You do what you can.

Some come, and then more come and you get a tad dizzy, not in the falling-down sense, maybe more like foggy and dazed, but it’s okay, it’s okay. Every single bed in the house is taken, and the upstairs loveseat, and the living room sofa, and every night you load the coffeemaker and move it to the windowsill in your bedroom so in the dark of morning the drip drips maybe won’t wake the sofa child and everybody upstairs and you can get a few minutes for your brain. Or, that’s the hope.

(Your husband’ll fall straight back to sleep.)

(Once, in the middle of the night, you find the sofa child still on the living room carpet, dead to the world, because hours previous, getting settled, he thought the sofa was too hot, but in the morning you see he’s crawled up where he belongs and he still has Lulu with him, she must’ve crawled right along up with him, and she’s quietly wagging, not disturbing his slumber, just watching you out of her huge moon eyes. So that’s something.)

You cook some, if you’re able. Stupendous pans of meatballs, oatmeal they’ll eat for the sugar on top and the raisins except somebody can’t abide raisins. You skip the black pepper on the chicken because otherwise somebody else will weep and wail and gnash her teeth. A different day, when you open the microwave door after heating your dish for three minutes, it’s not in there after all. You forgot to put it in. A child says he has to make this peanut butter and honey popcorn he ate weeks ago at a party, he begs and begs and begs, and you say Well I’m not helping, your granddaddy has to help, and wouldn’t it be better with actual peanuts in it too? and then you throw up your hands and what ends up is a giant pan of half uncoated popcorn, and mixed in with the rest, something sticky-diaper brown.

All your scarves are on the floor because somebody always wants to wear your scarves. They’re still on the floor. They’re still on the floor. You let the salon lady put her client in your best orange living room chair and squirt the water and the defrizzer and nicely hair up the carpet. Well, it was already haired up from the extra dog. Once you come into the room to find your ugly squeeze toy certain relatives gave you slouched atop the stove. It was already dirty from some kid whamming it onto the floor, over and over, because of the satisfying thwack, and now somebody’s splayed it against the stovepipe indecently. There isn’t much to see, though. His tiny little thing.

You do the crazy faces, why not. You visit the boys making rockets with matches and tinfoil out in the shop, the flames spurting near the scrap wood and the dry hay and mostly fizzling out.

When an august man guest comes, not just some uncle or the cousin who has the baby everybody yearns for and clamors to hold, and you’d thought you’d be feeding the kids, not this man, so you’d made jello, but now the kids are eating over at the cousins’ and you’re left with all your dainty cups of dessert quivering with apricots, so you decide Oh well, give the man jello, fine. And whoop, he likes it. He says Is this apricots? He pronounces the a like in apple. Apricots. He says, I guess I’ve never really eaten jello. He says, I guess I’m not a jello snob anymore.

And when the younger two stuff themselves into your lower kitchen cupboards with the plan to make somebody who’ll be stopping by hunt for them, at least nothing shatters or tips over—not your glass cake plate, because you say Wait wait wait, let me take that out of your way, and not your glass coffeepot, a spare you also keep down there, and not the glass crockpot lid that always sits wobbily atop the earthenware crockpot bowl, and also not, in the other cupboard, your garbage buckets and dog food dishes. The kid squashed between the garbage and dog food has your Highlights magazines from Gift & Thrift along to read (in the dark? or what?) and makes squeaking noises to tip off the searcher, and really, it’s not for long, no harm done, you can laugh.

And when you hear the same two plotting to play restaurant, and you discover they’ve spread over the deck table your most beautiful tablecloth you made from a shower curtain from Gift & Thrift, you bark Hey, hold on, not that one. You have to fold it back up, put it back in the closet. But that might be all you do wrong. Obediently you choose from the menu (Cereal, chirios, rice crispies; Eggs, add pepper, salt, arugala, ketchup, chives; Toast, avacado, honey butter, butter; Jam Options, blackrazzberry, redrazzberry & strawberry). Obediently you eat. If you had to you’d fake gush Oh delicious delicious, but you needn’t fake because it’s true and you can tell the truth like a real Christian.

And once when a kid is out on the porch screaming because you hauled her out there to forestall your eardrums puncturing from her screaming in the house, something snaps and you stomp back outside and scream right back in her face, which isn’t Christian but even Christians break, don’t they. And let’s be perfectly clear. You wouldn’t trade a minute of all this for the world.