She looked dejected when she came in the door.

Dragging her swim bag behind her, she shrugged when I asked her how practice went.

“It was OK, I guess,” she said. Then she paused, heaved her bag into its cubby next to the back door and shrugged again. “I didn’t get Swimmer of the Month.”

I squeezed her shoulder lightly. “Honey, you weren’t there a lot this month. It’s been hard to get you to practice, but I know you’re a great swimmer and you try hard,” I said.

She shrugged a third time and nodded.

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”

I don’t subscribe to the theory that every kid should get a medal, that each player should have his or her moment on the podium. Life is a competition and when I was a kid, that was clear in every interaction I had with the world. I never won an award in my life, but I still came out of childhood with the understanding that, if I wanted to, I could compete.

Still, it was difficult to watch my child struggle with this lesson.

“Em,” I called to her as she walked up the stairs. “Honey, I’m proud of you.”

She graced me with a brief but bright grin.

Thanks, Mom.

***

I’ve been writing for a long time. I used to write in notebooks, then in cotton-covered journals and now on the Internet. I heard a lot that I was gifted, that I would make it, that I could be somebody in the world of words. That if only I would try, put my neck out, put my pride on the line I could play in the big leagues, go to the big show.

For a long time I sat and waited for that recognition to come to me. I wanted to be discovered.

Then I figured out that you have to stick you head under the faucet to get wet, so I did that, too. And I had my 15 minutes, that’s for sure. Lately I’m behind the scenes, writing “clicky” headlines and being pushed to bring in pageviews in that peculiar, hypocritical way of the Interwebz. But something has changed.

Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s the rest of the world but either way, I’m no longer interested in taking a tongue lashing from strangers and especially not from those who know me well enough to realize that when I write something now, something for money, that is my voice, my trained monkey—that is not me, my belief system, my values.

Because what I really want to write would bury me. I want to write about how the United States is one of the biggest purveyors of violence against children, both here and abroad, and we are particularly keen to murder babies with brown skin (but we definitely react when suburban kids get murdered, but the news cycle on that lasts about four months), be it with drones, embargoes, generational poverty or lax gun laws.

I want to write how you shame me, and I shame you. How the Internet and social media give us a strange and terrible freedom to shout our judgment from the mountain tops, but in such a way that the violence of our words feels very … removed. I’m not innocent—I get paid by the machine that exists just to fuel this rage.

I’m stopping, though.

I’m leaving the pageview mills. I’m stepping away from it to examine my own conscience. I’ve been writing online, with vigor, for seven years. I should have a thick skin. That a few people now have the ability to hurt my feelings from afar is a warning signal that I’m rubbed raw from exposing myself and my views in a public forum for too long.

I used to think that my role in this world was to bear witness. That’s why I signed up to become a journalist, with all the shitty hours, worse than shitty paychecks and the thankless job of exposing the truth to people who just don’t want to hear it, or at the very least only want to hear their own version of the truth.

Instead, I’ve become the worst of the lot. I’ve become a pundit.

I won’t ever get the big job. I won’t ever get the gig that I once dreamed of. I’m 42 years old and I am never going to be the editor of The New York Times, which is OK, because it will be out of business before long, anyway.

I used to care about that very, very much and not so long ago I found myself wrestling with the envy that threatened to overcome me as I watched people I consider my peers get that award instead. It was eating me alive.

I was modeling poorly for my children.

This isn’t a “poor me” plea for you to tell me how talented I am, or how I shouldn’t give up. I haven’t given up, not at all. But I also haven’t shown up for practice very often lately, and when I do my stroke is lazy. I rely on my old tricks, I don’t look at my form with a critical, competitive eye, because I’ve developed contempt for my sport.

I am never going to be Swimmer of the Month. I think maybe I don’t even want that, and it is a huge relief to finally say so.

I feel so backed up, it’s been too long since I’ve written anything, anywhere, that had any real meaning but the fact of the matter is, I feel like I’ve lost my voice.

There’s plenty to say, plenty to talk about. But I can’t get it out. I think about writing and it makes me want to put my pajamas on and go to bed.

Granted, a lot of stuff makes me feel that way right now. But I always wanted to write. I don’t right now. Or rather, I want to but I just … can’t.

I mean, technically I’m writing right now, right? But it isn’t artful, it isn’t dealing with some pretty pain or some lovely universal truth. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m only interested in my own truth right now.

I’m kind of pissed off these days, too. Which is better than the sad, sorry-ness of my self before I had surgery in April. I was unhappy. But coming that close to the edge, being that sick? A lot of that shit doesn’t matter to me anymore, the stuff I was unhappy about.

I agonized about work and self and career and balance and gender roles and parenting a kid with a mental illness and not having granite counters like every fucking one else I know but dragging a catheter out my hooha for five weeks kind of put that all into perspective.

I love my kids. I love my husband. My No. 1 job in this world is to love and care for them, in all the forms that takes, if it is being the economic engine of my family or making Nutella sandwiches every day until my kids turn 18.

I’m all up, all in.

I do know that every day I live here is another day wearing a hair shirt and I want out, we all want out, even the kids are sick of the corn and the car trips and they want to live close to their grandparents and their cousins. And for once we feel united, we feel like we’re leaning forward instead of stuck in an intractable morass of misery.

I’m angry still but that anger is productive, it’s pointed in all the right directions, aimed at the proper targets.

I’m overweight right now and that’s pissing me off. My middle hurts, from navel to pelvis, and that’s pissing me off. It still hurts to pee, I can’t remember the words for things like “hose” and “jacket” and it’s all from being knocked out and every time I hit my head I’m supposed to go to the ER but I don’t, and all of that is pissing me off.

But here’s the thing—whatever doesn’t kill you, doesn’t make you stronger. It just really, really hurts.

You decide to be strong or not.

I’m the decider. I’m deciding to stand up and push on and lean into the wind and I’m going to close the book on this place, this season. I’m going to write a new chapter. Just you wait and see.

When I was 12 years old, my dad took me, my best friend and my little sister to see Duran Duran at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, on a school night.

I was so excited. It was the pinnacle of my life to date—I mooned over that band like they were the second coming. My dad wore earplugs and nodded in approval at the opening act, Billy Idol.

“Not bad,” he said to me.

That’s the kind of parent my father was. He groused and complained every time we got new shoes but he sprang for tickets for this show and even took me on a weeknight, an hour’s drive from our house. That same year, he forked over what for our family was a huge sum of money for me to go to England for three weeks to visit a school friend who moved there the year prior.

My dad wanted to expand my world. He wanted to give me advantages he couldn’t even have dreamed of as he slept on the enclosed porch of the run-down rental house my grandmother rented for their family —just her, my dad and his sister and brother. She was a teenage mom who worked in a donut shop. His dad was an alcoholic who left when my father was just four years old.

It wasn’t an easy life. But my dad was smart and he wanted more. He worked his hardest and went to college on full scholarship. He brought a suitcase and a book case and he leveraged his intelligence into a career that took him from intern to a member of the executive board by the time he died.

He married my mom when she was 18 and pregnant. They lost that baby, but still they stayed married. I was born into poverty two years later and my father spent the rest of his life working hard every day to make sure that poverty was defeated.

My parents, they broke the cycle of poverty using their brains and their love.

I am so blessed. It wasn’t always an easy childhood, but I should be a statistic and instead, I’m sitting in my family room in a four-bedroom house, with my college degree, my job in the arts, supporting my family and keeping our heads above the water line, unlike so many others. My children do not live in poverty, like my dad did.

That’s why I was so upset yesterday.

Yesterday was the ninth anniversary of my father’s death. I held his bare foot in an ICU room as he bled to death, chanting the Hail Mary in the hopes that the divine mother would intervene and save my dad. It was the hardest day of my life.

I didn’t break that day, and I still haven’t, but yesterday I couldn’t shake a feeling of shame that I didn’t even know was there until someone accidentally named it for me.

I am ashamed. I am ashamed that I took the gifts my family gave me and squandered them. I am a malcontent, fighting always to see the sun but drawn to the darker hues. I have so much and I want more more more, but I don’t want to make the hard choices that would enable it.

My father would be so disappointed in me.

That’s how I feel today, on the day after.

Old friends are here today, people I haven’t seen since the eve of my 18th birthday, the night my parents went out on the town to say goodbye to the city we’d come to love. As quickly as the dream began, it was over—in three weeks we’d be leaving the U.K. and heading back to the states. Me, to college, a miserable first-year experience that set the tone for the remainder of my time in Boston. But today, we were all together, only this time the children belonged to me and I got to sit with the adults. We laughed about dog kennels and ski trips and things only those who shared our experience as ex-pats could understand. Mike is alight with pride and love for his grandson, Pat is still Pat, only now a schoolteacher mindful of the foibles of the middle-school set. My father should have been there. Instead, this year it will be nine years he is in his grave.  I missed him. He should have been there with us today, at the beach, burying my son in the sand up to his neck, at dinner with a beer in his hand, after in the living room, his arm absently draped around my mother’s shoulder, his good-night kiss on my forehead. He should have been there.

The rain today put us all in a bad mood, even though we were ready for a break from the beach. Yesterday, the ocean looked like a huge sheet being shaken out; roll upon roll upon undulating roll of waves hitting the shore. The littlest one was determined to defeat the surf, marching headlong (headstrong) into the white foam. Once, we were both knocked down by a wave that broke right behind us, pushing us down and up the beach, tumbling and tumbling into the sand. Without thinking, my arm shot out into the space where I saw him go down and, lo and behold, I got purchase. I pulled him up from the water as the sand exfoliated an entire layer of skin from my rear end. But today, it rained. By bedtime we were all ready to be apart from one another. Tomorrow is a new day, a clean slate, a new topography with which to grapple, and conquer.

A long time ago, I brazenly decided to stop being so cautious.

I wrote what I wanted, lived how I wanted, threw myself into my life and career with what seemed like dangerous abandon. In fact, I called it my year of living dangerously.

It led to many good things. While the good things were fleeting, I can see now that they laid the groundwork for the emotional, physical and professional headspace I find myself in these days.

Flirting with death leaves you with clear vision and realigned priorities. There is so much bullshit that has fallen away from my life. I just don’t care about it anymore. It isn’t worth caring about right now….maybe it never was. But right now, I feel more reckless than I ever have.

I can’t allow myself to be chained up by expectations from others that don’t match with the life I want. And I can’t let my own ideas about how to measure happiness and success (granite counters don’t count as winning) interfere with how I need to live.

Right now I kind of have a get-out-of-jail-free card. I was severely injured and very ill, and the time required for me to get better left a lot of time for thinking about what would make me happy.

It’s pretty basic: Happy, healthy children who have all of their needs met and most of their wants satisfied. A marriage that is a partnership, one that gives and takes with whoever is up at the moment, and whoever might be down. A roof over my head that is clean and comfortable, and a vacation by the sea once a year. Loving relationships with my family of origin.

I see on my social networks people I once considered my peers in talent and drive succeeding at the kind of work and life that I once thought I wanted. But I see how they spend their lives in conference rooms and on airplanes, away from their partners and kids.

I would hate that.

I enjoy my work, but I love writing. I don’t have to work to get the things I love.

I’m taking a deep breath.

My name is Amy. I’m 41 years old and I have most of what I need and a lot of what I want. You can’t put a value on me. I won’t let you. I am worth more than rubies, a price you cannot match.

I am going to live like each day might be my last because it almost was, and that, my friends, means living dangerously—again.

And maybe always.

Oh, friends.

What happens when you take a person well-known for her own personal naval gazing (some might say narcissism but to those people I say bite me) and you add in a serious health scare?

I’ll tell you what. You get me, a person who is freakishly worried about dropping dead.

I would like to tell you that I’m fine. The fact of the matter is that I’m not. I’m still bleeding vaginally, I’m still suffering post-surgical pain, I’m still tossing back pain killers five to six times a week, I’m still waking up in the middle of the night with an ache in my bladder and my kidney that is enough to drive me out of a deep sleep and into the bathroom to wait nervously for my body to do what it has done naturally for the last 41.8 years—take a piss.

It’s summertime, and I should be getting ready for my long trek across the midwest and the east coast to get to my mecca, the home for my soul, the place I feel the happiest, the ocean.

Instead I’m getting blood draws every three days, injecting myself in the belly with blood thinners and getting a pelvic exam once a week where the doc who put me in this position sticks a giant Q-tip up my padoodledoo and paints the top of my vaginal cuff with astringents to try to stop the bleeding.

I’m so angry.

This weekend we were supposed to go to Ohio for a wedding. I’ve been in captivity since April 15 and I desperately wanted to go to Cleveland for the weekend.

(And let’s not even get started on how that measures my mental health and outlook. I WANTED to go to CLEVELAND for a FAMILY EVENT.)

Alas, I cannot. My blood thinners are still up in the air. I’m still bleeding, despite the giant Q-tip and its astringent and I am so exhausted and sore still that vacuuming the boy’s room pushed me right over the edge yesterday.

How is that possible? I’m 41 years old. And vacuuming made me need a nap.

I know I will eventually get better. But I’m so uneasy right now. I’ve entered the purgatory of not-yet-well-but-not-still-sick and it’s a hard place to navigate.

I swear to you this. I will get to the ocean.

I won’t stay here, on this burnt-out little piece of suburban shit. I won’t.

I woke up before 6 a.m. with a pain spread across my lower back, a leftover from the last two months of physical trauma I endured after a hysterectomy that went terribly wrong.

[Here are the facts: On April 15, I underwent a robotic hysterectomy. On April 22, I woke up after what I thought was a 15-minute endoscopic procedure to repair a nicked ureter, and woke up four hours later to be told that when they opened me up, my abdomen was filled with urine and blood and the flesh around a wound in by bladder was "green." Two weeks later and one week after being released from hospital, I was back for another stay after two acute deep vein thrombosis were discovered, one in my right gonadal vein and one in my inferior vena cava, close to my lungs.]

It’s been weeks of waking up this way: Sore, foggy from the pain medications and the eight combined hours of anesthesia but too keyed up to go back to sleep. My body feels permanently braced for a blow, even though I’m better now, healing.

The urinary catheter that plagued me for four weeks while the stitches in my bladder knit back together is gone, so are the bilateral stents that were inserted in my ureters to let them heal from any unseen injuries sustained when the doctor took out my uterus.

The joke is this: I really needed that hysterectomy. My uterus was the size of someone 12 weeks pregnant, there was endometriosis all over it, my cervix and my bladder.

They burned the endo off my bladder. The injury I sustained there, the one that could have easily been fatal, was thermal.

****

This week has been hard for my son.

He hasn’t wanted to go to school, he’s weepy and recalcitrant in the mornings. The year is almost over and it’s his last at the school he’s attended since just days after he turned three. We’ve had one child or another at that school for nearly five years, and saying farewell to it will be bittersweet.

It was very hard on him, my boy, when I was in the hospital. Twice in the middle of the night I disappeared into the bowels of the ER and he woke up to my absence. Each time, I came home sicker than the last time, on strict orders to move as little as possible, lest I bleed from the catheter and put myself in danger thanks to the myriad of blood thinners in my system.

I was immobile, pale and thin, 12 pounds lighter than I was the day I  went in for that first surgery. I was weak, muddled and in pain, unable to care for them as I normally do. Daddy and grandmothers were on duty in my stead and each day we talked by FaceTime or Skype while I was in the hospital his face collapsed on itself earlier and earlier into our conversation.

I’ve been home for weeks now. Two nights ago, he turned back to face me before he went upstairs for bed, sippy cup in one hand.

Mom, he said. Mom, I’m so glad you’re home.

Every day in the car at drop off he begs to stay home; I remind him that his days with Miss Carolyn are waning and he needs to take his back pack and go inside with her. I give him a million kisses for his pocket and send him on his way, making our ordinary, daily promise:

See you after school.

***

Six months ago today, 20 parents sent their children to school and shortly afterward, 20 6- and 7-year-olds lay dead on their classroom floors or in the washroom, the teachers who tried to save them holding some of them as they died.

That day, I was unable to turn away from the news coverage, deeply empathetic and easily imagining myself in that firehouse, waiting for the most terrible news. I cannot shake the understanding of the fragility of my children. The story told by one mother who lost her daughter that horrible day about how her child disliked going to school and how hard it was for that little girl to get on the bus each day stayed with me.

Her daughter didn’t want to go to school. Her mother sent her there, gently encouraging her, promising to see her again later that afternoon, like every ordinary day that passed before Dec. 14, 2012.

It was no ordinary day.

***

Henry woke up today with a tear on his cheek, his eyes puffy from allergies. His monkey pajama shirt and plaid pants as familiar as the sunrise, he begged me to let him stay with me today.

I want to be with you, Mama! I want to stay home. Please let me stay home today.

I cajoled, hugged and gently chastised.

You need to go. There are only a few days left. Then you’ll be home with me every day for such a long time.

He countered, pleaded and cried.

Don’t make me go!

The pain in my kidneys flared up again, and I remembered what it felt like the day the doctor told me I was walking around with a blood clot in my body, close to my heart, a silent, ticking clock counting down the end of my days.

I remembered Newtown and all the parents there who wish with all their hearts today and every day that maybe, just maybe, their child had stayed home the day a madman ripped their lives apart.

Today, I let my son stay home.

I’m writing this from my hospital bed.

I broke down this morning, in front of two strangers. One a social worker, the other a nurse. I told the story again and again, and now it has a coda: I have two blood clots, dangerous ones, ones that could have killed me quickly and silently.

I went to the ER Sunday morning when I woke up, looked down and saw my catheter bag full of blood. Nine hours and one precautionary CT scan later they found a large clot in the vein leading to my right ovary had formed post-surgeries.

A small piece of that clot had broken off and is sitting in my inferior vena cava.

My friend happened to be the radiologist on duty. My mother-in-law happened to still be here. My brother-in-law happens to be a Mayo-trained, excellent hematologist. I haven’t bled since my arrival in the ER. No one knows why that bag filled up with blood, but it never happened again.

My father’s hand, here at work. My daddy’s fingers on my rope, lowering me back down. Letting out some slack. Making sure I stay tethered.

My friend the radiologist, he tells me, “Someone was watching out for you.”

My dad. I know it.

But my rope is still taut. This series of unfortunate events is pushing me further and further to the end of it. I’m angry. I’m scared. The work I struggled to get, the ship I worked so hard to right, is tilting as clients go unserviced and payments go unmade.

I have been in this bed since Sunday. I am surrounded by love and support, bombarded with prayer and warmth on all sides. But my family needs me. I must go home. I must get well.

The nurse cocks her head. She looks at my tears. Get up, she says. Walk. Go outside. Do what makes you feel like you aren’t here.

I tell her I need to write.

My baby girl is at home pulling out her eyebrows. My baby boy struggles to hold himself together when we kiss each other over fiberoptic wires (miracle of ages!) and his face collapses in on itself as he begs, Mommy, Mommy hurry up. Mommy, come home. Twice now, they go to bed and in the morning I’m not there, for days at a time.

We’re all holding our breath. We’re all clinging to the rope. We’re all nursing wounds and massaging scars and praying to ears we hope, oh hope of hopes, aren’t deaf. We are an island, we are a village. We are one, we are many. We are singular, we are plural.

Oh, how I want to go home. Oh, how I want to be well.

I’m here in this ugly hospital room, willing my body to heal so I can throw my loves, and you, too, some rope to hold on to.