Twenty years ago, one of my community college students wrote an essay about a day so busy that she forgot to pick up her seven-year-old daughter at school.
All tagged mother
Twenty years ago, one of my community college students wrote an essay about a day so busy that she forgot to pick up her seven-year-old daughter at school.
The stray black kitten, known to neighborhood kids as Silky, climbs up the screen door to peer into our living room.
I used to look in the mirror and see my father. Now it's my mother who stares back.
I found her at the kitchen table with a yellow legal pad.
My seven-year-old and I arrive at our traditional pumpkin patch. She picks out a huge, tall monstrosity.
I was anxious and bumbling. Compulsively feeling his forehead for fever. Joining him in crying jags.
Father motions her behind the steering wheel. We’re on the field he graded with a landing strip in mind, so where’s the harm?
My 77-year-old mother and I have a system: She texts me an emoji every morning when she wakes to let me know she's alive, and I text one back as a receipt.
“Uterine atony,” I hear the doctor say as the neonatologist is showing me my brand-new baby. I glance at my blood pressure before looking at my son.
“First,” I say, “we need to beat the cream cheese until it's smooth.”
Mom buttoned me into my best pink dress, a ribbon tied in my hair, and sent us off to the restaurant where a famous pianist was booked.
Not quietly at ninety, a few mourners, a cleric using dismal platitudes. But disastrously. Throngs crammed into pews.
Whenever I visit we mostly sit as familiar strangers and talk about the tea. Once in a while, though, there’s a small window, five minutes max, when her eyes sparkle.
Footsteps up the driveway, hours too early. Clinking of keys on the hook, coins in the can, wallet on the counter.
“We’ve been coming here for six weeks, and it works for J and I, but does it work for our son? Will they love him and his differences?”
I’m two, maybe three, wearing a baggy diaper and standing in shin-deep puddle water. Leah’s here too, all pigtails and chubby legs and chubby cheeks.
The pastor raises his hands and loosely smiles at the Sunday regular crowd. Satisfied, he begins his prayer. "Dear Lord, let our children find prosperity . . . "
I’m helping Jessie cook chicken in the wok. It’s cold outside, but warm in here.
Relief licks my bones. Our infant son will not die.
“There’s nothing more that we can do here, ma’am,” one of the paramedics said.