For Serena, on the occasion of her 13th birthday
Dear Sweetcake, Have I ever told you the story of your birth? You were incredibly wanted. When your older brother Nathaniel was about two and a half, I started thinking about the age gap between me and MY older brother, which I had always thought was optimal (probably because that’s what Grandma and Grandpa told me): two and a half years. I wanted Nathaniel to have a sibling close in age since your older sister Jessica was an only child for nearly 12 years until Nathaniel came along and...
Read MoreFor Nathaniel, on the occasion of his 17th birthday
Dear Nathaniel, 17 years ago, I met you for the first time. Do you remember? Perhaps not, but I do. I was very excited. I liked being pregnant with you. So much promise contained in the roundness of my belly, the roundness that was your home for 9 months. There was an entire person in there! After we moved to Doylestown when you were about 5 months cooked and I was no longer working, I did a lot of nothing. Read books, cat on lap. Ate bananas and Tootsie Rolls. Painted your room purple. Got to...
Read MoreCountdown
In just over six weeks I will voluntarily relinquish custody of our three children to my former spouse, crossing my fingers with unfounded hope and trust, and leave them. Perhaps indefinitely. The person I thought I was will no longer exist and in her place will stand someone else entirely. I'll sell or give away most of my belongings, pack my car with what remains, hug my kids, and drive away. Alone.
Read MoreThe Picture I Carry
A picture has been burned into my retinas. It haunts me. I close my eyes and it is there, often unbidden. It comes to me in the middle of the night and at unexpected times throughout the day. I long to push it away, but I need this picture. It's all I have: a mind's-eye picture of my children, of a single moment from the last time I saw them. June 21.
Read MoreChasm
On Mother's Day this year, a month before I left, I cut Nathaniel's hair for the last time. He sat on the porch stoop in a t-shirt and shorts, shivering in the unspringlike cool, bending his long body to conserve warmth and to make his head more accessible to my awkward scissoring. I held up curling dark-blond strands of his hair, overgrown since his last cut in midwinter, and sheared them short, as if in doing so I could make that last time of such casual intimacy between us stretch into forever.
Read MoreMagic
"There are two exciting things I can't wait for!" Serena's voice over the phone was breathless from excitement when we spoke in early December. "Christmas -- and your visit!"I'm glad to be ranked up there along with Christmas. And I'm even ranked ahead of Serena's own birthday, looming on the horizon. Our weekly-or-so phone calls make only a tiny dent in the enormity of time and distance that stretches between us.
Read More Hi. I’m Talyaa.
Cancer Chick.
Soulmate.
Wild Goddess.
Soulmate.
Wild Goddess.
I have Stage 4 cancer. Doctors have little hope and little to offer, so I had to take my healing into my own hands. Luckily, my soulmate is a break-the-rules warrior, so we created a radical healing program. My life will never be the same.
This time I'm living life like I mean it. No more tango somedays — living like a wild goddess starts now. I'm already the Cancer Goddess.
Next stop. Wild Goddess Life.
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