Six years ago, shortly before the 2000 presidential election, Mark and I went to visit his father somewhere in the mysterious region south of the Mason-Dixon. I was not looking forward to the trip: I'm an anxious traveler at best, yet here I was, hugely pregnant, boarding a plane to visit someone who routinely made [...]
Posts from ‘April, 2007’
The Child That Wasn’t
Before I had any children, it always seemed to me that parents didn't do enough, which was easy for me to say from the outside. I once had a co-worker who used to bitch about her pregnancy all the time: how tired she was and how huge she was and how in pain she was [...]
The Little Things
My daughter has a beloved little stuffed animal named Gigi that she takes with her everywhere. Gigi comes in the car with us to preschool and stays curled up in my daughter's backpack in her cubby until the end of the day. Gigi comes to the grocery store and rides down slides at the park. [...]
Higher Power
God and I don't get along. We have had a terrible relationship, much worse than my relationship with Sleep. This is probably because I have no problem admitting that Sleep actually exists; most nights, it is there for me, if only briefly. But God? I was raised Catholic and spent every Sunday in church getting [...]
Lightning Does Strike Twice
We all tend to make the same mistakes over and over and over again. When I started 12 Step, I was amazed at how many beautiful, intelligent women I met who had been married 2, 3, 4 times, each time to an addict. The first marriage had broken up due to drug addiction, the second [...]
Victory
When asked about his day, my son has responded like a teenager for as long as he's been able to talk: "I don't know. Nothing." Sometimes I will trap him into half an answer by asking leading questions, like "I see red paint on your pants. What did you do with paint in kindergarten today?" [...]
Diagnosis
When my son was two, he wasn't speaking, at least not in the traditional sense. He could make, to a limited extent, the initial sounds of words: "ba" for anything from ball to butterfly or "kah" for anything from car to kitchen. This could have made understanding him confusing, except that he didn't use the [...]
I Don’t Ever Want To Hear You Say That Again
About a week ago, my daughter was playing a memory game. After a few right answers, she got one wrong and said, "I'm not very smart." Now, this pushed my every last button, because she is brilliant, but already at three, something is seeping in and telling her she's not. But as a smart woman [...]
The Matrix, Reloaded
"Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself." Mark and I lived most of our lives in the Matrix; we were born in it, grew up in it, met each other in it, were married in it. For over 30 years, our brains tried so hard, [...]
The Matrix
Now, I admit, I love a good Keanu Reeves movie, or even (as most of them are) a bad Keanu Reeves movie. He has this uncanny ability to channel his defining role as Ted Theodore Logan (of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure) throughout his work. (Just think of the way he delivers the line, "I [...]
