Creative Nonfiction

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.

Then came the day that my husband found me sitting in the garden. Bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, dirt beneath my finger nails, I was biting into a large ripe…

After an hour with my son, the counselor insisted I take him to the nearest Emergency Room. An addiction specialist, she said his underlying problem was depression and anxiety, not…

We had badly pitched an old tent, and after whispering scary stories, the children faded into sleep. I lay awake, listening carefully to one child’s quiet wheezing, the flapping tarp,…

One night after bedtime stories, I lie next to my son and watch his eyes grow cloudy with the haze of sleep. He looks younger this way — not four years old,…