I just spent a wonderful weekend in Houston, cavorting and plotting and reflecting and deep-thinking and giggling with some of the brightest and most brilliant and beautiful and bad-assed women on the interwebs. I left uplifted and inspired and more than a little in love with my community.

Then Air Canada messed up my flight connections, and I deflated a little. Then they lost my beautiful red shoes – along with the rest of my luggage – and I deflated some more.

Then I got home and Jasper started struggling to breath and had to be rushed to the hospital – again, again – and my husband raced off with him while I curled up with the girl and my heart was punctured in so many places that I didn’t so much deflate as collapse in a tattered mess and Houston and Mom 2.0 and all the glitter and rainbows and bacon-wrapped-shrimp taco awesome of that space receded utterly and – this is, of course, entirely predictable and fully banal – I felt scared and alone and I cried.

I knew that everyone was still there, of course: this is the magic of our community, that we are always there, that there are always virtual hands at the ready to catch us when we stumble. But there are, still, moments when virtual hands are not quite enough – when they feel like spectres, shadows of the real thing – and one’s consciousness of that – one’s sense-memory of holding real hands and the betterness of that – overwhelms and one is overcome by the deep, deep need for the warmth of real flesh and one wishes for actual touch and the remoteness of that wish provokes a sadness that echoes deep in one’s heart.

(I’m not ready to write – I do not, right now, want to write – about the ugh and the oof and the shake-fists-at-heaven do-not-wantiness  that are provoked by one’s child undergoing recurrent episodes of struggling to breath. Jasper was able to come home this morning, and the immediate danger is passed, so the fear is less intense, but I feel so beaten down by it, this fear of breathlessness, and I am tired and I just want to spend a few hours telling my self that it’s all okay and not that bad and what were we worrying about anyway, even if that might involve some lying, so.)