For years, I believed I could FIX my son, control, restrict, protect him, by sheer force of will. When that didn’t work, I’d throw up my hands in despair and tr...
How does one find self-worth standing before the evidence of broken dreams, unrealized potential, and past mistakes? This is what plagued me as I stared at the ...
I’m not sure if my mistake was in joining together reality and fantasy or if I simply was treading someplace where I didn’t belong.
Gradually Mother’s cooking faded, along with her tan. No longer in the kitchen when I rushed home from school, she’d be lounging on the cushions of our faux vel...
When I was slim, I communicated with my whole body in large, confident gestures; I enjoyed being front and center. But I’m no longer thin. To deal with difficul...
By morning, there were no pauses left to count. The winter chill crept into the room as Dad lay lifeless.
His quiet Southern lilt didn’t match what he was saying. There should have been magnolia petals falling out of his mouth or some exhaustive yarn about his mothe...
It is not what I expect. Lined up side by side are chairs with patients already hooked up to IVs, and one empty chair for Katie, a giant vacuum of space waiting...
Stories are my past. They bob along a lazy river waiting to be plucked up, cherished, and set back down to drift. But they are images, merely snapshots in free ...
By episode 20 or 21, I started thinking of cooking in a new, sacred light. I felt a profound need to honor Mom and Grandma by finally learning to cook.
Liliya had been abandoned at six months by her birth mom, left in a baby carriage in a train station in Moscow. The Russian police took her to an orphanage wher...
You want to tell him you wish you could have gone too. That your mother never picked up the pieces. That there was never enough after he left. Not enough love, ...
When collateral damage becomes acceptable, the room dims. The brokenness of the world is no longer the problem of others.
After hip surgery, my father’s memory is all over the map. As he recuperates in rehab, he tells us he’s been to Spain, England, Oakland and even Kabul, all in t...
I have a student who is failing my class. He wants to be writer, but he comes to me and tells me that he can’t write because he is depressed. He is wearing paja...
If recovery means you are no longer sick, or even that you are simply functioning again, then perhaps I have recovered.
If I were a religious person, I would say something blessed me that day. But I’m not a religious person. Perhaps some part of me believed, as I still do, in the...
Sometimes you lie so much you begin to believe what you say. Sometimes you don’t even have to say the lies out loud to believe them.
I was in the kind of love that puts a rock in your heart and stuffs your eyes with cotton, but you hold that rock and that cotton. Because that’s all you’ve got...
I think these people mean to say, that my mother with Alzheimer’s, behaves differently from the mother I knew without Alzheimer’s.
