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Disability
On Seeing A Sex Surrogate
Pounding the keys with my mouth stick, I wrote in my journal as quickly as I could about my experience, then switched off the computer and tried to nap. But I couldn’t. I was too happy. For the first time, I felt glad to be a man.
March 2023Preparations
You can prepare for some things. / Others fall on you like / meteors ripping open the sky.
September 2022Took Us All Like We Was His
Before we was married, we rented a little townhouse in Dallas. My girls was with us. They from my first marriage. Nate come to us when my baby girl was barely a year old. He latched on and took us all like we was his, and I didn’t see all the love in that.
June 2018
The Stray
One winter, years ago, a stray cat lived under my rear deck. He was long and skinny and had a tattered gray coat, a whip tail, a block head, and a set of elephant nuts that hung low off his hind end. He survived by eating scraps of leftover food my mother threw to the birds. The sight of him disgusted me.
February 2018
Perseverance
The North Tower of the World Trade Center, the Kona Ironman race in Hawaii, a four-door Plymouth Reliant
December 2016
Beyond Their Years
Linda Kreger Silverman On Understanding Gifted Children
We say children are gifted when their intellectual ability is advanced beyond their age. A four-year-old girl who can pass all the items on an IQ test that an eight-year-old is expected to be able to do would obtain an IQ score in the 200 range. Children who are developmentally advanced are out of sync with their peers, and also out of sync with the expectations of teachers and parents, which leads to vulnerability. They need individualized education and counselors who understand how to work with these children.
May 2015
Almost Unendurable Beauty
The plastic prescription vial contains thirty doses. I press the cap down, twist it counterclockwise, and shake a cylindrical pill into my hand. It is an ugly gray, like dryer lint, like newly poured concrete, like a bullet. I know my daughter will notice this.
May 2015
The R-Word
When he diagnosed my three-month-old, Fiona, with a chromosomal disorder, the redheaded, cherubic medical geneticist did not use the phrase “mentally retarded” — thank God, or the gods of rhetoric, or just the politically correct medical school the young doctor had attended.
May 2015
Anything For Love
When I was eight, I was so obsessed with Erich Segal’s novel Love Story that I memorized the first few paragraphs and recited them at every opportunity: “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she loved Mozart. And Bach. And the Beatles. And me.”
March 2014
Teaching My Daughter To Walk
If my daughter had been born to the Ashanti people in Ghana, she would have been abandoned at the riverbank.
January 2014
