And suddenly I look at her and I see myself... and every mother and wife, all of us torn between two worlds, tempted to pull away from time to time. We sit side by side on my bed, just like when I was a teenager. I would read her my journal late at night, sometimes until sunrise. "It's a school night," my mom would say. "You need to get up early." But she would stay with me until I was tired, until I had exhausted all my stories. "Archer will be up soon," she warns now. "You should sleep." "But wait!" I say. "I almost forgot to tell you..." So she stays, even though I know she's tired.

I tell her about how scary the flight home was, how we got stuck in a storm, and how I thought we were going to die. "All I could think about was Archer and all the things I would miss. Then I remembered how you told me, when I was learning to drive, to visualize a force field around the car. So I closed my eyes and imagined a giant rainbow around the airplane and I said, I'm so lucky, I'm so lucky, until the man beside me stopped crying and I knew we had escaped the storm."

"You wanted to be home?"

"I did."

I look up at the glow- in-the-dark stars still stuck to my ceiling all these years later and I wonder why my mom hasn't taken them down. Maybe in a way she doesn't want to let go. Maybe neither of us do.

"Thank you for watching Archer."

"Thank you for coming home."

And we hold hands, two silhouettes in the window I used to climb out of in the night, plotting my escape into the adult world.

From the book Rockabye, by Rebecca Woolf.