This week my daughter turned thirty. I binged on photographs of her and unspooled all those soft sentiments. Mercy was the only one of our babies that I practiced infant massage with, which may have been because she was so sweet tempered, or perhaps it contributed to that disposition. In either case, squeezing her oiled limbs, as she lay on a purple quilt in the sunshine was almost as luxurious as nursing. She was the middle child up until the twins arrived, and seemed immune to the sibling squabbles that hammered those early years. 

I remembered the party my friends threw when I turned thirty, the year Mercy was born. That group was my lifeline, reassuring me that I was at least in the arena when it came to raising children compassionately. Without them I wonder if I would have drifted out to sea. We had a babysitting coop, and spent afternoons at the playgrounds in Albuquerque. I learned how to spell Albuquerque. 

Then after the nostalgia subsided, I began to recall the angst. Those were the years that we were on government subsidy, and John worked at a temp agency for five bucks an hour and no benefits. Our apartment was cramped, and the cockroaches outnumbered us by a long shot. Since there was no yard for the kids' tricycles they were stacked up in the living room next to the Lego bin. The congregation John served on weekends was increasingly dissatisfied with him, and called for his resignation. The stress reached a tipping point, pushing his celiac disease into the forefront. A stranger called out of nowhere to say he had kidnapped my husband. Our car needed work, and a good friend lent us her van for a few weeks, a kindness I could never repay. My asthma peaked to the point that I was bone skinny.  The quote on our Christmas card that year was "Comfort ye my people," because I craved it. 

Yet the view three decades later is less encumbered by anxiety, and more like the one from a biplane just clearing the treeline. The path, however overgrown, led us to where we are now. I discovered that there is life after failure.