This is what my mother told me the first night of my sophomore year in high school when I asked her what was the point of geometry. All of the lines and angles and what was I supposed to do with them? I was already in my I’m-going-to-be-a-writer-so-the-hell-with-numbers phase of my life (which continues even today). “When am I going to ever use the word isosceles,” I said.

“It’s all about planning,” she said as she salted and peppered a beef stew because she was pretty sure my father was coming home on time for dinner, which he almost never did. She stood over that open pot, her neck arcing forward. Her face, when she turned around to make sure I was doing my homework, was a mix of fool’s hope and worry. She always planned for us to eat as a family although we seldom did. “In geometry,” she said, “you have a list of givens and you apply logic and reasoning and that gives you an answer.”

I thought about the givens in my mother’s life, and if this was the answer she’d planned on. This kitchen table with the plastic floral tablecloth I spread my math book across. The sun yellow housedress with sauce stains even PowerTide couldn’t wash out. I imagined my mother standing in a department store planning to buy that housedress, when it was on a hanger all crisp and perky. It probably looked like happy homelife to her. And then I thought about the moment she spilled the sauce on that housedress, that moment the honeymoon of its being new clothing ended. I wondered if that’s what happened to her marriage, to our family.

So, I’m not sure why, three years later, I was all that surprised, why we all were, my father and little sister, even our overweight tabby Cleo, when my mother quietly boxed up her life and moved to a secret apartment while we were caught up in our daily routines of school and work. And once the shock wore off, I was convinced that my mother must have had a plan, one she kept all to herself, to live in some magazine life with a polished wood apartment where she wouldn’t have to cook dinner for anyone anymore.

Good. I thought. A plan. But didn’t she have a plan the night she met my father? Wasn’t that supposed to be a better life? Or the plan of having a daughter, and then having one more? When she walked into our house the first time, wasn’t that a plan, when she ran her fingers across the smooth of the banister and walked over to the big bay window, not knowing how many hours she would spend looking out of it waiting to see when my father would come home?

The problem with plans, I decided, is that life doesn’t let you live. Life is not a bunch of dots you can plot on a straight line. Life doesn’t really like a plan after all. Probably insulted by our arrogance, it throws in all kinds of salt and pepper, no recipe.

My mother finally called after a month. Said she needed some time to adjust and here’s my new address, just don’t tell your father. “I needed the quiet,” she told me over a cup of tea, the kind of moment I would never have expected to have with my own mother, so formal, so grown up. My mother’s new apartment was decorated with white shag carpet, and we sat at a wooden table with very sharp angles, embroidered placemats, and no sign of a tablecloth. It was the kind of décor you’d have if you no longer had to worry about children hurting themselves. The kind of pristine newness you’d never spill a drop of anything on. And my mother, herself, furnished in a V-neck blouse, a delicate chain necklace, her nails trimmed and polished.

I started to wonder at that moment, if she would ever be my mother again, or if we would ever be what someone, somewhere would describe as a “normal” family. One with holidays, and photo albums and yes, even the quiet of a shared dinner.

But as I sipped my tea, as I shared this moment with my “new” mother, I looked at her face, mascaraed and blushed, the sharpness of worry gone for the first time, maybe ever. I’m not sure I’d ever seen her face like that. I wondered if this plan of hers to have a better life would even pan out. And then I wondered if we even needed to know.