Tag: family
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A Span of Values
My ex filed against me about once a month on average I would say. Filing was the weapon. Every time he filed, I had to respond, and responding cost money and energy, and money and energy were the point. He could reach into my life on a monthly schedule and make it more expensive and…
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Bowl Cuts
My girls hate the pictures. Every so often they’ll come across old photos of themselves from when they were little, and there it is, the haircut. The bowl cut that is round, slightly-too-even, unmistakably-a-kid’s-haircut look, sitting on their heads in photo after photo. They groan. They laugh. They ask, in the way kids do, why…
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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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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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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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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…
Whatever Held 