It takes months for me to find a good therapist. When I finally do she tells me my family is too “enmeshed.” As if I didn’t know this already. Still, I try the label on for size. I use it as a ruler, measuring where I’m at, always in relation to my mother. But all measurements and calculations are more complicated now. I am the oldest of four children and my younger sister Jorelle has been in a car wreck. The gash in her head is sewn shut by the emergency room doctor but she lays in a coma for…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Because our son, Benjamin, is already four years old, because we’re not sure if there are going to be other babies, and because we don’t know just how to explain this to him, after midnight, we’re pulled to his bedroom, just to check on him, just to make sure he hasn’t kicked his blankets onto the floor. It is winter and a blue moon hangs heavy over our tree tops, sturdy oak and maple, bare branches covered with the season’s first snow. We find him content and full of dreams, Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “Puff the Magic Dragon” coming over the…
The hardest thing I’ve ever done is be a single mother. It saps almost everything and takes the rest—your energy, time, creativity, hope, and . . . did I say energy? Parenting is hard work. Single parenting is hard work x 100. You get by on little hugs and kisses and gifts of pebbles and growth milestones and that utterly contagious, spontaneous child’s giggle. Writing space shrinks dramatically. I count myself very lucky to have two books coming out within a year of each other. But this is a totally new accomplishment, and reflects the way my life is being…
“Where are we going?” Her every morning question. “Miss Patty’s house today.” “But I don’t want to go there! I want to stay home. Hmmp.” “Put on your socks—please!” “I can’t do it. I’m little.” She puts her socks on fast enough while playing dress up. “Give me a foot.” Out juts a petite, near-rectangular block. I nab it with pink cotton and then begin pulling up the flowered zipper-flipper of her bubble-gum purple jacket. She proclaims, “Iiiii’m thir-sty. I want some juice.” Opening, slamming kitchen doors, I produce a sippy…
My mother had two sisters she never told me about. When she mentioned her large family, she told me she was one of ten children. I boasted to my friends—ten kids! That was bigger than any family I knew. My father once explained that in a family that size, there’s not enough love to go around. Was that why my mother was so cold? So unhappy? My father’s explanation provided no comfort, but many images. I pictured the family my mother never talked about–she and Teresa, the two girls, twenty years apart, and the eight boys that came between. Everyone,…
This is the story my sister-in-law’s brother Andrew told over dinner: One night he, some friends and a fellow female student at Brown University went to a local bar hangout. The waitress brought them a tray of tortilla chips and the house salsa, which contained a special, secret ingredient. They all drank, ate, and laughed a lot, especially when the young woman pretended she was choking. Only she wasn’t pretending. Ten minutes later, when the paramedics arrived, the girl was in the final throes of anaphylactic shock, and, before the eyes of horrified strangers, died. The salsa’s secret ingredient? Peanut…
I’m having the biggest ego trip in my life. Lucas, at one-and-a-half years old, sees me everywhere. He notices a woman in a magazine ad and squeals, “Mommy!” Same squeal with the woman on the back of the Cheerios box, the female firefighter in his picture book, and the image of a mermaid in the Starbucks logo, Mommy. (Okay, maybe that last one has more to do with the frequency with which Mommy visits Starbucks.) Every woman depicted, regardless of ethnicity, age, or any remote likeness to me, is Mommy to him. His squeals are embedded with such toddler joy…
– I was at the shoe store the other day and a father said the most refreshing thing to his five-year-old son. “You look like a pimp in those red shoes.” The child didn’t say, “What’s a pimp, Daddy?” But even if he had, that would have been okay. Why do parents lose half their vocabulary and their sense of humor when they have young children? Surely a five year old doesn’t get that pimp joke, but he does get that his father is funny and quirky. It’s sad to listen to parents dumb down their talk. They refrain from…
It’s quiet. Really quiet. My son is at my ex-husband’s place for the week. The constant outer noise and inner static of an intimate relationship that is now over is gone. Most efforts at reaching out to build business interests beyond what was already emerging stopped around six months ago so all my energy could go toward finishing the Eden trilogy. And now, the silent prayer of the last fifteen years has been fulfilled. My life is very quiet. Not only is my outer life very quiet, my inner life, my mental life is much quieter. I was shook three…
Twenty years ago, there was only one reason I coveted turning forty. ONE. As a hungry student, on the scent of the Shechina (immanent presence of the divine), the esoteric, and the mysterious, I discovered that the rabbis forbid anyone to learn Kabbalah before the age of forty. Suddenly forty became to me like sixteen to a young adolescent yearning to drive a car: The age of unencumbered freedom. The age that the doors of universal wisdom flew open and the full buffet is there for the taking. Forty became the age of permission. Of course, there would first be…