Note: This essay is written by Melissa Hart. She is a parent with ACEs parenting a child with ACEs.
I look around at the life we’ve created for her—the bedroom full of books and dress-up clothes and musical instruments, the photos on the wall of our family vacations to tropical beaches and wildflower mountains and national parks. I fight an urge to shake her little shoulders and stare into her big brown hostile eyes and yell, “Why can’t you just be happy?”
But I don’t . . . because I know better. The Everything Feeling’s got me in its grip as well, and has since I was her age.
* * *
I’m eight years old. My mother—my confidante and playmate and Brownie leader–buckles my siblings and me into our station wagon and flees from our chic Los Angeles suburb. She deposits us in a scrappy duplex half an hour north in a scrappier beachside community. A makeup less woman–Budweiser in one hand and Marlboro in another–embraces her. She’s my mother’s new lover. “We’re leaving your father,” Mom tells me.
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