I am still amazed, these days, at the ease with which my children go to bed. Teeth, pajamas, song, a brief conversation about the day, another song, a kiss, and that's it: six nights out of seven, they're asleep within five minutes. If this routine sounds routine to you, I am filled with envy, because it wasn't always this way. My children were the original bedtime nightmares, and I spent significantly more than a decade struggling, first with Mara, then with Eva, to end their days with a modicum of decorum, not to mention speed.
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What's in a name? Shouldn't my daughter be able to choose her own? Her legal name is Isabel, picked because it could be pronounced equally well by my French family and her father's Mexican relatives, but none of us has ever called her that.
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The black cat dies is my refrain, and with her flies childhood. Theirs -- my children's -- not mine.
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It's January, the snow is heavy on the roadsides and piled high in parking lots; it's too cold to be out so I'm at the Perinton Community Center running the track. It's 16 laps to the mile, repetitious, monotonous, an unchanging view as I circle around. I'll run 3 miles this morning, 48 laps, plus a few warm-up and cool-down laps. It would be so easy to stop, out of boredom, out of fatigue. But I don't stop. The Marine Corps Drill Instructor calling cadences in my ear won't let me.
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Two hours after Rachel delivers her third baby -- another boy -- she doesn't lie when people attempt to gauge her disappointment.
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This month, Literary Mamas are reading about academic life. This fascinating collection of titles will take you from preschool to graduate school. Take your pick!
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            Don't tell me I've never built anything. I assembled these cell walls from spit and pulp
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Cristina Henriquez quickly rose from emerging writer declared one of "Fiction's New Luminaries" by the Virginia Quarterly Review, to author of the much-lauded short story collection Come Together, Fall Apart, to novelist of the debut The World in Half. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic as well as many other publications and anthologies. Literary Mama's former Multi-Culti Mami columnist Violeta Garcia-Mendoza chats with Henriquez about her cultural and literary origins, her craft, whether it is easier to name a child or a character, and how motherhood is shaping her writing life.
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Motherhood, for most of us, comes with its own language. We learn to divide our experience into trimesters; we become familiar with all things maternal, including "instinct," "bond" and "leave." Many of our new words slide into a kind of noun-heavy babyspeak: onesies, binkies, sippies, nummies. But there is a kind of motherhood that catches you by surprise, one that empties your heart and mind and leaves you struggling to find any words at all. Vicki Forman writes about such an experience in her memoir, This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood, which was awarded the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize in Creative Nonfiction.
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