I drive across the Henry Hudson Bridge and get off the parkway at Dyckman Street, an exit I have always associated with my mother but never taken before. It is mid-August, blue-skied and not too hot, and my mother is…
Browsing: MER VOX
I believe in Literary Citizenship. I really do. I believe in it in caps, as you see. To me this term has meant writing and sharing my literature, as well as advocating for literature through attending and creating literary festivals/conferences/readings.…
These are the rules regarding glitter. Listen up. The glitter has been placed in view but out of reach. This is deliberate. The “glitter tray,” the cardboard box originally designated for shaking and shining, is no longer available to you.…
Tilda Swinton made small talk as we strolled through quiet, cobbled streets to the door of her garden apartment. We followed her in, my husband and I, and were met by a tortoise-shell cat. A decorative railing marked off a…
Amongst the things I did not realize about having four children was the fact that there’d be so much stuff to manage. I’m not even talking about the doctors’ appointments or school forms (there are those, too, groaning to-do lists’…
When you see the word “choice,” you might first think about the emphasis of the “pro-choice” proponents on free will, as opposed to the sanctity of life that its opponents emphasize or the privacy aspect that was the basis for…
Two years after my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, my brother and I moved her from her house in River Vale, New Jersey, to a nearby dementia unit called Memory Lane. I wish I could say it was the hardest…
In Bali, where I live in a big bamboo and grass house, “Ibu” means mother… I am a mom, to 8 people ages 4 to 34! I am also a midwife, which gives me the astonishing day and night attendance…
“I wonder if my children will ever really know me?” My friend, mother of four, grandmother of many, asked me this when she was sixty-something. At this time she had become a certified counselor for elders encouraging them to uncover…
Today when I visit my mother at the dementia center, one of the residents convinces several of her companions there is a cat on a nearby roof. She can see it, she says, and I assure her that I can…