I cooked dinner while my mind was still at work

Dear Delyara, I am a wife and a mother, and tonight I stood over the frying pan thinking about an email that had upset me at 11 a.m. That is the thing about adult life nobody really warns you about. Work doesn’t stay at work if it touches the wrong nerve. It comes home in your shoulders, in your silence, in the extra flatness of your tone when your child asks a completely innocent question and you answer like someone still arguing with a person who isn’t even in the room anymore. I stirred the food, set the table, answered questions, reminded someone to wash their hands, and still part of me remained in that office, reading that message again in my head and coming up with better responses too late to matter. The dinner got made. The family got fed. But the woman doing the cooking was not fully there.