when you feel like you don’t fit or really belong

Someone has to be that Mother.

That mother who drives a full 3 hours to the border with a packed mini-van and anxious kids and creeps through a 20 minute traffic backup under the hot, beating sun—

only to rifle through her wallet and look up feebly to tell the custom’s officer she doesn’t have birth certificates for 2 of her children.

Yeah — that would be me.

“Do you have any ID at all — for either one of them?”

The custom’s officer asks it gently. Like he doesn’t want to push the flustered and flailing over any imagined or very real edge.

He glances back at the long snake of vehicles behind me, waiting. In the sun. That’s not moving either.

“Um… no.” I shuffle through my wallet again. “No, sir — I don’t.”

Does the earth open up and swallow the Abiram of mothers?

 

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