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Saturday night is '70s night on my R&B oldies radio station, which I can only get in the kitchen. So from my blue Formica counter with the permanent halo-like blisters where my ex-husband once dripped Krazy Glue, the ancient radio plays loud, bass-heavy funk. Every radio in this house is small and old, except for the small and new one in my daughters' room. Their father gave the radio to my oldest girl for her 8th birthday, her first since he left.

Since I have to listen to this station in the kitchen, I clean the floor, the counter, the cupboard doors. My kitchen is shinier than it has been for years. It is fairly free of funk, using the definition my husband and my friends always employed when they spoke of it as dirt. Clean this funky house, man; get this funkhole in shape; man, your house is funky.

It's Saturday night. The music bumps. The girls have taken their baths. I have washed their long black wavy hair, and they dance in the kitchen in their nightgowns for a moment, the beat of Kool and the Gang spilling across the linoleum. "Mama's playing funk again."

They know it is the music of my teenage years. Of riding in the car, of dancing in too-hot living rooms with bodies pressed all around while music throbbed from cheap speakers and we sweated to 20-minute songs by Funkadelic, who counseled, "Don't fake the funk." We had dances with names like the Rock, the Gigolo, the Cowboy, the Freak, the Body Language.

Tonight, while I move around the kitchen with a damp dishtowel and the Dustbuster, the girls laugh because the DJ plays "Your Love Is Like the Holy Ghost." I can't help it; I show them what we used to do, my friends and me, across from their father and his friends.

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On a Saturday night a few weeks ago, I was invited to a party. But I had spent my baby-sitting time that week going to a lawyer's office, where my husband and I ended our 13-year marriage. My daughters do not know this yet. They ask a lot of questions, and we both try to answer. They are edgy much of the time if I go anywhere except work, and so I know the party is out. All day, we hung out in the yard, the girls and me, and then my mother and niece came over. We decided to go out for an early Chinese dinner, something we had never done. Why not? It was Saturday evening. We deserved to splurge. I drove everyone to the restaurant, thinking the aquarium fish would entertain the 2-year-old. The girls picked the place, telling me they had been here once with their father. "The placemats on the table tell you your birth year," my 8-year-old said. "Mama, you're the Year of the Rabbit."

That seemed appropriate for my life. I often watched silently, hunched over, chewing, while trying to gauge everyone's mood.

We entered the restaurant, and somehow the heavy glass door hit my oldest daughter's foot. She was crying in the booth, and I was thinking she'd made a big deal of stubbing her toe, when she pulled off her shoe to reveal a big toenail halfway torn off. Blood and meat and tears. Everyone winced and looked away. The waiter hadn't even brought the placemats. Year of the Constant Disaster, more likely.

We left quickly. I dropped off everyone else but the injured party and took her to urgent care at the clinic. We waited in the crowded Saturday night reception area, talked about school for distraction until she cried silently, trying not to look at the people staring at her bare foot, toes wrapped in dampened restaurant napkins.

When we were ushered into a room, she looked around at all the equipment, sobbing now, and I talked. All emergency rooms look scary. I told her I was scared the last time I was in a room like this, two weeks before she was born, when severe carpal tunnel syndrome was aggravated by my pregnancy to the point that I had nerve damage in my thumbs. I couldn't hold a fork, brush my teeth or drive. I joked about how today, my numb, feeling-free fingers are often useful, as when I can handle hot pans without protective gloves. But she asked why I didn't get medicine back then, in that emergency room.

"Because the medicine might have hurt you, inside my belly."

"You just had to hurt?"

"Yup. I had to choose between you and the medicine."

"And you picked pain?"

She was so impressed. It did sound impressive, put that way. But when I looked at the sterile silver instruments, thinking of my times in emergency rooms with her and the other two girls, the terror of spinal taps and seizures and high fevers and IVs, that before-children pain felt like nothing. The scary stuff was now, every day, the scarlet fever and pneumonia and stitches we'd been through so far. The years ahead seemed more frightening than I could ever explain to anyone.

Then the doctor came in. He inspected, trimmed, bandaged and counseled against possible infection. My daughter hobbled out on my arm.

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