The fluorescent lights in my office always made everything look slightly unwell, a quality I had long ago decided was deliberate, some unconscious architectural choice made by people who understood that a workforce running on adrenaline and deadline pressure didn’t need the distraction of looking comfortable. That Tuesday morning the glare felt particularly oppressive. My desk was buried under financial reports and spreadsheets and three half-empty cups of coffee at various temperatures, and I was the kind of tired that lives below the muscles, in the bones themselves, the specific fatigue that comes from working double shifts for months to keep one adult and one child housed and fed in a city that charges premium rates for both.
I had said yes to the Disney trip because Elliot had spent months drawing pictures of Mickey Mouse. He was six years old, and he drew the way all six-year-olds draw — with fierce intention and no concern for proportion — those small hands gripping his red and black crayons like they were tools of serious work, producing portraits of the iconic mouse that were deeply enthusiastic if anatomically creative. Every time he showed me a new one, the guilt I had been carrying about working so much would tighten another notch.
I was a single mother doing the best I could, but my best often meant Elliot spending his evenings with babysitters while I closed out accounts. I was building something, I told myself. I was providing.
But no six-year-old has ever been comforted by the phrase I’m providing. So when my parents and my sister Kara announced they were taking a family trip to Florida and casually suggested bringing Elliot along, a part of me that was exhausted and guilty and desperate for him to have something magical without my having to manufacture it myself said yes before the rest of me could weigh in. The dread had been there from the beginning.
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