When I wear tank tops or cap sleeves, Hazel slides from a hug to wrap her small, strong fingers in the loose flesh there, praising its coolness, rubbing her cheek into pillowy handfuls of skin. She calls them “wings,” with a kind of awe. Her brown eyes gleam, adoring as a spaniel’s, sharp with an innocent knowledge of my embarrassed pleasure inthis physical display of affection.

Hazel’s overt delight in this part of the overlarge body I have struggled with for decades humbles, unsettles, and delights me. It is the opposite of her tickle-torture, something that urges me to gather close rather than push away.

It is a miracle of love, this worship of a body I have so often felt trapped inside.

I sit tentatively in the barely lit, airless, windowless clinic room, my back straight and stiff in the tight plastic corset that holds my spine in anatomical position. In the lingering fog of anesthesia, I’ve been studying nerves and sensory and motor pathways to understand the new pain down my leg, the unsettling numbness and weakness, and the need to manage complex bowel and bladder dysfunction while wrapped breathless by a plastic boa constrictor.

I am polo shirts and pleated shorts. I am a low ponytail so no one can tell my hair is long. I am four square at recess instead of playing fairies. I am not boy until I beat the boys up for calling Claire and me lesbians when we beat them at four square. I am not “boy,” which is a synonym for anything it wants to be—for brave, for loud, for astronaut, for president, for tough, for interesting, for anything. I am girl, a synonym for trapped.

An Apology of Girls

We tuck ourselves against the wall in the hallway, so nobody notices us. Thirteen and nervous about our knobby knees or how our stomachs press against the polyester of our plaid Catholic school skirts. We swallow our answers in class like our neatly cut sandwiches—nobody wants to be a know- it-all. We whisper about Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. We gush about the boys in class we like but will never tell. We smile and say everything is fine, even when it’s not. Even when we’re anxious. Even when the other girls leave us out of conversations about school dances and training bras. Even when my mom’s in the hospital.

Erect in her chair with her palms on her thighs, she gazed downward toward the earth, a gentle smile across her face. At eighty-three, my mother had recently launched a meditation practice. This wasn’t the first time I’d found her in a deep state of measured breathing.

She wore her Moroccan kaftan dyed fresh-kill red, the black embroidery across her chest like a diagram of a circulatory system. An arrangement of orange sections, sliced avocado, and walnuts in a Berber ceramic bowl sat on the table in front of her, a still life waiting to be painted. Birdsong accompanied the hum of the refrigerator fan, while the voice of an English actor reading Poirot lulled from her laptop speaker.

I had wanted to be present when Atticus, our thirteen-year-old Siberian husky, was put to sleep the next day, but we couldn’t leave our children, eleven and eight, home alone and didn’t want to bring them, so we agreed Brit would go by himself. Monday morning, we gave Atticus his last meal, and the four of us brought him on one last walk in the field. I took pictures. Even at the end, Atticus looked handsome—the unusual fleur-de-lis marking on his face, dark fur around his blue eyes, his thick grey coat.

When he returned from the vet, Brit told me we’d been right to do it—that after the injection Atticus looked the same as he had alive—that our dog was ready, that it was time. A few days earlier, he’d said we needed to decide if we were keeping Atticus alive for him or for us. That last Sunday, I spent hours lying with him on the wooden floor or on the kitchen rug, telling him it was okay, that we would really miss him but he could go, it was okay for him to go.

I generally dislike being uncomfortable, and before I met my husband, the closest I’d ever come to camping was spending the night sleeping on the floor of a Marriott suite. The thought of carrying my food, water, clothes, and bed on my back seemed masochistic.

And yet, somehow I found myself in Yosemite National Park with a forty-five pound pack on my back, about to embark for four days on the North Rim trail. As I started hiking, I followed my husband, Steve, and our two friends as we went—it seemed to me—straight up a mountain side. There was no real trail to speak of—just sandy dirt, and nothing tall enough to shade us from the heat of the sun. I immediately realized I was in over my head. I’d gone about one- hundred feet before I was short of breath, overheating, and in need of a water break.