 Jason, my twelve-year-old step-son, rapidly pounds his bare feet up the stairs as if evacuating a smoke-filled building. “Dad, you coming?” A wrinkled, white t-shirt engulfs his lean frame.
Evan, my husband, holds two bottles of wine and walks deliberately up each step. He knows there is no fire—just another end-of-season baseball party to attend. “We won’t be back too late.” Evan squishes his mouth against mine and then kisses each of our three younger children, 8, 7, and 2, who are busy decorating their bellies with temporary dragon tattoos.
“Stay late—I want you two to have fun,” I say. “Just take a cab if you have too many drinks.” Evan rarely goes out with his friends these days, and I know he and Jason need some quality time together.
“Brand new batteries in the breathalyzer,” Evan tells me. “Don’t you worry. But since you mention it, I think we’ll plan on that.”
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 My dad is Lutheran, my mom is Jewish. My childhood exposed me to traditions from both denominations, but I certainly wouldn’t describe myself as religious.
Spiritual, yes.
Religious, no.
At birth, I was given the Hebrew name “Chai,” which means life, but that’s as far as Judaism went. Sure, there were big Bar Mitzvah parties for my friends, but the only time my family lit a menorah was when we visited my grandmother’s house.
I do recall my dad’s Lutheran side of the family whispering nasty things about Jews, so I assumed my parents had come to some sort of understanding that religious rituals would not take place in our house, or maybe they just never spoke of it at all.
No, worship was not a part of my upbringing.
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 My husband Evan says, “I think we should drive all the kids down to San Diego to visit my family.”
I remain silent, imagining the overwhelming stress of all four of children—2, 7, 8, and 12—trapped inside of our car for an eight-hour drive. Ten hours if you count the times we’ll have to pull over for pee breaks, stretch breaks, and sanity breaks. Not to mention that we’ll have to feed them.
Maybe I can keep a flask of vodka in my diaper bag?
“We could stay overnight somewhere halfway,” Evan continues, “make a fun vacation out of it.”
Fun?
It’s not that I don’t want to see Evan’s family, because I do, but I’m just not equipped to handle the mayhem of one tantrum-throwing two-year-old, two girls who constantly bicker, and a pre-teen who gets easily annoyed by all of them.
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 Tatiana, my eight year old, bounces on the arm of my leather office chair, doing her best to distract me from the writing I need to finish.
“Honey, can you please stop?” I ask her. “You know that makes me dizzy.”
She knows, but she doesn’t want to wait any longer. “Mommy, I’m just sitting here.”
My hands type quickly on the keyboard. “This will only take me five more minutes.”
With four kids and endless revisions of my memoir, Drop Dead Life: A Pregnant Widow’s Heartfelt and Often Comic Journey through Death, Birth, and Rebirth, I feel like I’m always trying to squeeze in five more minutes. No more manis or pedis. No more kickboxing classes. No more sleep.
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 Dana and I clink our tequila-filled shot glasses, as our combined six children—2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 12—all sprint across the hardwood floors of her home.
Tatiana, 8, shouts, “Get em!” and then, like a vulture in flight, she swoops her locks of matted medusa hair down upon a squirming pile of elbows and stinky feet.
Voices squeal: “Get off . . . Mommy . . . Stoooppp . . . You farted on me!”
Finally, the kids tumble aside, one by one, and Jason, 12, reveals his sweaty, red face. “You wanna help me here?”
Poor Jason.
Dana says, “Looks like you’ve got it handled, bud.”
I laugh, raising my glass. “Here’s to being together.”
Dana tilts her head back, swigs the Patron, and then eagerly sucks the juice from her lime wedge. “Wish we could do it more often.”
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 On Father’s Day, I hold the wristwatch — a stainless steel Bell & Ross— noticing the delayed clicks of the white second hand. My thumb moves in circular motions across the waterproof glass, and I am surprised by the weight of the timepiece.
Erik, my 29-year-old husband, pleaded with me for this expensive watch.
But I said, “You know we can’t afford that right now.” We were saving money to buy our first house in over-priced Marin County, CA.
“Hyla, he’s going to give it to me for one-third the cost.”
Oh, Erik. “Why do I have to be the one who has to say no?”
Erik had put me in charge of our finances after he’d accepted that his enthusiastic spending habits wouldn’t bode well for our future. We were newly pregnant with our second daughter and moving from one rental house to the next was getting old.
But Erik bought the watch anyway.
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 Keira, my five-year-old daughter, whined, “I don’t want to talk to anyone,” from under her purple, fuzzy blanket. She did not want to start going to therapy.
She had recently returned from school one too many times, saying “nobody likes me” or “I’m not smart” or “nobody wants to be my friend.”
But that was as far as the conversation ever went. She really didn’t want to talk to anyone. Not even me.
I pulled the covers back, exposing her angry, brown eyes. “That’s just it, honey. It isn’t good if you don’t talk about your feelings.”
She wrapped her front teeth around the base of her thumb’s cuticle and chewed on the skin. “I don’t have any feelings.”
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 Evan and I reserved a three-night stay in a hotel on the coast of Carmel, California. We wanted to celebrate our anniversary, but mostly we just needed some time together, without our four small children.
We adore all of our kids — really, we do. But the work-soccer-cooking-diapers-homework-dance-laundry-baseball-bickering-parties-acting-swimming-meltdowns can get to be a bit much.
Still, it was hard to believe we were actually getting away.
Keira, our six-year-old daughter, watched as I put my red dress and black heels into an over-sized suitcase. “Mommy, why do you have to go through the weekend?”
Razor. Can’t forget my razor.
“Keira, seriously? Look at me, honey. Do you see the circles under my eyes?”
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 Match.com. E-Harmony. Yahoo Personals. J-Date.
Yup, I signed up for them all. I was a mama on a mission to find love online.
More sites, more options.
I had tried the club scene. Blaring music. Dim lights. Too much booze.
“Nice toes,” one guy had said, looking first at my feet and then straight at my chest.
Tall, dressed in black slacks, button-down blue shirt, full head of blonde hair. He certainly was attractive.
But way too young and way too interested in my breasts.
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 For three hours, the grasshopper-like chirps call out from the defibrillator. Three hours.
This entire time, I continue to write sections of my memoir, Drop Dead Life, trying to pretend the beeping isn’t there.
If the beeping is there, that means we really own a defibrillator. That means I actually need to be ready to pull out the child-sized paddles and jump-start my daughters’ hearts.
It’s been a rough few weeks. We just visited the pediatric cardiologist at the Oakland Children’s Hospital and this was the first year in which my new husband, Evan, and I were completely honest with Tatiana, 8, and Keira, 6, about their chances of inheriting their birth daddy’s genetic heart condition.
Fifty percent. Each of the girls has a fifty percent chance of getting Brugada’s Syndrome.
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