My Chamomile tea smells of dry grass, and cat fur. I let the warm scented steam ground me while I look around for a place to sit in this Community Coffeehouse, which really is a house. I assume I’m in the acute-olfactory stage of coming down off a panic attack, because.I think of how this house smells like Grandma Angie’s, pine cleaner and sweet fried things and hot drinks. I’ve just dropped off Stephen and two of his band-mates at Youth Orchestra Practice. I am here because we got there barely in time, because the caravan of other orchestra moms left for their Meeting During the Meeting without me, because I wanted a place out of the rain and dark to gather my shattered nerves before heading back to the church venue where I left them. I doubt I’ll be missed. The other moms refer to each other variously as “such a strong personality” or “ a real character.” I’m a dumbass who got us to practice late, again, an idiot Lot’s Wife in constant flight from some disaster behind or inside me. Especially when I’m The Mom around these young scholar-musicians, their wit and confidence a constant squeeze at my heart. Even over the Youth Orchestra Mix disc I put in, I overhear snatches of friendly debates over Kumon or Kaplan, rock-climbing or bouldering, online chess or online poker. All the while I navigated through the fog and fluctuating waves of cold fear, hot shame, and…guilt., I think that was what pushed me closer towards my ever-present internal abyss, A sudden thought, ‘That music was just black dots and lines on a page seconds before those kids made it into this fugue”, and I’m down the well, walloped by an icy, side-swiping dread. That’s when I noticed the exhausted old Buick that had been panting behind us for the last few miles stumbled across the slow lane and shudderingly heaved over the shoulder and down a steep embankment. Some of my functioning nervous system thought taking the Downtown Loop instead of getting off at the next exit was a good move. The kids got into practice before the church locked up and shooed me away from the parking lot. I walked past alley cats and trashcans with an old car blanket around my shoulders, Rez-style, before I followed the sign that said Utopia Cafe: Meeting after the Meetings, 7-9. On the entrance path, a snail is waiting,momentarily perplexed by a pine-cone in its path. A man notices me noticing as he steps over it, holding open the door as I walk through. There is a huge sunken room with a round table and a smaller one with the counter I’m sitting at, where a counterman gives a greeting to each arrival before bringing them their drinks. “Scar Clan Survivor in the house”! “Whoa, it’s Crips Who Create!”. Door-opener pats the seat next to him, and I join them. I notice that my hands on the cup aren’t shaking anymore and decide to stay, and get another cup of tea.. I suddenly remember one of the first times I tasted chamomile, the sweet, common weed that grew wild with all the other cats and kids in our yard. I had held onto a cup just like this one a half-dozen times as a child, watching for survivors to crawl out of the cars that regularly crashed through the freeway rail into the ditch behind our house. So that's one mystery solved. In the playlist of triggers, it's a deep cut, I would say, if I had any understanding of music. I join in the prayer for the unknown souls who struggle alone, and then it’s time for Shares and A-Ha Moments. When I say something about not belonging, someone suggests “Why don’t you stay and listen before you decide?” They begin taking turns telling their tender, circumscribed ‘shares”. No fingerholds of beginning, middle or end. As circular and bottomless as the coffee in the mismatched cups in our shaky hands. The one-day-at-a-time pace out of a slippery slope, one unexpected detour in the road enough to reduce you to immobility. No tutor holding a sturdy, unambiguous stairway to the stars. “You play the hand you’re dealt”, I would say, if I knew anything about games with rules. “You have to discipline your thoughts first”, is one A-Ha moment. Stephen would say the same thing. I try to remember the last time I was able to help him in any meaningful way with his homework. A lesson on integers, both of us proud and delighted with the mystery of negative numbers. “-1 + 1 = 0”) Before closing prayer, counter guy comes by with an old-school picnic basket full of day-old pastries. I accept a snickerdoodle twinkling with rainbow sprinkles. A volunteer for the closing prayer hopes that what we heard here is blessed, and that it will carry help to those who need it. A moment of silence again, and this time,I have a ridiculous microvision of a family climbing out of a Buick crashed at the bottom of a deep ravine. I’m there, too, flicking out my lap-robe like a magic carpet over the ditch, where it magically turns into a plank the kids walk across. We sit on the grass and eat delicacies from an old picnic hamper. It’s so ridiculous that I feel quite restored, and give everyone a hug on my way out the door. As soon as I pass the trash again, I am thinking of Daisy Grandma Angie's scrawny black-and-white cat, the lone female of a rotating tribe of twenty or so who only ever produced one surviving kitten. She spent every night dutifully searching further and further away from home to hunt for her little son. When she could no longer compete for the plumpest mice and slowest birds, she raided the trashcans in the first-wives' apartments across Garvey Blvd. I remember laughing at her the morning she came in with an air of triumph and exhaustion, carrying a partially-wrapped DingDong as though it was an antelope. She growled when I took it away from her, and I laughed at her. Oh Daisy, I thought. Blessed are the mothers catching sleep during the day, who summon the courage to ferret through life's trashpiles in search of life's finer things, over and over again, night after night in search of the occasional treasure. The unknown, imperfectly socialized dime-a-dozen domestic scrubs who bring home their best to the child who accepts it as a given, because it is no gift, because it is what we do. I’m not a Mama Bear or a TIger Mom or even much of a Rez Mom. If I am very lucky, I’ll be what I am - the unknown, the unknown actor who resets the game to Zero for my child. I hear before I see the kids let out from practice. Stephen is in the front passenger side, spotting the wrapped cookie with serious hazel eyes. “Is that for me?” he asks gravely, and then takes a big bite.