Creative Nonfiction

Stop being ridiculous, I tell myself. Three kids is plenty, more than my share, really, when you consider our carbon footprint and the Earth’s carrying capacity and all those couples…

Even among her many mom powers, her technique for starting an orange awed me. After washing it (“you’ve got to wash it, you don’t know where it’s been”), she set…

You know the truth: you can never be the hero, and not only because you let your son enter that den of pizza. Self-congratulation feels false, itchy, after all the…

While Jeff and I stand there, I have the same recurring thought as always: that the leaves of the oak tree beside Dad’s grave will move in the breeze, indicating…

I didn’t agree. It was worth it. I’d try harder. I could be whatever it was she needed me to be. I’d hang on. I wouldn’t give up. She was…

And then I asked myself the question my daughter must have pondered before telling me what Mitchell did—the question generations of women have asked themselves: Is it worth it?

Am I really Medea, sorceress of Greek and Roman myth, who sacrificed her children for revenge? Or will I be the mother who sacrifices everything for her children?

I grew strong. And yet I couldn’t outrun motherhood or age or the life that threatened to swallow me up with its lists and its human alarm clocks and its…

Even though you are almost seventeen and not a baby, I have to get up and go over to you to touch you and make sure you have not disappeared…

But I am her mother and because there is no one to take my place I cannot collapse under the crush of these early months. I can’t crash the car,…

I pictured my palm opening to reveal a tuft of hair, a purple ribbon. He’s right here.