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The Fancy One
My youngest is the fancy one. That’s the shorthand I’ve always used for her, and it fits, though it means more than it sounds like. She loves beautiful things. She loves aesthetics, the look and feel of a life well arranged. Records spinning, a good show on, something coming together under her hands. If you…
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Z for Zorro
I found out I had cancer almost by accident, and I told my mother about it almost as an afterthought, which is to say I told her after it was already over. I was twenty-five. There was a mole on my calf that had started to flake and darken, and I hadn’t thought much of…
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California
My parents lived across the street from each other in San Jose.That’s how they met. Two families, both of whom had come to California from somewhere else, both of whom ended up on the same street as neighbors, and their kids found each other, and here I am. If either family had chosen a different…
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Are you mute?
People asked me if I was mute. Much more than once. Classmates, teachers, adults who should have known better. A child is quiet, and the explanation the world reaches for isn’t she’s thinking or she’s taking it in. It’s that something must be physically wrong with her. That she is missing a part. I wasn’t…
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You Always Believe the Mother
My son took nineteen hours. Both of my girls took two. Two hours, start to finish, both times. These days when someone says “two-hour delivery” they mean something turning up from Amazon, a phone charger or a bag of dog food left on the porch. I delivered two entire human beings in that window. I…
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Until I couldn’t
The pink arch went up over the finish line in San Francisco, and there were cameras, and there were my friends beside me and there, finally, were all three of my kids. It was my tenth walk. It was my son’s birthday. And it had taken me ten years to get to that picture. My…
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From the stands
He had a serious wind-up before he was old enough to know what a wind-up was. I mean a toddler, barely steady on his feet, already rearing back with this deliberate, solemn intensity, like the throw mattered more than anything in the world. Nobody taught him that. It was just in him. And years later,…
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Montaña de Oro
I found it when I was at Cal Poly, and it became my favorite place on earth, and it has never lost the title. The entrance is a road lined with eucalyptus, tall and silver green, and driving into it always did something to me, some small reliable lift, like the curtain going up before…
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New Friends, Harsh Realities
Most of what a scan is, is waiting. The PET/CT unit at Stanford was a trailer, and it had three parts. A room with the machine. A monitoring hub where the techs and nurses sat watching their screens. And a small sitting area, dim, with two medical chairs and IV poles and a single bathroom,…
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The Women Before Me
My grandmothers were their own study. Just as different from each other, and between them they handed me almost everything I know about how to be a woman in the world. My mom’s mother was a straight shooter with very little filter. She was strong in her church and would quietly hide the fact that…
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