My middle girl was about twelve when it started, and it started in the car. I was driving her to practice, and I was somewhere else. I was often somewhere else in those years. Single mom, a job that was more than a job, court running underneath everything like a second full-time position I hadn’t applied for, and a brain so full that the actual road in front of me was often the last thing getting my attention. I’d be driving to a practice or a game or wherever we were due, and I’d just start meandering. Not lost exactly. I always got us there. But rarely by the same route twice, because I wasn’t really navigating. I was managing everything else and letting my hands drive.

She noticed. Twelve-year-olds know exactly how to get somewhere they go every week.

“Where are you going?” she’d say, watching the wrong streets go by.

And here’s what I said, more often than I’d like to admit. I didn’t say I’m overwhelmed. I didn’t say I’m so tired I can’t think straight. I didn’t say there is so much on me right now that I forgot which way the practice is. I said, bright and easy, “We’re just taking a little shortcut.”

It was never a shortcut. It was the opposite of a shortcut. It was a woman driving in loose circles because her mind was three problems away from the steering wheel. But shortcut was cheerful, and shortcut didn’t worry her as much, and shortcut let me keep the real answer to myself. That was the whole point. I was very practiced, in those years, at trying not to let my kids see how close to the edge I was. I had a voice I could put on over almost anything.

So I said shortcut, and I said it a lot, and she called me on it every single time, and it became a thing between us. And then it became her name.

I started calling her Short Cut. My daughter, named after the little lie I told to cover the hardest years of my life. She has been Short Cut, on and off, ever since. She understands it now, more or less. She knows her mom used to go the long way, and that somewhere in the mom-taxi, she picked up a nickname. That’s the version she has, and it’s true enough.

She wasn’t named after a wrong turn. She was named after the thing I did to keep her from worrying about another thing. Every time I said “shortcut,” what I meant was I am barely holding this together and I refuse to let you feel any more of it. And somewhere in all that circling, all that pretending, all that driving with my hands while my head fought the rest of my life, I’d look over at her in the passenger seat and love her so much that I gave the lie her face.

That’s what a mother does, I think, when she’s drowning and won’t say so. She takes the cover story and turns it into a term of endearment. She makes something tender out of being lost.

We got there every time, by the way. Never the same way twice. But we always got there.

That’s the other thing the name means, now that I think about it. Not just that I was meandering in a fog. That we always, always arrived.