Category: Uncategorized
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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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Down the hall
There were two beds in my mother’s room. She was in one. That night, I was in the other. I had driven up from Madera after my own treatment, the shot still working its way through me, that particular sick heaviness settling in the way it always did a couple of hours after. I walked…
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What She Knew
They were laughing when I walked in. My ex, and a man I didn’t recognize, sitting together in the courtroom before the hearing started, easy and joking like two people waiting for a ballgame. I didn’t know who the man was. It didn’t even occur to me to worry about it. I had done nothing…
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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,…
Whatever Held 