It’s possible I wasn’t the average new mom. The middle of six children, I’d been a babysitter since age ten (I know, it was the 80's). …

There is a dumpster on the side of my parents’ house filled with fabric. Reams and reams of my mother’s handmade curtains. I put them there. I threw them away. Well, I threw some away. In my third trip across the lawn tossing away the hours of her life, my…

“When does Mike get there?” I stood in my parents’ garden/garbage shed on the phone with my oldest brother. The only spot on the property with cell phone coverage when it rains. “He’s coming back from Paris. I think he’s on a plane, now.” Silence on across the proverbial wire…

I showered in the basement yesterday. The gleaming white, guest bathroom with the top shelf shampoo. Two guys in hazmats suits focused on coils and venting percentages of our a/c unit just outside the master bathroom. The annual wellness check made more critical in our global house arrest. Imagine adding…

I woke this morning with the memory of my mother kissing my forehead. Not as a child, but the summer of my sophomore year in college. The odd annual return to my parent’s house, a place I hadn’t really lived since leaving for boarding school at age 13. …

In the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college, I accidentally took two jobs. I’d already committed to return to the day center where I’d worked the summer previous — a job my mom had gotten me through small talk at the water’s edge with a long time…

Have you heard? We need to feel our feelings. Seriously, it’s all over my instagram. In the first few weeks of COVID, it was exercise challenges, sourdough starters, and closet cleaning. About two/three weeks in, the tune changed to no showers, three-day-old yoga pants, Twizzlers for dinner. Things to do…

We’d made the plan months ago, my sister and I. She brought it up first. A quick reference to the father’s day phone call a year ago, when we both realized we’d spent the day teary, feeling alone, missing our dad. “We should be together,” she exclaimed like a character…

A Day For Mothers 2022 There are friends that still ask, even after all this time: “How are you feeling?” but I know they mean “how are you grieving?” I look back at the early days of loss and I can see myself getting sick–the PTSD creeping like a slow-growing…