12

I’m sitting in ski gear at the base of a mountain in Vermont. The last time I skied here was in 2008, the winter I learned I was pregnant.

Jason and I had been together six months. I was twenty-eight and certain of only one thing: I was not ready to be someone’s mother.

That pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. Now, nearly nineteen years later, I’m on the verge of having a twelve-year-old, and I feel that same vertigo of unpreparedness.

For all the competence and confidence I’ve gathered since then, for all my fluency in Gen Alpha slang, this age feels daunting. It was when I started remembering everything — when my father could no longer convince me certain things hadn’t happened, and my mother could no longer insist her breasts were real.

That was the year my parents’ divorce settled into my bones. It was when I started talking to boys that I began to understand both my strengths and my vulnerabilities as a woman. It was when the sugar coating wore off. Nothing tasted quite as simple after that.