This is Anorexia

By Anne Lonergan The scene is too beautiful to be the setting in which our lives veer drastically off course. The doctor’s office is orderly but inviting, the walls are painted a warm shade of white, the lighting soft and pleasing. Behind the large white desk, a wall is lined with books and periodicals and treasures from the sea. Another wall showcases framed degrees and multiple awards. Large panels of glass replace the remaining two walls, granting access to a pink sun setting over the Long Island Sound. We are high above the water, the sun is low. Through the act of bearing witness, the three of us help the huge orb nestle itself beyond the horizon. The dock that protrudes from under the office windows ends abruptly in the darkening water, the boat having long been packed away for the winter. This is our first appointment. My husband and I are concerned that Catherine, our 15-year-old daughter, is not

By Melissa Uchiyama From the very start of pregnancy, there are a myriad of decisions to make. No pee stick doles out suggestions on who to tell when. There is no chart. Becoming pregnant while already a parent means another giant decision must be made: when to tell your child that he or she may have a sibling. I say, tell ’em. Tell ’em when you’re comfortable and don’t let fear get in the way of important, life-changing news that’s yours to tell. Telling our kids early-on puts faith in them as thinking and feeling family members. Our family has only positively benefited from including our children in the good news early on, not stifling a sweet thing, pretending I’m only getting rounder from bread rolls, and not an actual baby. My husband and I told both of our children very early on (less than ten weeks) and decided to do all of the growing and many of the discussions

By Petra Perkins Sometimes a mother and daughter need to get away – without husbands, kids, and without reserve. My daughter Sue and I took such a vacation. It would be our last trip together – but not our last journey. “Let’s go to France,” I said, weeks after Sue’s diagnosis of MS., Multiple Sclerosis. A doctor told us his certainty, but we didn’t believe it until a second opinion. Maybe we didn’t really believe it then. She’d been having some weird bodily sensations – headaches, fatigue, dropping things – but felt well enough to travel. I thought I was doing a good thing by buying one big duffle bag, jazzy with a zillion pockets. Not one to travel light, I filled it to the brim and then it was too heavy and ungainly to carry. Sue named it The Monkey, because she ended up strapping it on her back. This isn’t a story of Sue contracting a brain/nerve

By Melissa Uchiyama My daughter’s tooth lies over there, on a tea saucer by the sink. It is her first one, the first milk tooth to drop from her mouth. She wiggled it with incessant fascination, so much so, that she got an instant cough, fever, and must wash her hands every few minutes. All the germs that come with wiggling teeth. This is all new. Her pink training wheels sit by the front door, wrenched off like another two baby teeth. Not needed. Grown out and flung away. All this growing and that’s hardly the end. This is the tip, the first shoots. My baby girl cannot stay small. She is climbing up like a vine, a summer tendril with beans and new flowers. Another wiggly tooth sits by the other’s hole. Her legs cast off from the hips and she is almost-six going on eight. Amazed at the sharp sides of the tooth and that which couldn’t be

By Claire McMurray Did I breastfeed my daughter? As a new mother I spent an unhealthy amount of time grappling with this question. Not because I wanted an answer for anyone else, but because I needed one for myself. I still don’t truly know. For the first few weeks of her life my baby had a mix of breastmilk and formula. Then she had milk from the breast, even though she screamed every time I tried to feed her. At 12 weeks I gave up feeding her at the breast and she got pumped milk in bottles for the next few months. When I tapered off the pumping she got a mix of frozen milk and formula. Then it was just formula. It was the disconnect between what seemed like a simple question and my own baby’s intricate and flexible breastfeeding timeline that sent me into a tailspin. What exactly is breastfeeding? I wondered. Is it just milk from the

By Claire McMurray

By Melissa Hart “Stupid Mommy! I hate you! You’re an idiot!” It’s 2:45, the end of the school day. I cower in a corridor like a kicked mutt surrounded by serene hemp-clad parents and their eight-year-olds. Patchouli oil emanates from their golden arms and legs. They bend their sunny open faces toward one another—faces that cloud and pinch at the sight of my second-grader. She’s flushed and furious, sweaty curls standing on end. She smells of spilled tempura paint and noodle soup from her overturned Thermos on the floor. Her green dinosaur boots stamp a frenzied tarantella around me as she screams. “You never do what I want. You’re the worst mother ever!” Shame flames my cheeks. The other mamas in the hallway, the bearded longhaired papas, probably believe her. I’m Snow White’s Evil Queen, Rapunzel’s Mother Gothel. In short, I most surely suck. I don’t meet the eyes around me, I don’t say a word. I turn, chin ratcheted

By Sarah Bousquet “Be happy, mama!” My toddler holds my face in her clammy palms and smushes my cheeks skyward. She caught me somewhere else, far away in the land of deadlines, to-do lists, and future plans. It’s not that I’m unhappy, I’m just not here. It isn’t lost on me that she perceives these states of discontent and distraction as equivalent. Nothing yanks me back into the present like my busy, talkative toddler, those little hands forcing the corners of my mouth up in the right direction. Trying to be present in our distracted culture often feels unattainable amidst the ping of text messages and emails. We must always be multi-tasking and yet we are told to be in the moment, especially when it comes to our kids. Before I became a mom I thought, what’s sadder than a parent at a playground, eyes fixed on a screen while a child shouts for attention? Now I give that parent

By Reni Roxas I suppose none of this would have happened had it not been for my two teenage boys fighting in the car. As soon as my oldest son, Eric, a high school senior, joined us in the parking lot he said, “I’m not going. Not unless the idiot rides in the backseat, where he belongs.” We were going on a college campus tour. The so-called “idiot” was Eric’s fourteen-year-old brother, Paolo, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, his crutches thrown in the back seat. A month before, Paolo had broken his leg during freshman basketball tryouts and was given a pair of crutches with doctor’s orders to stretch his leg on car trips. It forced Eric to give up the coveted front passenger seat to his injured brother. I am the Filipina mother of these two boys. When Eric and Paolo were younger I watched them tumble and tangle, a Rubix cube of locked arms, elbows,

By Emily Crose My son was born after a week-long labor in August of 2013. When he came into our life, it was a beautiful moment. My tough little boy came into this world covered in bruises from his birth and I looked down at him in the infant warmer and his tired, new little body with the eyes of a proud. Albeit exhausted new father. We named him Quentin – a name both my wife and I loved. Quentin is the star around which my world revolves. As a new dad, I couldn’t have been more excited to welcome him into the life my wife and I had built together. There were so many things that I wanted to do with my new son, and I couldn’t wait for him to be able to experience them all with me. Saturday morning cartoons, teaching him how to rip apart a computer and then how to put it all back together

By Sara Hendery A group of boys. Group—meaning, powerful. Young like first breath, like new morning, like unlearned words. They gather, circling around an old beat-up shed; I sit and watch from an Amtrak train paused on the outskirts of a neighborhood in North Carolina. The boys are spray-painting diligently, as in, These words must be perfect; they must make us look dangerous, masculine, like men. I watch them congratulate each other with heavy high-fives and hawks of spit on the ground. A woman, the owner of the shed, I assume, walks out of her trailer, finds the group of boys vandalizing her property. Hey, that’s mine. That belongs to me, she must think. She’s yelling, hands swinging as if swatting flies; she doesn’t yet see what they have written. I cannot stand the thought that she will see what they have written. The boys run, dispersing like excited cockroaches, and I see the large red lettering through the sparse

Essays

This is Anorexia

Opinion: Tell Your Kids Early

The French Connection

Mother As Witness

Did I Breastfeed?

Why I Put my Drug-Affected Daughter Back on Drugs

The Art of Being Silly

Coffee Cake and Kindness

He Calls Me “Mommily”

Dangerous [Language]