You’d think being responsible for someone else’s life would make you really uptight, but it has the opposite affect. You spend your days tending to someone else’s feces. In the before-time, you could enjoy the luxury of disgust, and silly fears. It was an indulgence, you know, to run screaming and flapping around when you saw a spider.…
When you look at yourself in the mirror, your brain smooths out the reflection for you. It automatically smears Vaseline over the lens of your mind and what you see is familiar, workable, fine. Every woman carries a gauzy camera lens and soft lighting in the toolbox of her mind. But then those surprises. Tagged…
(originally published in April, 2013) Spring Break can eat a bag of DICKS. Seriously. I…I had the worst damn week. I’m absolutely bereft over what this summer is going to be like. My daughter. Oh my daughter. She is a good girl. Willing to please, loving, positive. She is unbearable. I think it’s my…
That’s it. I quit. Hands in the air, quit. It’s official. Everything…EVERYTHING is going to harm your child. Including swaddling them. You know, swaddling. The thing that nearly every civilization in every era of history has done for all of time? Yeah, now we need to worry about THAT, too, according to The…
LE’s teacher Mrs. Z was gently molded and hand-patted from the clay of humanity into the perfect form of “Kindergarten Teacher.” She is slight and cheerful, in her early 20’s, with crystal blue eyes as wide and guiless as the babies she teaches. She laid what she called “a rubric” in front of me today at the Parent Teacher conference. It…
Daughter of Mine, this isn’t how I planned it. Why aren’t we dancing in eyelet cotton dresses together, our bare feet pressing wildflowers? Twirling with our long curly hair dancing free in the sunshine? I DID lug my Wildcat 1972 portable record player last summer into the weedy clay of our yard, but you weren’t really into Creedence and asked…
Amelia is very efficient mother, good in all the ways I am bad. That’s why I like her as a friend. I don’t feel threatened that her daughter’s braids are tight and straight and that her children always have clean dishes and don’t ever have to use tupperware lids and left over fast food…
Lex tells me not to mix pills and booze. Pick one and stick with it. She says that, from where she is tucked away in the leafy brown silence of her home. It used to be a mechanic’s garage, now it’s a cozy, glorious dump of a place, real wood paneling and bizarrely proportioned rooms. She doesn’t have children. She sits…
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