Hello, goodbye.

The night Lazlo came home, I went to bed with a feeling of completeness in my chest. Finally, finally, we're all together again. All of us. 

We meant to celebrate, but Story fell asleep on our way to dinner, so we settled for drive thru Taco Bell.  The kids and I had spent the ENTIRE day watching movies in the tiny room of the Stanford Guest House, the hotel that the Ronald McDonald House sends you to when someone in your family is sick, to keep you from contaminating the whole house. A little bit ago, someone brought the noro virus to the Ronald McDonald House, and it sent loads of immune compromised kids to the ER. My friend and her step daughter almost lost their dream Make A Wish vacation to Disney Land because of that virus. So here we are, the day we bring our last baby home from the hospital, only home is a hotel. But my days of hotels and Ronald McDonald House and Make A Wish and Stanford Hospital and sick kids are over. A new chapter is beginning, now. Now, I go home to Santa Cruz to pack because we're being evicted and we're off to start over somewhere else.

................

"Can I sit here?"

I look up from my booth in the community dining hall of the Ronald McDonald House to see a woman I recognize, but don't know. It's kind of an unspoken rule here that, unless you're already friends, you leave each other the F alone in the dining hall, because everyone is stressed and frazzled and just trying to scarf down their food before they rush off to do whatever sick kid thing they have to do. But I invite the woman to sit down. I've seen her around. She compliments me on my baby, tucked asleep in his wrap, against my chest. 

"This is Gus," I say, "His twin brother is still in the hospital."

"I have one of those, too." She replies, and suddenly I see why she's here, at the Ronald McDonald House, and sitting with me. She launches into her story about her baby, born prematurely with a terrible illness, surviving against all odds. As incredible as these babies are, all their stories basically have the same plot here. Because if they aren't here with the same plot line, it means they're dead. 

It was fifteen minutes of conversation later that I realized I knew this woman's incredible life story, but I didn't even know her name, and she didn't know mine. That's also par for the course around here. Stories and explanations first, names later. It feels so good to commiserate with someone who is going through it, themselves, that names don't even matter. My name could be Bozo the Clown or Freddie the Ax Murderer, and it wouldn't matter. We're all the same in that place, that strange space of time suspended in stress and hope and fear and gratitude.

I went back to Santa Cruz with that woman's story tucked away in my heart, and I think of her and her family and her incredible baby often. I probably always will. I will never forget the stories I've heard and the families I've met during my months at the Ronald McDonald House. They will stay with me forever, reminding me what I have to be grateful for.