I close my eyes, take a breath, and roll out from under the van, having just swapped the radiator.

“Alright, should be fixed,” I say to Dominic, my eight-year-old son. He’s squatting in the gravel, flicking pebbles with a stick. “Let’s fill it up with coolant. Can you jump in the driver’s seat?”

He climbs in. I walk over to him. He is already fiddling with all the switches and buttons, flipping the blinker and wiggling the gear lever. I place my hands over his to calm them.

“Dude, can you do this?”

“Yep.”

“No buttons, no switches, right?”

“Yessir.” He is bouncing in the seat.

“Okay, I need you to turn it over when I say, then turn it off when I say stop.” I show him how that works. He nods. I ask if he understands. He nods again. I ask him to repeat it. He does, in a way that makes me believe.

I go to the engine and start filling and he watches me. It’s over ninety degrees; he is in the shade, but I am standing in the sun and the sweat between my legs is visible on my pants. I upend a gallon of coolant into the opening, squeezing and flexing all the hoses. I have him turn the engine over and it fires right up. We cycle again and bleed out the air.

On summer nights we would take the subway to Union Station and walk south under the Gardiner to the ferry terminal. Then we would ride the Sam McBride back and forth to the Island. We went alone. He said he wanted me all to himself. The crew knew us. They pretended not to notice that we stayed on board and took multiple crossings on one fare. Maybe they remembered what it was like to be seventeen. And we really weren’t any trouble—just two kids in love. For one evening a week, we were world travellers on the deck of a large ship taking us to exotic destinations. We’d lean over the railing, his arm heavy across my shoulder, and imagine we were cruising the Mediterranean or navigating the Nile. Every crossing took us to a different destination. We imagined exploring worlds we had only read about.

I’m still a newbie, new to sport climbing, new to leading routes, and this one is at the outside edge of my ability. It’s short—thirty feet—but kicks off with an overhang that snubs many. I pass the overhang and clip safely into the first bolt. A few moves later I wedge my toes into a crack and am now maybe fifteen feet off the ground. I curl my fingers around a half-inch hold, chest-height, and extend my left hand to snap a quickdraw onto the second bolt.

Unbelievably, it is just out of reach.

Seems the crack I followed to get here was a bit to the right of the prescribed route. Rookie mistake. And there’s the bolt, just out of reach. Like, half an inch—so stretch a little, right? Not so simple. My left arm is free, but the rest of me . . . I can’t move an iota. My calves are already twitching, fingers weakening. Reach again. Gain a quarter of an inch. Still no dice.

I wasn’t just pregnant—I was pregnant and really, really bad at it. Into each life a little rain must fall, sure. Much of my life’s rain has had to do with making babies. At that point, I’d had three miscarriages—there’d be a couple more later on—and this pregnancy that seemed to be holding had been a particularly disgusting sort of drama from the get-go. My husband had become my custodial crew, following me around with a bucket and a damp rag. I was certain he was secretly wondering how he’d ever liked me well enough to get me pregnant in the first place. I’d never felt so profoundly mortal, so clearly made of dust.

We’d just arrived in Australia, my husband’s homeland. Miraculously arrived, more like. The gate agent in Los Angeles had taken one look at my pallid face, lifeless eyes, the whiteness of my lips, the roundness of my belly and had—all blessings on his coiffed and highlighted head—put his finger to his lips in a gesture of silence and kindly upgraded us to first class. We’d crossed the Pacific on sacred beds of solace, shrouded in feather duvets of glory.

We yelled out to Angela. To be more accurate, my lifelong friend, Heather, yelled “Angela!” to a group of runners who huddled near a car in the middle of a dusty, dirt-covered parking lot during a thirty-six-hour Ragnar running relay in early June.

Red earth caked our shoes and teeth, filling in the crevices of enamel and wicking fabric.

“Angela!” Heather yelled it again.

We hoped this blonde woman with long, thin, tan, athletic legs would turn around. We hoped that maybe the woman would yell back, “Heather,” or “Kase,” or “Heather and Kase!” We hoped that maybe this woman we hadn’t seen in twenty years would actually be Angela. The blonde woman didn’t respond. She walked away. But Heather had hope. Heather always has hope.

“She turned her head,” Heather said. “I swear. She turned her head. I know it’s her.”

“I think she did too,” I said. I did think that, though I also thought I could have imagined it.

Twenty years earlier Angela disappeared from our lives after a one-year visit. Why did we care? Partly because it’s what Heather and I do—when we’re together, we chronicle our lives as friends.

It’s another parenting drop-off. This time, I am driving my daughter, Sage, to Bozeman from Portland for their summer job with the Montana Conservation Corps. We started that morning in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where Sage climbed barefoot over a fence to gather dogwood flowers in the courtyard of the Holiday Inn Express. Sage showed up at the breakfast table with a paper cup from the buffet full of dogwood blooms and a Happy Mother’s Day card. Surrounded by other travelers, we shared breakfast in the sunny courtyard before getting back on the road.

Mother’s Day generates complex feelings for me. My mother has chosen not to be in my life since I was five. When my kids were small (they are now both in their early twenties), Mother’s Day unearthed feelings of grief and loss. But then, right in front of me, were these two beautiful souls. My husband would shepherd them through the day, trying to get them to behave in restaurants, keeping them busy making something or cleaning something. They were mildly reluctant, distracted and unconcerned with my feelings. I tried not to take their indifference personally. Containing my feelings about my own motherlessness was emotional gymnastics.

Driving to Bozeman with my youngest is an antidote to the typical Mother’s Day Blues and the internal struggle to protect others from my loss.