a moon, worn as if it had been a shell

I had a stack of papers on the dining room table that isn't really for dining but for stacks of arguments-to-be and the slow leaking of The Husband's work - bills - and a bowl of odd Legos and cardboard circles for cakes and pastry tips and one of the stacks had a paper, a bill for thousands of dollars -- due, of course -- an old treatment for Sophie, another treatment that didn't really work and the form stating the insurance increase and the form for the judge who is deciding whether Sophie is mildly retarded or severely retarded and I was zipping up Sophie's sweater, trying to get her out of the door and to school and the day was beautiful, like paradise it is, always, here in Los Angeles, an extended period of green because of perfect rains. I thought what's it all for? what's it all for? and I thought, as I do quite frequently, more than once a day and far more frequently than a normal mother of normal kids, even teenagers who drive (because those normal mothers say it all the time, that they, too, worry) what if she dies? dies young? what will it all have been for? the fighting? the arguing? the searching and fixing and trying? what for? And I looked into her eyes, like pools they are, but black not blue, the light at the bottom, you have to search and I knew what it was for and it was for nothing all that fighting and working and trying and reaching it was all for nothing it wouldn't matter if she died but what did matter was the love and that was all that mattered, the love, there's nothing else that matters but the love and that's that light you have to search for to remember to live by.