I Didn't Need A Retreat. I Needed To Hide In A Closet.

Small feet slapping against hardwood. Doors being pulled open, slammed shut. Twelve. Fourteen. Fifteen. I’m coming, Mama! She always drops 13, I think to myself, smiling in the dark as I crouch into a ball, willing myself invisible.

I’m in our laundry room, which is little more than a glorified closet crammed with half-used nubs of chalk, mesh swim bags, bubble wands, car detailing kits, a fire extinguisher — all the accoutrements of life that claim no other place in our household. My four-year-old daughter and I are on our third game of hide-and-seek, a new fixation of hers that usually ends with me in this exact position, numb-limbed and bereft of all distractions but those in my own mind. The laundry room has become my bardo, my echo chamber.

In this half-lucid, anticipatory state, I recall what an anthropology professor once told me: Games serve the function of reenacting cultural constructions in a contained setting. That is to say, play mirrors the complexity of social dynamics, especially for children who are learning these dynamics for the first time. On a small scale, we’re rehearsing for the challenges we might encounter down the road. What, then, does hide-and-seek teach us, if not the impossible yearning to be seen by another?

From my perch in the dark, I hear my daughter approaching, singing idly to herself in that way she still does, an endless fount of self-entertainment. Any time now, her hand will find the knob. She will turn it. I’ll be pulled out into the light, into her triumph. My heart begins racing, as it does every time I play hide-and-seek. It doesn’t matter how old I get, or how low the stakes. The game will always feel thrilling, borderline illicit. It’s about hiding, but more importantly, it’s about being found. The threat and joy of it. To be discovered in our most vulnerable state — what could be more beautiful and more terrifying?

As my daughter’s footsteps recede, I sink further into my own dream-world. I begin speculating: What if the players in a game of hide-and-seek are two sisters, escaping their own fraught reality? What if, as they grow older and apart, the game never really ends, only becomes more sprawling? And what if what they’re seeking lies buried across the world, waiting for the moment in which they most need it? For many minutes —where is my daughter, anyway? — I’m lost in this beginning. I can see the shadowy woods the sisters run through, one looking over her narrow shoulder as the other squeezes her eyes shut and counts, skipping numbers. I glimpse the red, puckered scrapes on their ankles, the shared longing in their hearts. I’m so deeply invested in what happens next that I don’t even hear the knob turning in my own reality.

Suddenly, before I can follow these sisters’ story, the laundry room door flings open. My daughter stands grinning in her pajamas, already ordering me to start counting for the next round. So it continues, this endless game, these long days. But the idea has rooted in my writerly brain. The sisters of the woods will return.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I assumed the first thing I’d have to learn was the art of compartmentalization. After all, another little being’s needs will always come before mine. Her hunger over my sleep; her diaper changes over my fast-cooling takeout on the counter. Her playtime over my creativity. That’s what everyone told me, in not so many words: Brace yourself. You will be subsumed. And while that has been true in many instances, I’ve found that motherhood and creativity are more interwound than I could have ever imagined, one feeding into the other, a magical connectivity between the mundanity of everyday life and the imaginative capacity we all carry as mothers, as humans.

And no one knows the value of a good fairytale like a mother of young kids. Our minds are constantly writing hypothetical narratives, scanning our pasts to make sense of our children’s futures. We are in a constant mode of examination and retelling. In rest and in play, we are the accumulation of the stories we’ve heard. And when we’re ready, we’ll send our stories into the world.

For the next six years, even after my daughter’s fixation with hide-and-seek ebbed, I’d continue thinking of those sisters. Not obsessively, no, and not continuously. But in idle moments in the car wash, while shampooing my hair or slathering peanut butter on a sandwich, my mind would flit to the woods again. I’m peeking behind the trunks of white pine trees. I’m kneeling in the bank of a creek, hands in the cool grit, ears perked for tiptoeing footsteps. I knew I’d find those sisters again, if I was patient.

It took many insomnia-plagued nights and painstaking words to rediscover them, but I finally had the chance to honor the sisters in my forthcoming book, The Seekers of Deer Creek. While there’s no dark laundry room inside this novel, its heart lies somewhere within the thrumming pulse and limitless imagination of those minutes of hiding. The thrill of the chase drives each brushstroke of the story.

Not every game I play with my daughter leads to a book idea. Some exist for the comfort of repetition, pegs moving across a board, cards shuffled in an interminable deck. But each moment of motherhood holds the potential for an idea, a story that might linger and transport, even as it affirms our presence in the here-and-now of our days. We don’t have to compartmentalize. We only have to brace ourselves for surprise, the only true constant of parenthood.

Thao Thai is the author of Banyan Moon, the July 2023 Read with Jenna title, Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, and Book of the Month selection. Banyan Moon was also selected by booksellers as an IndieNext pick and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. She was the recipient of the 2024 Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Excellence Award, and her work has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, WIRED, Elle, Lit Hub, and other publications. Her new novel, The Seekers of Deer Creek, comes out August 4.