How did we get a 5 year old with severe ADHD to wear a mask for a full year of kindergarten?
As a child, I witnessed the brutal torture and beatings that my mother, a teacher, endured at the hands of a gang of violent students, the Red Guards. The image...
Our teacher had said she thought the Negroes were going too far. I had raised my hand and disagreed. “Too far from what?” I had asked.
...at least when you are not lying awake at night in your bed in the living room, feeling the enormity of the world’s violence and wondering how your family mig...
We bought the trailer after Trump became president, a safety net, in the probability of needing a means of escape. Maybe Canada then on to Cuba? At least it eas...
I read the Bible each morning partly because I want to know the scriptures; I read partly because I want my ears to be healed; I read partly because I want to b...
He was disheveled and smelled like cooked grease and cigarettes. It was an odor I associated with his being poor and hemmed in. There was so much about our life...
Maybe I should tell her that Daddy drives with his knees while poking triangle holes in beer cans? Or that he once fell out his car door while rounding a corner...
Our Spanish teacher is not allowed to teach us anymore. This is because she kissed a woman and in our tiny Catholic school, this is against our policy. Theresa ...
Dr. Joy is the best therapist ever. She acknowledges my feelings around generational trauma and my fractured relationship with my Korean Tiger Mom.
My grandparents raised peas, lettuce, and cantaloupe on a 140-acre seaside ranch since 1915, but they could not buy the land, only lease it. Unlike European imm...
My body has changed like my surroundings, too. Instead of the 15-year-old I was when I went to sleep, I am now the 18 year-old-version of myself that I will wor...
In short order, I went from liar to thief. I took my brother's silver dollar collection. No one spent old silver dollars, so when I tried, the manager of the 7...
A memoir in the finest sense of the genre! An easy read, packed with astonishing events that flow into one another like water, The View From Breast Pocket Mount...
Afterward, at a nearby coffee shop, Pops and I munch on grilled cheese sandwiches and drink café con leche. We talk about the different jobs the workers do, how...
Such can be the power of a teacher’s words. I was certain that all my Gen Ed students had their own Miss Laughlin who turned them off to the joys of reading and...
I don’t have a mom who fell in love how I was able to fall in love. My mother is a survivor in a way most Americans won’t ever understand. I am honored to be th...
Most days, I manage to distract myself from the horror of losing my bearing and blurring the lines in the fog of forgetfulness. I carry the markers for Alzheime...
The waiting was unnerving. Alli asked almost daily when Daddy would go to jail. For a second-grader, jail was something imagined from cartoons. We did little to...
In 2020, George Floyd's sadistic public murder ripped away the grand illusion of universal empathy at the core of the American Promise and vividly demonstrated ...
