Parenting

Formed Otherwise

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

There’s a presumption that to raise a child with disabilities makes you brave. I wasn’t brave. I wasn’t always a stellar mother, either. But I studied my daughter as if she were an ancient text to see what was beneath the chatter and the rage

The Good End of Pleasant Street

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

When our landlords came by to introduce themselves, they stood beside a shelf of our books on how to avoid suffering: “Develop a mind that clings to nothing,” said the Buddhist Diamond Sutra; Be Here Now, read the spine of a Ram Dass book. Dan was a general contractor and wore a flat cap and a half grin. Or a sneer. I wasn’t sure which.

Our Fraying Hearts

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

I have a sense of the drama people want to hear about, but most days our ER is filled with abdominal pain and vomiting—nothing like what you’re accustomed to seeing on TV.

Milk

Sun, 31 May 2026 11:00:00 -0400

Pumped for an infant, spilled at the dinner table, used as a tear gas antidote

Separation

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

There is a dead snake on the cracked road. My son says it’s not a dead snake. He says the snake has just shed its skin and left it there.

Struck

tfd3@psu.edu — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

I often wonder if there was something I missed, if the thunder and lightning said something I couldn’t understand.

Bars

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

On a playground, at a gymnastics meet, over an apartment window

Pockets

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0500

Shoplifting cigarettes, running the pool table, creating a “pocket prairie”

The Night I Don't Remember

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0500

It doesn’t matter how many AA meetings you go to. As long as you are taking oxycodone and oxymorphone, you’re going to be high, and, as long as you have complex regional pain syndrome, you’re going to be taking something serious for the pain.

Nicknames

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

Get to know Boxcar Betty, Stick Dick, Lali, and the Cajun Asian

Butt-Dials

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

“How are you?” Janice asks her brother, because what do you say to someone you didn’t choose to call except the same thing you say to everyone?

Lasciare Stare

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

My father took a puff from his Camel / and dispatched his message / in smoky cursive, Lasciare stare, / then said it again softly

The Eulogy I Didn’t Give (V)

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

Are you writing his eulogy in advance? Are you afraid / to sleep at night? Afraid your bones are planning / their escape? And what do you mean by love?

Don’t Be Alarmed

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500

After her third glass of wine, Beatrice got up to look at Bert and Martin’s wedding photo, the one with the understated silver frame and the two of them making out like teenagers, Martin’s leg wrapped around Bert’s thigh. It was supposed to be a joke, but they ended up liking it. She stared at it and thought, This was the man I thought I was spending my life with.

The Children's Wing

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500

Other parents see our little girl running up and down the hall, or performing a dance in the playroom, or climbing onto a stool to get the Funny Bunny game from the closet, and they ask why we are here. I have told the story so many times to so many different doctors that I’m beginning to wonder if I’m keeping the details straight. Was it four in the morning or six? What woke us—the trembling and shaking, or the lack of breathing, or the choking sounds?

House Hunting

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500

Our sordid credit history seems to sadden more than shock her. Such nice people, she must be thinking. How do these things happen?

On Walking

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500

To love walking is to love the body, and this has been a barrier for me. Walking requires us to be a physical presence moving in a physical space. Your body is on display, with all its jostling parts and creaky joints. I know it’s vanity—this self-consciousness, this awareness of other people’s eyes—but it was something I shouldered when I walked, something that made me seek the comfort of a climate-controlled car.

The Childless Aunt

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Though a faint hope that I might yet conceive continued to smolder in the back of my mind, at some point it dawned on me that none of these joys and trials I wished for myself were exclusive to biological parents. I could love any child who needed me.

About That Time I Pushed a Car Uphill

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0400

I want to pause here and point out the obvious: According to the laws of physics, as soon as Darius put the car in neutral, it would begin to roll back. With me behind it.

Getting Dressed

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Sleeping in uniform, layering against the cold, wearing your spouse’s jeans

Mad to Live

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

When my children began to tattoo their skin, / even modest images scared me. / I winced at each new embellishment, / wishing them innocence, not scars.

Moon Boots

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Our baby could not yet hold his head up. I lay on my parents’ living room floor next to my son, wondering how I was going to afford and overcome everything by myself, thinking I was too clumsy to take care of something as delicate as a child. And, in having these thoughts, I came undone.

There, Here, Jazz

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

The first time I walked into our new old house, it was the light / that surprised me—how much of it fell through the four windows / facing south and landed wide across the floorboards . . .

A Good House

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Two days before our family moved into a boxy, modern, three-bedroom home—our first house, forty miles outside Boston and across the highway from the poetically named Long-Sought-For Pond—the painters we hired to paint the bathroom found black mold in a wall. A chunk of plaster had bubbled up and fallen off at the lightest scrape of sandpaper. A week later, we spent an hour in the pouring rain with the home inspector—at last. The housing market was so tight that we’d only briefly toured the house before closing.

Tips

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Waiting tables at a diner, playing in a wedding band, giving massages at the Phallus Palace

Roots and Rhizomes

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

I know now that you aren’t born a parent. But you are born with inherited traits and proclivities that you end up either nurturing or starving out. Life, in my experience, requires a lot of deadheading. I’m glad my father taught me how to do it at such a young age.

Shimmer

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

We don’t have all the facts—the social worker closed her eyes, her head dipping almost imperceptibly—but she did tell us that before he was moved into the foster system, at night, after his biological mother had passed out, this one impossibly small boy would tuck his younger siblings into bed and, in case his father somehow found his way home, sit in a kitchen chair across from the front door, an old air rifle pumped and butted up against the slender wing of his shoulder.

Inside the Whale

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 16:33:49 -0400

All Night

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

A 24-hour diner, a hospital late shift, a conversation you don’t want to end

Glory of the Seas

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400

A couple of years ago I moved into a retirement village and had to do some serious downsizing. My shell collection went from five shelves to two, not counting the larger shells on lone display and the dozen or so whelks scattered about.

I’ve kept a few rare and uncommon shells: the junonia, the paper nautilus, the carrier shell. I’ve also kept the ones Mother sent me from her own collection. The bleeding tooth. Shells and rocks friends brought me from their vacations. Fossils I picked up on the beach. The purple cockle half Bobby—now Bob—and I found fifty years ago. (He has the other half.) The small, ocean-battered Triton we found during his first visit to Oregon. Various turkey wings, tulips, and spirulas. The fossilized whelk.

My life story on two shelves.