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Disneyland
For a long time, Disneyland was a promise that lived in someone else’s mouth. Their father would take them for the weekend, and he’d tell them that this time, soon, we’ll go. Then they’d come home to me, and I’d be the one holding them while the promise dissolved again. I got good at that…
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The Doorway
The chair. The beeps. My whole body tense, every time, for a year.That’s what comes back first. Not the medicine, not the diagnosis, but the chair I sat in and the sound of the machines and the way my body braced itself the moment I walked in, before anything had even started.I went alone. Every…
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Anything with a Heartbeat
She was two, maybe three, when we had a litter of puppies from our labradors. There was a yard full of them, all ears and paws and tumbling. My middle girl was right down in the middle of it, immersed. She’d pick them up and carry them around. They were nearly too big for her;…
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On her own
For most of her childhood, my youngest came as a pair. She was reserved out in the world. She was quiet in public, watchful, the kind of little girl who hung back and let her older sister go first. The two of them did everything together. If I signed one up for something, they both…
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Not my truth
There’s a rule in family court that nobody explains well enough.You are not allowed to speak badly about the other parent. It sounds reasonable on paper. Protect the kids, keep the adult conflict out of their hands. What it actually means, in practice, is that one person can say almost anything, and the other person…
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I’m sorry
My mother went looking for a window washer during the time of my treatments, which sounds like such a small, practical thing to need in the middle of everything else that was happening. She’d cometo stay with us mostly to hold the house together, three young kids under 5 who still needed feeding and driving…
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The Carnival
I’d just started dating someone new, and we decided to take the kids to a carnival in town, nothing like Disneyland, but the rides were better than expected for a small festival setup, and the games were rigged just enough that everyone still wants to play them anyway. The kids had a great day. Rides,…
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Normal Brain
I am driving again. Madera to San Jose, San Jose to Madera. Central Valley to the Bay and back, the same road, the same hours, until I stop seeing it.At one end is my own treatment. At the other is my mother, who is stage four now. The cancer is in her bones. I am…
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Shithole people
I took a break from hospice volunteer work for a while. But I always come back to thoughts about my very first assignment, a man I ended up calling Elvis, though that was nowhere near his real name. He was born in China, moved to Brazil as a young man, and came to America once…
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Cotton fields
The drive was an hour each way, three or four times a week, for the better part of a year. Central Valley flat, the same stretch of cotton fields going by every single time, white and low and endless in a way that stopped registering as scenery after the first few weeks and just became…
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