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…
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…
There are Mothers of Invention, Motherlodes, Holy Mothers, Mother #%*!-ers & Mother tongues. We give birth to a child, a book, a business venture or a song. We are born, reborn & born again. While the umbilical cord that connected…
My fifth grader thinks she’s slick when we are getting ready for school, that if her lip gloss is subtly applied, or combined with a lighter shade, I won’t notice her slightly rosier lips as we are heading out the…
This story does not have an ending, I am unfolding as a mother, as a writer, as a friend, as a wife, as a daughter and as an individual every moment. There are things that no woman tells another about…
I’ve been birthing a collection of poems about raising a gay daughter since she came out at fifteen. That was four years ago. I didn’t realize I was writing a collection on this theme but my role as mother had…