Read What I Had Before I Had You for Free Online

that he thought we should keep the kids together, and in this he revealed himself. Carrie would love a break from Daniel, and Daniel wouldn’t mind my undivided attention. It is Sam who wanted a break, not just from me and Daniel but from Carrie, too. From all of us.
    Of course, the kids don’t know any of this. All they know is that I’m the divorcer and Sam the divorcee, so they think that I’m the one refusing them a choice, dragging them away to a colorless Yankee life while their father weeps for them, all alone in our wonderful tumbledown ranch house in Austin. I loved that house. I can’t bring myself to tell the kids that their father doesn’t want them, and this makes me a little proud. It seems like the high road. Already, I bet he is not alone.
    Daniel has moved off a bit down the beach, absorbed in the construction of a long winding ridge of sand. The light has cooled, and the beach crowd is thinning out. We should get to Kandy’s; I didn’t call to tell her we’d be late. I stuff the sunblock and the water bottle back into the beach bag and stand to shake out my towel.
    Daniel runs up to me, panting, clutching the bucket, which he has filled with shells. “Mom,” he says, “I made a monster, and it came alive!”
    “Cool!” I say. “Do you want to take those shells with us or leave them on the beach?”
    “Listen!” he shouts. “I made a monster, like a long dragon monster, and when I put in the eyes, it blinked. And then it crawled into the ocean, and look, it’s gone.” It’s true that the long ridge of sand he was building is no longer there. The tide has come in quickly.
    “Did you make him legs?”
    “Her. Yes.”
    “That explains it.”
    Carrie sits up. “He’s thinking of that sea-turtle movie.” She’s right. Daniel is thinking of an IMAX nature documentary we saw a few months ago, about the life cycle of the sea turtle. We stared up at the domed screen, and when the baby sea turtles first trundled down the beach and were lifted on the outgoing tide, Daniel reached out for my hand in the dark.
    “No! It’s not from a movie, I saw it! I’m not lying!” His face contorts miserably; his eyes search me for faith. “You don’t believe me.”
    “I believe you.”
    “No, you don’t,” he says. “I can see in your head you don’t.”
    I shouldn’t be surprised that he is so volatile today. He is uprooted, kidnapped, betrayed. His schedules are off. He has been battling carsickness all day. I probably let him have too much sugar. Shouldn’t I be better at this? My own disorder is so slow-cycling by comparison, and so easily managed, that I sometimes forget what it used to feel like. His diagnosis is early-onset bipolar, and comes with a whole host of new and surprising troubles. Psychotic symptoms. Night terrors. Rapid cycling: a demon pulling levers inside my boy, winding him up tight, letting him spin out, and then jamming him up again. No rest for either of us, not one day of rest.
    Carrie grabs the bucket from him and starts going through the shells, picking out the pretty ones. “I saw it, too,” she says, and looks at me sidelong. Though we’re supposed to be flexible with Daniel, nobody has told us to lie.
    “Carrie. Pick up your towel. Let’s go.”
    “No, I totally saw it,” says Carrie, her eyes mock-wide, and now I see that this is an act of aggression. “It walked down the beach and floated away. There it is! A giant fucking dragon Daniel made!” She points at the horizon, where the light is a purple gray, pressing down on the smoggy, striated neon-orange band above the farthest ocean. In the water, nothing but motorboats.
    “Yeah,” breathes Daniel, and looks joyfully back at us, lagging, before he reads his sister’s sarcasm. Before his symptoms began to manifest, he adored Carrie, but she recoiled from him the fastest and most completely of anyone. Now it has been so long since she invited him into a game or took his hand to cross the street that