I know you were annoyed. It was a last-minute trip. He was home from his college program for Thanksgiving. He wanted to bake cookies. I forgot to warn him that the store would be busy. I couldn’t get to him in time. He cut ahead of you in line. Then he dropped a carton of […]
Late afternoon sunlight drifts across my desk. The trees outside are bare, their dusty leaves collecting on the ground. I read the text from my brother. Then I read it again. My childhood home. Sold. A family with two little girls. It’s been four months since my mother passed away. It seems impossibly long and […]
Hey Mom, what did you do today? My oldest son. Your voice across the miles. What did I do? Well, I did nothing. And I did everything. I noticed a broken window blind and scheduled an appointment for the eye doctor. I passed by your room and straightened the quilt on your bed, readying it for […]
We sit upright on the couch, listening to the news. Bullets raining hellfire on a sleepy town in Maine. A bowling alley, of all places. I take stock of my children. This what you do when tragedy strikes, no matter how near or far. College, basketball practice, upstairs doing homework. Down for his after-dinner snack, […]
The late afternoon sun dances across my desk. It’s more orange than yellow. Here in New Hampshire, autumn is well on its way. I lean back in my chair, a Word Document open on my laptop. It’s blank. I feel first-day-of-school nervous. Going-into-labor nervous. Except instead balancing on the ledge of newly sharpened pencils or […]
He is always screaming. But sometimes he’s quiet. I can’t find a way to soothe him. He squirms when I hold him. He cries all the time. He’s not talking. He has no words. He won’t look at me. I don’t know what he wants. All day long he cries and I don’t know what […]
I have never once sat in the bleachers and rooted for you to hit a homerun. I have never sat in a stuffy middle-school gym and rooted for you to spell the word paragraph into a microphone. That’s the tricky thing about autism. It makes me consider how we don’t root for the same things as most. […]
I have the son who couldn’t sit still for circle time. I have the son who whirled around the doctor’s office, all moving limbs and screeching sound. I have the son with autism. I have the son who shrieked and clawed his way through puberty. I have the son who bit the teacher. He left […]
The first thing she notices are the bushes. They reach over the sidewalk, forming an arch of green. Ducking beneath them, she thinks of her mother, reduced to ashes in a box. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Yet here, at this house, she is everywhere. Every corner hosts a memory. Tomatoes, plump and red […]
I. We are hands clasped on a sunlit campus, autumn’s confetti beneath our feet. We are possibility. II. The swish of white. A dash of black tie. Silhouettes before the priest, posed family photos, all stiff smiles and jangled nerves. Who will we be? What have we done? III. This first pregnancy. It’s like watching […]