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In a conference room cluttered with cold Chinese take-out, I sat with Jane as she wolfed down shrimp and noodles, finally eating lunch at three PM. Jane was a small woman with ocean blue eyes, golden dot freckles, and a pixie cut. She listened patiently as another OB/GYN resident in the room talked about a recent study proposing C-sections as standard of care over natural birth.
Read More“Guess my score,” my son Tom prods as he drops his busted backpack on the kitchen island.
I know this game. We haven’t played it in a while, not since his middle school days. The game means that he’s done well on a test but is not quite sure how to voice it.
Read MoreThe first memory I have of our camping friends is of the day our daughters started kindergarten. We weren’t camping friends at this point, just parents of two children apiece. Their daughter—crying quietly at her desk. Mine—bright-eyed in her blue/green/white plaid skirt, matching headband, white polo.
Read MoreEvery week she asked me how I felt and every week, while, in general things were “fine,” I always told her there was almost always a day, or a couple of hours a day, where despondence grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. It was as if someone, something, was wrestling me and trying to get me to give in, to tap out. We were in different weight classes though. I was the lightweight and the despondence was the heavyweight and I didn’t have any agility or tricks up my sleeve to counteract the weight disparity between us.
Read MoreWhen they ask me, I tell them we came for the rain.
It’s easy that way. It makes them laugh. It’s the dog walkers who always want to know. A passing conversation in the park. They usually talk about Mochi’s long legs first. Like a mom with a new baby, I let them gush over him. No, he’s not a puppy, just small. Yes, he’s enthusiastic. I tell them he’s a rescue and an immigrant too. He was my carry-on luggage, stored safely below the seat in front of me from San Francisco to Dublin. We linger for a few minutes, as our dogs take the time to sniff. Then they ask, they always ask, why did we come?
Read MoreDerby Days is the first convergence of Greek life on campus during the fall semester. It is your introduction to the Greek life competition, and it must be taken seriously. At dinner, some of the girls who will be participating in the lip sync competition tonight start to arrive. Someone tells you that they will be lip-syncing to some rap song. You can’t help but laugh because you can only imagine how funny it will be to watch a group of skinny white girl’s rap. You’ve just finished clearing your plate when you exit the kitchen and see something you’ve only ever seen in pictures. You see Sister S, in full blackface. Sister S is wearing baggy blue jeans, a wife-beater, an oversized button-down tied around her waist, a bandana wrapped around her head, and chunky skater sneakers. You don’t realize that you’ve been frozen staring at her until she comes up to you.
Read MoreThe dog is different now. He has developed a subtle yet more articulate language of long gazes and soft moans. Maybe not just expressions of pain but also the frustrating inability to fully express himself. These are of course, just my interpretations and perhaps too self-reflective. “What is it, buddy?” I ask him, “What is it?” It’s cancer and it is, as they say, aggressive.
Read MoreYou and I became acquainted nearly thirteen years ago. It wasn’t love at first sight. In fact, I was initially after another one just down the street. But that one had too many problems and I didn’t want such a big project. I noticed you on the same day that I said no to the other one, and so I came to see you. You were cute, in solid condition. Very old-school but nothing that a little modern touch couldn’t fix. I had been casually looking for a home for several months. I and my now ex-husband, that is. This felt a little different and we really needed something positive to look forward to. Something of a distraction, maybe.
Read MoreI.
It wasn’t cool to like the Backstreet Boys while attending high school in the late 1990s, and this may still be true today.
But I wasn’t cool. I didn’t care to get jiggy with it or weep to “Candle in the Wind.” The odes to drugs from Third Eye Blind and Marcy Playground were boring. I didn’t give any real shits about Lilith Fair’s tepid lineup, though I still went, quietly rolling my eyes through “Adia” by Sarah McLaughlin.
Read MoreWe’re a few hours in when something starts to go wrong with the epidural. Not all at once, but a creeping awareness of sensation starts to tug at my attention as I lie there and look at the trees outside, and read, and make small talk with my husband.
At first, I ignore it. But then I start to get nervous.
“I can wiggle my left toes,” I say, not really to anyone. Observationally.
Read MoreThe amygdala assigns emotional significance to clutter I can’t throw away. To souvenirs and books throughout our house. To clawhammers, backpacks, yard signs we hang on pegboards. To ordinary places we visit again and again. This precious tiny thing deep inside my head also helps form shiny new memories. I want to hold on to my amygdala for a long time. Keep it healthy and functioning. Feed it. Maintain it. That sort of thing.
Read MoreThe basement is filled with junk and gems. I promised myself no space of mine would ever get this packed, but even in her delirium, Mom has conquered. Her gaze was voracious, her taste, sweeping. She was a champion of designers. She was a one-woman environmental disaster, with a carbon footprint as big as a mall.
Read MoreMaybe the woman holding the child was way too close to the edge of the pier. Way too close for way too long. Maybe that is what the shopkeeper told the Vancouver police when she phoned in her response to the Amber Alert. Maybe the ginger-haired artist who owned the Rare Button Shoppe—herself the mother of a curly-headed toddler—feared for the safety of the child on the pier.
Read MoreMaybe you saw her serving champagne on a one-for-you, one-for-me basis at a big nun party, shooting corks for children to catch. Later, you’d bond that one summer week watching science fiction movies in the novitiate basement. You’d be thrilled when she came to live in your same convent. It would make sense, the life-sized poster of Spock in her bedroom, just down the hall from yours.
Read MoreBarbie. Everyone’s favorite (or favorite-to-loathe) doll-slash-role model-slash-best friend-slash-impossible ideal-slash-icon of cultural demise. Even though I’ve always harbored a fairly incurious attitude toward the Barbie-as-perfection phenomenon, I nevertheless loved playing with my inanimate, buxom, rubbery friends. I didn’t compare myself to them, and they didn’t dictate my self worth. They were just one population in an only child’s universe of dessert-scented dolls, bathtub mermaids, and little plastic people who lived in a furnished tree.
Read MoreI’m still sitting in this car going nowhere, staring at the side of our house with its mildew stains branching across the siding because we’re overdue for a power wash. The car was a splurge purchase several years ago. A Volvo with peanut butter leather interior which, every time I run my hand over, brings me all the way back to an elementary school friend, whose parents drove a similar car, had oriental rugs, and a dog too designer for our cocker spaniel neighborhood. A time when I thought it might be possible to live forever, or at least frozen in time like Harrison Ford in Star Wars, to be thawed out later. The hero never really dies.
Read MoreWe broke up on a Thursday in a foreign country where I only spoke a disjointed version of the language. In a charming little restaurant, he sat across the table from me, reached for my hand, told me he loved me, but…I guess the rest doesn’t really matter. He was back on the dating apps two days later. It’s such a disorienting thing to feel your entire world implode, to watch dreams of a life together disappear into thin air. I questioned if they had ever been within reach at all. They weren’t, but I didn’t know that yet.
Read MoreCold. Alone. Dead. These were the few words that registered among the many spoken to me on that horrific afternoon when they came to tell me my son was gone. Fentanyl was added to the mix over the coming hours.
“Who? What? How?” repeated over and over again was all I could muster in response.
“We don’t know,” was their answer.
My living, breathing nightmare had only just begun.
Read MoreMy toddler is standing next to my bed. Again. I swing my legs out of bed. “Lie down,” I whisper. He rushes back to his makeshift mattress on the floor, lies down, and waits for me to tuck the blankets around him. Again. At least he’s not screaming at me about this routine anymore. We’ve done this back-and-forth battle two nights in a row now. If I don’t give in, the worst should be behind us. I just hope my husband doesn’t sabotage all my efforts by allowing him to crawl into his side of the bed. Since I’m awake I might as well write about it.
Read MoreWho would have thought we’d be back here again? Me, blinded by your headlamp, white-knuckling a tooth-shaped stress toy with your name and number printed on it. You, on your swivel stool, tapping your running shoes to the eighties soft rock that seeps through the walls like the smell of the salmon your assistant reheated for lunch.
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