Doing it Differently

It was nearly a year and a half ago that Dave told me he was probably dying. I sat on the porch swing on my terrace, phone pressed to my…

Ethan knew the day our moving truck was coming. Friday, September 5, exactly two weeks after his own move to Penn State. We spoke that morning around 6 a.m. He…

When it came time to help Ethan through the college selection process, my ex and I took a divide-and-conquer approach. I flew with our boy to Ann Arbor for a…

In recent weeks, I’ve organized our photographs and cleaned out files, jewelry boxes, and the tool chest my dad dipped into whenever he did odd jobs around my apartment. I’ve…

Like many moms, I spent countless hours of my son’s second and third year hunched before a snaking train track, acting out various conversations and conflicts between Thomas the Tank…

“I made my first solo drive,” Ethan tells me on the phone. It’s evening and he’s at Richard’s apartment. Hours earlier, the two of them went to the DMV where…

For Ethan’s second birthday we hung large sheets of black paper all through our large kitchen and provided our guests with buckets of chalk. We did this so none of…

“What fourteen-year-old doesn’t want to have dinner with her mother?” A woman named Lola bellows this in the teen area of the library where I work. “Do you see what…

Now that Ethan and I have all of one year together before he leaves for college, I’m grief-stricken once again over the brevity of this one-way trip. I’m also angry…

It’s the night of Ethan’s junior prom and, weeks earlier, he’d volunteered me to sign the paperwork for the after-hours joyride he and ten of his friends have arranged for.…

I’ve been telling myself that I shouldn’t write about Newtown. That it’s not my story, not—kina hora—my tragedy. In the days after it happened, I even admonished myself for tearing…