When I was eight years old, I walked in from school to see a family friend named Ray and my mom chatting at the dining room table. I felt an uneasiness in my stomach over their closeness—a feeling that would define our relationship for most of my life.
When I was ten, my mom left my dad in a dramatic mad dash—kids in the car, screeching away as my dad grabbed a door handle. I think she ran over his foot. With none of our possessions, we drove to Seattle to stay with family for a week. It wasn’t the first time mom had scooped us up and run away, but it was the last time. When we returned to the Pullman/Moscow area, we had nowhere to go but Ray’s house. I just knew it was going to be his house. I refused to go inside and spent the night in the car, mom checking on me periodically, begging me to come in. I didn’t budge.
Mom and Ray married a few years later, and the man never stood a chance with me.
But he showed up anyway.
He supported my mom in supporting the three Baker kids. Sent us to summer sports camps. Contributed to school shopping budgets. Provided a home with a bedroom for each of us and a pool, too. He didn’t want a pool. But he knew we would love it.
I have no idea what sacrifices he made for us. I was too busy viscerally disliking him to notice. But I know now there must have been many.
What We Do When We’re Hurt
I honored my eight-year-old’s intuition. And the adults around me—each carrying their own pain and stakes in the story—reinforced that narrative for decades.
My dad made sure I knew Ray was an enemy. My mom, even after she and Ray divorced fifteen years later, indulged my dislike of him when he upset her. She shared disparaging things about him, demonized him even later in life. It wasn’t until right before her death that she finally told me how grateful she was for him—how he showed up for her, took care of her, was home to her.
That’s what we do sometimes when we’re hurt—we recruit allies, reinforce narratives, keep old stories alive because changing them feels like betrayal.
In my heart of hearts, I believe my mom when she told me their relationship didn’t turn romantic until long after her separation from my dad. But by then, the story was written.
That’s what we do sometimes when we’re hurt—we recruit allies, reinforce narratives, keep old stories alive because changing them feels like betrayal.
He Stayed
After they divorced, Ray and my mom recovered their friendship and remained best friends through the rest of her life. When she abruptly needed a new place to stay, he put his life on hold and invited her to stay in his spare bedroom. His house swiftly became her house, too. Through years of declining health, Ray became mom’s caretaker without much respite.
When my mom died a year ago, my heart started to soften by his tenderness toward me—by how truly he seemed to understand how devastated I was. He had an intimate view into our bond, and he knew how brutal the acceptance of her loss would be for me.
Ray became a compadre in grief. He checks in often on the hard days—mom’s birthday, holidays, the anniversaries where grief takes the wheel. He sends photos of mom’s gardens as they come back each spring in all the obvious glory her love fed into them.
I’ve become grateful for him. For all of it. For staying when I made it hard. For loving my mom when she needed it most. For never asking anything in return.
The Text Before Surgery
Two weeks ago, Ray had a heart attack while mowing his yard. He pulled through and went into open-heart surgery for a triple bypass. My brother and I each told him what he meant to us—our love, our gratitude, our deep appreciation for how he cared for mom. In his last text before surgery, he said: “I was perfectly comfortable joining mom. Now I have a reason to live. Overwhelming feelings.”
Ray made it through surgery and is slowly recovering.
I wrote about it on Facebook—the whole messy, tender, forty-five-year arc. I shared it because I was marveling at how something I’d held so tightly for so long could soften so completely.
The post resonated in ways I didn’t expect—more than 280,000 views and climbing. Hundreds of messages from people who saw something of their own lives in the story.
The Goo in the Middle
Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar doesn’t gently reshape itself. It dissolves. Completely. Into a kind of cellular soup.
The structure that was the caterpillar liquefies. And in that formless state, the butterfly begins to organize.
You can’t grow wings without dissolving what was.
I’ve been in the goo with Ray. With my own becoming.
Forty-five years of certainty dissolving into something I never expected.
And I’m watching the world dissolve into its own goo right now—systems collapsing, certainties evaporating, old stories no longer holding.
It feels brutal. It feels impossible.
But we’re not falling apart.
We’re dissolving so we can reorganize into something with wings.
