The Game Is Afoot

One

Pearl and I stare at our reflections in the smudged, toothpaste-splattered bathroom mirror that I really should clean one of these days.

"You've got this."

"I've got this."

"You are beautiful and wonderful and special."

"I am beautiful and wonderful and special."

"You can do hard things!"

"I can do hard things!"

"Or you can at least do, um . . . medium things. I'm pretty sure you can do those."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm just being realistic, Mommy. No offense."

My jaw drops and my eyes go wide. "Pearl!"

But she just smirks, arms crossed over her unicorn-printed sweatshirt, all I said what I said. I try to give her a look right back, because I'm the one who taught her everything she knows about looks, but it's almost immediately undermined by a laugh that bubbles up all on its own. This isn't the pep talk I would have given myself, but maybe it's the one I deserve.

"I can do medium things," I repeat finally, and Pearl nods in approval. She leans closer to the mirror, her eyebrows furrowing into a fierce stare.

"You are going to get a raise."

"I am going to get a raise."

"And if that Rose lady doesn't give you the raise, then you're going to stomp on her foot and run out the door because she's a meanie-head and you don't work for meanie-heads!"

I shoot her a side-eye at that, and she smiles her sweet one-dimpled smile, like she said I should hold my boss Rose's hand and go skipping under a rainbow in a field of flowers.

"I don't know about all that, Pearl."

She lets out a long, weary sigh that would be right at home at a Sunday service and gently pats my shoulder. "You just have to believe in yourself, Mommy."

She says it with the confidence of an almost-eight-year-old-her birthday is in a little over a week. It's the same confidence that gave her the audacity to clear her throat and correct the urgent care doctor last month when he called her seven and not almost eight. And then, after he prescribed her antibiotics for her ear infection and asked us if we had any more questions, her only one was whether or not he updated her chart with almost eight, not seven, so he wouldn't make the same mistake again.

That kinda confidence.

I wish I could bottle up that confidence and spray myself down, like a middle schooler who just discovered Axe body spray, before my annual performance review with Rose today. It's not my first time around the performance review block. I started working at Project Window, a teen mentoring nonprofit, just a few months after Pearl was born, so my time there is almost eight, too. And I've done this whole song and dance so many times that I could recite Rose's long, gushing love bomb of a speech about how I'm indispensable to the organization and how they're so lucky to have me. I could probably time it down to the millisecond when her eyes will start welling with tears, to emphasize that her gratitude is so authentic, so real, that it just overwhelms her with emotion. (Even though she must have those things on lease, with how quickly she trots them out and then puts them back away.) I could also call the exact moment when those same eyes, suddenly dry, will begin to drift to the door behind me as I'm making my case for a promotion, searching for any excuse to hit the emergency eject button and launch herself right on out of this conversation.

And I already know what Rose's excuses will be, because I hear them in the middle of the night when I'm staring at the ceiling and questioning all my life choices. "I would pay you a million dollars if I could, but that's the nonprofit life!" And: "Knowing you're changing the world is its own kind of compensation, isn't it?"

So, yeah. I shouldn't be nervous, because I know exactly what's coming for me today. But I'm hoping to switch it up this year-with bathroom mirror pep talks from my almost-eight-year-old and a sense of unending possibility that's seeming more and more delusional as 9:00 a.m. approaches.

God, maybe I should just stomp on Rose's foot and be done with it.

I can tell Pearl is thinking the same thing. She squints her dark brown eyes at the mirror, wiggly fingers pressed into a steeple. But before she can further tempt me into choosing violence, there's a clatter of something falling down in the living room, and then the clicking of our puppy's nails across the hardwood floor. That's the most notice Polly, our Shar-Pei-pit bull mix, will give us when someone's at the door. She's the worst guard dog. She only barks at old people and babies. Well, except for one other time, which was the most inconvenient time . . .

"Mavis? Pearl? Y'all all right in there?" Yeah, definitely not an old person or a baby.

Pearl's face quickly transforms from seeking vengeance to unbridled joy as she leaps off the step stool and sprints out of the bathroom.

"Daddy!"

I follow after her with considerably less joy. My thoughts have transformed from Am I wasting my life away at a job that's never going to see my true worth? to Why is this man just letting himself into our house? He has a key, but that key is for emergencies. And taking Pearl to school on his regularly scheduled morning when we're not even late-hell, we're early, thanks to this new routine I've got us on-that's not an emergency.

But I fix my face into something neutral because it's still so new for Pearl, seeing us interact with each other almost every day, and I'm not going to be the reason why there's tension.

"We're fine, Corey!" I call as I grab my blazer off my bed. "Just a little startled with the front door opening like that. No warning from the doorbell . . . or even one knock."

Okay, well, I'm not immune to just a pinch of petty. It's basically my right after years of solo parenting while he got to travel the world, putting his work first.

As I turn the corner, though, slipping on a couple of gold bangles, my eyes lock on that one-dimpled smile, identical to Pearl's. Polly runs around him in circles like this is the best day of her life and Pearl has launched herself onto his side, her striped-socked feet dangling off the ground, but Corey's flashing that smile right at me, his eyebrow playfully arched.

"Now imagine how startled you'd be if it wasn't me but some axe murderer off the street walking on in here."

"Axe murderer?" Pearl asks, an edge of worry in her voice. Which makes sense-axe murderers aren't some far-off scare when only a few months ago, your friends' mom locked you in a room to escape kidnapping and assault charges.

I arch my eyebrow right back at him and let out a long, weary sigh to rival Pearl's for good measure. But when he holds up his hands in apology, my cheeks instantly burn with embarrassment.

In one hand is a brown wicker basket with shiny lemons and something green peeking over the top-probably the latest bounty from his new apartment complex's community garden. But it's what's in his other hand that makes me want to dig a hole right here in the floor and fling myself into oblivion. It's my keys, with a black fob for my Prius and a keychain Pearl made me for Christmas that says "Mom of the Year" in sparkly beads. I swear the words are taunting me as they dangle back and forth from Corey's fingers.

"Did you know your keys were in the door?" he asks, reaching out to hand them to me.

"Uh, yeah. Of course." I mumble as I snatch them back. "I was just . . . getting them ready to go."

"Getting your keys . . . ready to go?" He flashes another infuriating dimple that makes me want to ban all dimples even though Pearl's is up there on my list of things that make life worth living.

"Yeah, Mommy is so silly! She does that all the time." Pearl's feet are back on the ground, and she starts digging around in Corey's basket. "She's always like, where are my keys? I can't find my keys! And then me and Papa have to find them in the door, and then we're late to school. But it's okay because Ms. Lilliam in the office likes her now. Hey, this smells good!" She holds up a big bunch of fresh mint, smiling wide, and I take back what I said about her dimple. All dimples are out to get me apparently.

Corey laughs, high and hearty, and I roll my eyes at both of them. For the record, I have a lot of things in my hands when I'm walking in at the end of the day-my bag and my laptop and this giant water bottle because we're all supposed to care about drinking water now-so sometimes I just don't have the physical capability to also get my keys. It's not my fault my hands are small. And anyway, our neighborhood is safe-Ms. Joyce across the street would come hollering from her perch at the window and probably try to take down the intruder herself if anyone actually tried to break in.

"Plus, she is already thinking about a lot," Pearl continues, and I almost pump my fist and shout out "Yeah!" But I'm trying to look like a responsible, non-petty adult. "She's asking for a raise today, and also she might have to fight that lady Rose."

"Oh yeah?" Corey says. "Rose trying to square up?"

"No one will be fighting." I slip on my flats by the front door so we can move this morning along before Pearl tells her father how I let her have ice cream for dinner last weekend. Or what word I muttered when that Kia Sorento cut me off on the 405.

Corey, thankfully, gets the message. "Is it okay if I leave my car here while we walk?"

Pearl crosses her arms and looks him up and down, like They really just let everyone parent these days, don't they? At least with him back in Beachwood full-time, someone other than me is getting that look regularly.

"Are you sure we have time for that?" she asks, and Corey throws his head back in another raspy chuckle. "It's less than a mile, my Pearl girl. And school doesn't start for another thirty minutes."

Pearl looks to me to confirm this, and I nod, begrudgingly. We haven't ever walked, me and Pearl, but technically, in so-perfect-they-are-basically-unrealistic conditions, it's possible. Even with my new routine, though, our mornings are never that perfect.

"It's a good way to start your day, with fresh air and sunshine," Corey says. "My therapist recommended it, and it's a lot easier than everything else he has me doing, that's for sure. Here, you gotta smell these, too, baby girl. I picked them for y'all this morning."

He pulls a lemon out of the basket and scratches the rind, holding it up to Pearl's nose. They both breathe in deeply, eyelids fluttering closed. It's such a quiet, special daddy-daughter moment that I'm tempted to snap a picture with my phone, but my mind is still stuck on the whole "my therapist" part. I mean, it's not the first time he's brought the guy up. He talks about therapy now like it's no big deal. Which, I know, I know-it isn't. But he didn't grow up thinking that, just like me. You only went to therapy if there was something really wrong with you. If you were working a steady job, doing what you needed to do-you didn't need therapy. And if you did, you certainly didn't talk about it.

But ever since he put his touring career on hold and moved back to Beachwood to be here for Pearl, Corey all of a sudden is someone who casually talks about therapy and starts his day with sunshine and stops to smell the lemons. I know he's not doing the work he wants to do-he's had to transition to mostly studio drumming instead of playing live music like he's always loved. But still, he just seems so-so . . . content all the time. Like he's got that elusive balance thing figured out.

And I'm . . . I don't know. Jealous?

Because how is he so good at that?!

That was my plan last year, after everything went so bonkers and I ended up getting sucked into the dark, dangerous world of the PTA and becoming an amateur detective for a few weeks. I was going to rest. I was going to take care of myself, or "practice self-care" as all the woo-woo books and Instagram posts refer to it. I was burned out and had no choice.

And don't get me wrong, I've tried! I've perused the aforementioned woo-woo books and Instagram posts. I bought green juice. I didn't know it would go bad so fast and had to throw it out, but I bought it. And I got a ten-day streak on my meditation app last month. I may have fallen asleep a few of those days and let Tanya keep talking over my snores, but see? Rest!

It's all just . . . a little harder than I thought. Which is really a scam if you think about it. Why is taking care of yourself so much labor?

I tried to put on my oxygen mask first, but turns out the strap was all twisted and maybe I should try and gobble a few pretzels first because who knows if they'll even be serving food later with all these airline budget cuts?

Anyway, it'll all be better once I finally, finally get this promotion. I've had to focus on that, had to put my head down and work, because with Corey here and present as a co-parent, not doing that would just be wasteful. Once I get it, though, I can stop putting so much of my mental energy toward daily existential crises and have more time to do . . . whatever it is I need to do so my heart doesn't beat so fast all the time. And yes, that goalpost for when I can finally rest is constantly moving, but this time, for real this time, once I hit it, I will garden and walk and actually do something just for myself like paint my nails or get my eyebrows done because these things are out of control, and not in the cute Gen Z way, but in the way that'll have Gen Z making Bigfoot truther videos on TikTok. I will finally be able to breathe. Because why is it so hard to breathe?!