and I tried to make the best of it. That Saturday, I walked through the local farmers’ market. There were so many kids Mia’s age, many wearing disheveled tutus and with nests of hair. I could have been walking with her, in a tank top, my tattoos visible, she in her pink plastic high heels and fairy dress. We would have blended in with everyone. No one would have given us a sideways glance like they did back in Washington. Mia would have played with the pack of children climbing up the fish statue. This could be our home. These people could be our family. I was sure of it.
On the drive home, I sank into the quiet of the car and the sounds of the road. Each mile that I got closer to Washington, I felt an ache in my heart, like I was going in the wrong direction. For five hundred miles, the journey of the last five years played like a movie in my head. I saw Mia toddling toward me in the homeless shelter. I felt the stress and desperation to provide a good home for her. All the driving we’d done. The car crash. Those cold nights on our pull-out love seat in the studio. Maybe The Alchemist had been right. Maybe if I took the first step toward my own dreams, the Universe would open and guide the way. Maybe, to find a true home, I needed to open my heart to love a home. I had stopped believing that home was a fancy house on a hill. Home was a place that embraced us, a community, a knowing.
* * *
Months later, just a few days after Christmas, with Mia in the back seat, I drove the rolling hills toward Missoula again. “Can you see the lights?” I asked, turning down the radio, pointing out the twinkling stars of the valley. I glanced in the rearview mirror, saw Mia shake her head from the car seat.
“Where are we?” she asked, staring at the snowy hills rolling past the window.
I took a deep breath. “We’re home,” I said.
After years of constant movement, Mia and I slowly settled. Her dad disappeared for the first several months we were there. He didn’t answer his phone, didn’t show up for the video chats we’d painstakingly fought over to schedule in the new parenting plan, and I didn’t know how to explain why.
Mia began running from me: at home, in the grocery store, on the sidewalk, and into the street. I carried her, kicking and screaming, stooping to pick up her pink rubber boots when they fell off during a tantrum. I knew it was a natural response to change, to losing her dad, to being uprooted and replanted in a place where winter had kept us inside since we arrived. Her behavior was bigger than anything I’d experienced, and I didn’t know how to handle it. It started to feel too dangerous, too tumultuous and exhausting to take her anywhere. One morning, I had to complete two errands: the post office and the store to get tampons. Mia refused, for two hours, to get dressed or put on her shoes, kicking and screaming and fighting so hard I might as well have been trying to hold her under water. The panic attack hit me straight and fierce, left me crawling on the floor, gasping, while Mia walked happily to her room to play with toys, content in winning another battle.
Things, as they usually do, have a way of clicking into place. I found work cleaning a large office building, plus a couple of clients who wanted me to clean their homes. One weekend, I picked up a magazine in the office’s waiting room called Mamalode and submitted a short piece. They published it in print, and I couldn’t stop staring at my name.
The same magazine had an advertisement for a movement-based preschool at a local gymnastics center. After meeting with the owners, they agreed to let me clean the facility in exchange for tuition. One of their employees moved in with us, paying a small amount of rent with the caveat that they’d be there while I went to work before dawn, before Mia was awake.
On a late spring day in Missoula after our move, Mia made an announcement: “Mom, we should go hiking,” she said, after looking at the blue sky through the window. I sat at the