“What about jobs?” I had asked. “Does Style Queen work? To get money for all that makeup, and her skirts and everything?”

Ellie frowned, then raised her chubby thumb and two fingers. “She can be an actress or a model or a singer.” Before I could ask follow-up questions, or try to use this as a teachable moment in which I would emphasize the importance of education and hard work and remind her that the way you looked was never ever the most important thing about you, my daughter had dashed off, leaving me to contemplate how we’d gone from The Feminine Mystique and Free to Be . . . You and Me to this in just one generation.

The magazine was still open to the quiz on the couch beside me. I grabbed it, bending my head to avoid the scrutiny of the übermommy two seats down whose adorable newborn was cradled against her body in a pristine Moby Wrap; the one who was not wearing linty black leggings from Target and whose eyebrows had enjoyed the recent attention of tweezers.

Do you sometimes take more than the amount prescribed? Yes. Not always, but sometimes. I’d take one pill and then, ten or fifteen or twenty minutes later, if I wasn’t feeling the lift, the slow unwinding of the tight girdle of muscles around my neck and shoulders I’d expected, I’d take another.

Have you gotten intoxicated on alcohol or drugs more than two times in the past year? (You’re intoxicated if you use so much that you can’t function safely or normally or if other people think that you can’t function safely or normally.)

This was a tricky one. With painkillers, you did not slur or get sloppy. Your child would not come home from school and find Mommy passed out in a puddle of her own vomit (or anyone else’s). A couple of Vicodin and I could function just fine. The worst things that had happened were the few times Dave had accused me of being out of it. “Are you okay?” he’d ask, squinting at my face like we’d just met, or apologizing for being so boring that I couldn’t muster five minutes of attention to hear about his day as a City Hall reporter at the Philadelphia Examiner. Never mind that his anecdotes tended to be long and specific and depend on the listener’s deep interest in the inner workings of Philadelphia’s government. Some days, I had that interest. Other days, all I wanted was peace, quiet, and an episode of Love It or List It. But I’d been occasionally bored and disinterested even before my use of Vicodin and Percocet had ramped up, over the past two years, from a once-in-a-while thing to a few-days-a-week thing to a more-days-than-not thing. It wasn’t as if one single catastrophe had turned me into a daily pill popper as much as the accumulated stress of a mostly successful, extremely busy life. Ellie had been born, then I’d quit my job, then we’d moved to the suburbs, leaving my neighborhood and friends behind, and then my dad had been diagnosed. Not one thing, but dozens of them, piling up against one another until the pills became less a luxury than a necessity for getting myself through the day and falling asleep at night.

I checked “No” as Ellie skipped back over. “Mommy, is it almost our turn? This is taking for HOURS.”

I reached into my purse. “You can watch Les Miz,” I said. She handed me the phone and had the iPad out of my hands before I could blink.

“That’s so cute,” said the mother who’d just joined me on the couch. “She watches musicals? God, my two, if it’s not animated, forget it.”

I let myself bask in the all-too-rare praise: Ellie’s passion for Broadway musicals was one of the things I loved best about her, because I loved musicals, too. When she was little, and tormented by colic and eczema, and she hardly ever slept, I would drive around in my little blue Honda, with Ellie strapped into her car seat and cast recordings from Guys and Dolls and Rent and West Side Story and Urinetown playing. “Ocher!” she’d yelled from the backseat when she was about two years old. “I WANT THE OCHER!” It had taken me ten minutes to figure out that she was trying to say “overture,” and I’d told the story for years. Isn’t she funny. Isn’t she precocious. Isn’t she sweet, people would say . . . until Ellie turned four, then five, and she was funny and precocious and sweet but also increasingly temperamental, as moody as a diva with killer PMS. Sensitive was what Dr. McCarthy told us.

Extremely sensitive, said Dr. Singh, the therapist we’d taken her to visit after her preschool teacher reported that Ellie spent recess sitting in a corner of the playground with her fingers plugged into her ears, clearly pained by the shouts and clatter of her classmates. “Too loud!” she’d protest, wincing as we got close to a playground. “Too messy!” she’d whine when I’d try to lure her outdoors, into a game of catch or hide-and-seek, or ply her with finger paints and fresh pads of paper. Movies “made too much noise,” sunshine was “too bright,” foods that were not apples, string cheese, or plain white bread, toasted and buttered and minus its crust, were rejected for “tasting angry,” and glue and glitter gave her “itchy fingers.” For Eloise Larson Weiss, the world was a painful, scary, sticky place where the volume was always turned up to eleven. Dave and I had read all the books, from The Highly Sensitive Child to Raising Your Spirited Child. We’d learned about how to avoid overstimulation, how to help Ellie through transitions, how to talk to her teachers about making accommodations for her. We’d done our best to reframe our thinking, to recognize that Ellie was suffering and not just making trouble, but it was hard. Instead of remembering that Ellie was wired differently than other kids, that she cried and threw tantrums because she was uncomfortable or anxious or stressed, I sometimes found myself thinking of her as just bratty, or going out of her way to be difficult.

The woman beside me nodded at her son, who seemed to be about eight. He had a Band-Aid on his forehead, and he was making loud rumbling noises as he hunched over a handheld video game. “A little girl would have been so nice. I’ve got to bribe Braden to get him in the tub.”

“Oh, that’s not just a boy thing. Ellie won’t go near a tub unless it’s got one of those bath bombs. Which are eight bucks a pop.”

The woman pursed her lips. I felt my face heat up. Eight-dollar bath bombs were an indulgence for a grown-up. For a five-year-old, they were ridiculous, especially given that our mortgage payments in Haverford were so much higher than they’d been in Philadelphia, and that instead of a raise last year, Dave and everyone else at the Examiner had gotten a two-week unpaid furlough. When we’d filed our taxes the year before, we’d both been surprised—and, in Dave’s case, mortified—to learn that I was earning more with my blog than he was as a reporter. This, of course, had not been part of our plan. Dave was supposed to be the successful one . . . and, up until recently, he had been.

Three years ago, Dave had written a series about inner-city poverty, about kids who got their only balanced meals at school and parents who found it less expensive to stay at home, on welfare, than to look for work; about social services stretched too thin and heroic teachers and volunteers trying to turn kids’ lives around. The series had won prizes and the attention of a few literary agents, one of whom had gotten him a book deal and a hefty advance. Dave had taken the chunk of money he’d received when he’d signed the contract and driven off to Haverford, a town he’d fallen in love with when the newspaper’s food critic had taken him there one night for dinner. Haverford was lovely, with leafy trees and manicured lawns. The schools were excellent, the commute was reasonable, and it all fit into my husband’s vision of what our lives would one day be.

Unfortunately, Dave didn’t discuss this vision with me until one giddy afternoon when he’d hired a Realtor, found a house, and made an offer. Then, and only then, did he usher me to the car and drive me out past the airport, off the highway, and into the center of town. The sun had been setting, gilding the trees and rooftops, and the crisp autumnal air was full of the sounds of children playing a rowdy game of tag. When he pulled up in front of a Colonial-style house with a FOR SALE sign on the lawn, I could hear the voices of children playing in the cul-de-sac, and smell barbecuing steaks. “You’ll love it,” he’d said, racing me through the kitchen (gleaming, all stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, and tile floors), past the mudroom and the powder room, up the stairs to the master bedroom. There we had kissed and kissed until the Realtor cleared his throat twice, then knocked on the door and told us we needed to respond to the seller’s offer within the hour.

“Yes?” Dave asked. His eyes were shining; his whole face was lit up. I’d never seen him so boyish, or so happy, and it would have been heartless to tell him anything except what he wanted to hear.

“Yes.”

I hadn’t thought it through. There wasn’t time. I didn’t realize that I was signing up not just for a new house and a new town but, really, for an entirely new life, one where, with Dave’s encouragement, I’d be home with a baby instead of joining him on the train every morning, heading into the city to work. Dave wanted me to be more like his own mother, who’d gladly given up her career as a lawyer when the first of her three boys was born, swapping briefs and depositions for carpools and class-mom duties. He wanted a traditional stay-at-home mother, a wife who’d do the shopping and the cooking, who’d be available to sign for packages and pick up the dry cleaning and, generally, make his life not only possible but easy. The problem was, he’d never told me what he wanted, which meant I never got to think about whether it was what I wanted, too.