Saints for All Occasions

by J. Courtney Sullivan

she held out hope that this was one of those calls from her mother that had the whiff of somber urgency but was in fact just a heads-up

that Macy’s was having a white sale.

Motherhood was a physical act as much as an emotional one. It took every part of you.

This, then, was the hardest part of being a parent. Your children had their private worlds, where you could never protect them. They were yours and yet not yours.

Their marriage was never built on romance. It was built on a sense of duty. It could weather disappointment. They had had hard times and good ones, mostly determined by what the children were doing at a given moment. She thought a marriage that was only about the two of them, or any two people for that matter, would have been too much pressure. Your children, your family gave you a reason to keep on.

But as far as she had seen, life rarely let you be purely joyful. There was always something there to torture you if you let it.

Nothing had just happened to her. She had made a choice and then she had made another and another after that. Taken together, the small choices anyone made added up to a life.