Tag: life
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Without her
My mother died at sixty. My kids were six, four, and two. What came next, in order: a divorce, single motherhood. And about nine months after we lost her, my father moved away. There was still some family, technically. But asking the few who remained came at a cost, one way or another, in ways…
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It Waited for Me
My therapist told me recently that the reason I’m only now processing all of this, decades after it happened, is that it’s finally feeling safe enough to. I’ve turned that over a lot since she said it, because it explains something I couldn’t explain to myself: why now. Why, twenty and thirty years after the…
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First and Last
They were my first friends, and I think they will be my last. Two women who have been in my life since before I can really remember not knowing them, who were there at the very beginning and are, I hope, going to be there at the very end. I’ve written elsewhere in these pages…
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Handled
My son felt he was given too much responsibility as a kid. That he had to watch his sisters, that too much was put on him too young. When I found out, I wasn’t angry the way I might have expected to be. I was blindsided. Because the whole time, I thought I had it…
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What They Wanted Me to Do
By the time we got engaged, I was already trying to find my way out. I didn’t intend to go through with it. I could see him clearly enough by then, the controlling streak, the way the temperature of a room changed around him, and something in me knew. But we were already living together,…
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Coffee and a Cat
My day starts slowly now, and I want you to know that the slowness is on purpose. I have arranged my whole life around it. I work from home as much as I possibly can, specifically so that my mornings can begin gently, without a rush, without being thrown straight from sleep into someone else’s…
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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…
