Eloise is sitting on the couch, watching “Sofia the First,” and Benjamin is napping in his baby seat. They are two and a half, and six months, respectively. Beth is completely overwhelmed. Her husband, Ethan, tries to help, but with his job taking up 70 hours a week, he doesn’t really have time at home with the family.

“Mommy, can I have a snack,” Eloise asks.

“Sure, honey. I’m just going to go outside and get something,” Beth replies.

Beth goes to the back door and pushes the sliding glass door with all of her weight. It finally slides. She sits on the bench near their dying flowerbed. She grabs a dirty pillow from next to her and screams into it, tears flowing.

She doesn’t remember the birth of Eloise, or Benjamin, or when her daughter first held her son and asked, “do we get to keep him, mommy?” She doesn’t recall her first actual friends, the girls from high school that she now only sees on Facebook. She doesn’t even remember the first time she met Ethan, in their junior year of college in a British Literature class that they both ended up hating.

Instead, she tries to remember warmth. As a young girl, she would lay on the hardwood living room floor of her only childhood home. The sun flooded through the window by the garden. She would just embrace that warmth, feeling it as it soaked through her body. She remembered watching the particles of dust float toward the sun. She watched the dust until she eventually fell asleep. She recalled the warmth of the cup of tea that her mom gave her after she tried to overdose in ninth grade. She remembered the warmth of being eight years old and returning to the car after she saw the Rockefeller Christmas tree for the first time.

In that moment, she just tried to remember warmth.