I drove out to the overlook at Fernwood State Forest, not feeling too well.

Adrienne was with me. We listened to the radio and chatted, casually, as we so often do now. I wish someone had told me sooner that when you stop being a homeschooling mother, you don't stop being a mother. In fact, it's easier to be a mother, because you're not a drill sergeant constantly wielding a math book. You just have to be a mom.

One day soon I won't be the mom anymore. Adrienne will be a grownup, and I will be alone. That wasn't what was modeled for me growing up. In my great big Irish Catholic family, and in the families I knew among the Catholic homeschoolers, a mom was never not a mom. She kept having babies with no end in sight, a baby every two years or so, the older daughters gradually taking on more and more of the housework until the eldest herself became a mother and the mother ascended to the rank of a grandma. There never needed to be a time when there weren't babies underfoot. But I am a different kind of mother. I'm the kind who has to learn to be myself.

I worry.

We drove up the back roads behind the airport in Wintersville, to the place where the housing developments drop away and Eastern Ohio really looks like Northern Appalachia. These are the foothills of a mountain range twice as old as the oldest dinosaurs. These are the beginning of the mountains that once stretched across central Pangea, before there was an Atlantic ocean. For just about as long as animals have had vertebrae, there has been an Appalachia.

In my mind's eye, I imagine that Appalachia always looked as it does now. For five hundred million years, there has been a road that goes up and down sharply, past respectably poor houses and obnoxiously wealthy houses and houses that look like they're falling over, by a clapboard church you just know is a hundred years old and then another church that looks like it was built out of a prefab barn. Then, suddenly, without warning, you're hugging the side of a mountain and driving down a narrow road, praying you don't take a corner too quickly and hit a guardrail or a white tailed deer. And then there's a ravine, and across the ravine a state park, with a green sign that says the risk of a wildfire is LOW. Then you get to the overlook.

Adrienne wanted to stay in the car and listen to the radio. She had only come for the drive and the talk; she didn't care about the scenic vista. I got out by myself.

By myself, I crunched through the noisy slush to the edge of the precipice.

This was the place where I heard the owls having an argument in the early summer. Now it's late winter, six weeks until it's time to plant the peas and onions, and the ground is white with snow. They say we're two days out from losing our democracy to a pack of oligarchs who will bleed us dry. Yet another round of interesting times.

Just about every year since Adrienne was born, I said to myself, "Thank goodness, the interesting times are over, and Adrienne can have a normal childhood now." And not a single year has been normal. We never did leave Steubenville for a respectable fresh start somewhere else. We got bullied out of our parish where I thought we'd found a home, partly because the pastor said my writing was "grave scandal." We never found a community among the respectable Catholic homeschoolers. We survived the pandemic. I discovered that my whole sect of the Catholic Church had been nothing but a vicious cult, and that I had been groomed by more than one severely abusive priest without knowing it, and I dealt with my trauma. She had her First Holy Communion at a church in Columbus, and then I gave up on being a good Catholic mother and put her in a public school. And now the second Trump term. This next round of interesting times will last until she's seventeen at the very shortest. She will never have a normal childhood, and I will never be a normal mother. It's too late.

At the edge of the scenic overlook, the world dropped away suddenly. Before me were the tops of trees, hugging the shale of the mountainside. Beyond the trees, at the bottom of the hill, was the road we'd come in on. Beyond that was a respectable farmstead that wouldn't have looked out of place any time in the past two centuries. Beyond that, more rolling foothills streaked with bare deciduous trees. Beyond that, the clouds touched the treetops. Beyond the clouds was the firmament, with God on the other side.

The only world in which I can possibly hope to please that God, is this one. Not in some imaginary world where I was capable of being that other kind of mother, but in this world where I have to be myself. Not in a country that lives up to what it promised to be, but in the United States of America as it falls apart. Not in the idealized version of the Catholic Church that I was raised to believe was beyond reproach, but in this terrible one which has destroyed my entire life. Not in central Pangea but in Northern Appalachia.

This is the only place in which I can ever find and speak with God, because this is the only place I am.

I did not speak with Him just then.

I stared out over the foothills, and snapped a photo, and went back to the car.