Creative Nonfiction

If politics divides many families, it was actually a sweet spot for my mother and me, the one place where our instincts and ideologies were almost totally aligned. So I…

My mother didn’t meet the son I named Daniel until she was 72. She was living in the nursing home in Maine, and Jeff, 23, was visiting from California for…

In theory, sharing a 14-hour drive with my daughter sounded like a reasonable idea. But as soon as she takes her first curve, I reflexively grab for the door handle…

The everyday, lately, has been uneven. Our house lost power. The dog injured her leg. My husband has shingles. My employer is bankrupt. My father-in-law tore his aorta. And yet…

I can only imagine what it must have been like for LJ’s birth mother to relinquish her baby, to wrap her in layers against the November chill, set her down…

For the first time since my water broke, I feel like melting into my husband’s hazel-green eyes, but then I notice the abnormally deep creases beneath them. At the hospital,…

The second time I wanted to die also involved my children. It was not the pain of deliverance, though, not the surrender of acceptance. It was the powerlessness all parents…

I see it in everyone’s eyes when they ask how I’m doing, as if I can answer, as if I’m not a beast of grief wearing the skin of a…

There’s something hypnotic about driving rain. My eyes are drawn to it as I peel potatoes for our own dinner. Carving out black bits with my vegetable knife, lines from…

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…