“I lied.” Marge sat unaware she twisted the tissue in her hands. “For the past six months my life’s been so far from normal you need a strong powered telescope to spot me dangling beyond the edge of the earth’s surface.”

Saddie offered her best friend another tissue. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

“I wanted to wait until things improved, so I’d have something positive to say, but things just keep getting worse. Every time I thought things might be getting better and I prepared to release my breath and relax a little, something new developed and I’d paused with breath held again.” Marge wiped at a fallen tear.

“It’s Annalisa. Her outbursts and temperament have put the rest of the family on edge. I don’t know what normal is any more and question if any of us are normal. What makes a child create and hold onto moral values far stricter than your own, and their philosophies and judgements are self-centered and imbalanced? She can stare at me with such contempt, reducing me to believe I’m insignificant and beneath her; a complete nescience. She glares at me like I’m ignorant of what it’s like to be a teenage girl. Her logical structure is like a tornado, a jumble of words and concepts whipped together into an irrational state intent on destruction.”

Marge glanced at the wall by the back door and blinked into focus the framed piece of needlepoint her grandmother had done decades earlier. The words stitched in a delicate faded blue thread were a paraphrase of Philippines 3:13: “Forget what is behind. Press on to what is ahead.”

The message propelled her, prevented her from collapsing and dying from the pain of her daughter’s recent announced hatred of her.

Forget what is behind...Press on to what is ahead...

The words ran over and over in her heart, and Marge knew they held within them her only hope for surviving.

But it wasn’t the pressing on that concerned her, it was the other part of the passage.

The forgetting part.