Trying to be rational.

Not a good end to the summer for me. Problems on the home front that I can't resolve because they're not, in the long run, my problems. It's harder to look in the mirror and fix what you're missing, than it is to see what others are doing wrong, but you have a lot less control over the latter than the former.

I wonder if that's why I blamed myself so much for all that went wrong between Jesse and me when he was a teenager: if it was something I did wrong, then I could fix that. I was the grownup, so no matter what Jesse did, thought, heard or was told, no matter what, it was up to me to figure it out and fix it. But the clock ran out before we could sit down and make sense of his teens. We were just at the beginning, him still angry, but willing to put it aside, to live in the same house with me. Me still scared, angry a little myself, but able to talk to him a little, trying to feel my way toward reconciling. And Mr. Nomist so positive that we would work it out.

Fall is coming. The beginning of his end. This time, in his last year, we were trying to get him and his girlfriend to come to dinner on us. He would have none of it, no matter how we tried to make it work out; he would barely talk in the hallway. But we ran into each other-- at the grocery store, on the street, and we would talk as intimately as if we were sitting around a table together, close, sweet, hopeful. He had a hard side, that kid.