This is where I tell you my abortion story. I tell you that I was six weeks along, or 15. I tell you that I was 16-years-old and in love, or 29-years-old and alone. I tell you I cried. Or I didn’t. I tell you because I told nobody, or I tell you as I’ve told many people throughout my
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Today I turn 40 years old. And today I will hit submit on an application that has taken six months (or 40 years) of work to complete. I don’t know if I will, or even should, be successful. All I know for certain is that I’m giving myself permission to try. [ Serendipity, literary: luck that takes the form of
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I used to hate cats. It was the easiest marital decision we ever made– we’ll never have a cat. The smell, the claws, the hassle. We’re not cat people, we agreed on time and time again. That was before I watched my child be weaned off a ventilator. Huddled in the corner of the room, surrounded by doctors and machines,
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That was before I knew that trolls can say terrible things about you in extremely public ways, that they can go to great lengths to find out intimate details about your life, and finally (and the breaking point for me) that they can involve your family. They will speak about the things most sacred in the world to you. For me, my children.
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Do you remember when we used to fill our weekends with so many activities that we felt like we needed an extra day just to recover from Saturday and Sunday? Now, we walk twice a day to visit three horses that live on the outskirt of our neighborhood. We could bike or drive, but walking takes up more of the
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When my kids are really into a show and I’m telling them they have to do their chores, I invoke the pause. Pause it now, so you can finish it later. If you don’t pause it now, then you’ll never get the rest of it.
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There is a road that leads to my childhood hometown that slices a path through fields of mint. I used to yell at whoever was driving to roll their windows down, even in the heat of summer, when we’d get to that specific spot where I knew the air would be filled with the sweetest fragrance imaginable. It wasn’t the
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I woke up this morning to a 6-month-old baby. Every few weeks I still remind my husband that this child has lived longer in my womb than he has out in the world. I need someone else to feel the gravity of that statement. I was pregnant forever, I often groan. There are so many complicated factors when it comes
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Calyx- When we moved into our house it was flagged with a massive presence looming in the front yard and spreading through the cracks in our blinds. A crabapple tree, barren but promising, greeted us each time we pulled into the driveway. We missed its bloom but I’d seen it in pictures and it drew me to the house in
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When we checked into the hospital after finding out we lost a baby last November one of the first questions they asked us was if we had chosen a name. We hadn’t. We only had four months to ruminate on it. We thought we had so much more time. That question quickly preceded what we wanted to do with her
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Chop Wood, Carry Water 