Essays

Cottontail’s mothering work has transformed her into the ideal candidate for her dream job, not the kind of mush-brained, overtired, and unconfident person that I felt I’d become after a…

Driving my kids home from school one day, I told them about the writing challenge. “I want to do it,” my newly minted teenager said. In my mind I said,…

How ironic. The teacher-librarian’s daughter doesn’t read.

Two years have passed since my son and daughter departed for college, emptying my nest. I watch these adult siblings now weaving their individual lives and look for threads that…

About a third of the way through a book, I would stop and flip to the end. Not to the last page of the story, spoiler-style, but rather all the…

I want too much. I shouldn’t have come on this research trip with a five-month-old baby.

Three and four pounds when they were born at thirty weeks gestation, their own struggle to survive, each time I recall it, takes my breath away. Perhaps the journey that…

I could construct my own little world, but it could never totally camouflage the chaos lurking underneath.

I have come half-addled to a precious week of writing. It is mid-winter and the holiday season has been rough and ragged with a young adult son home for the…

My son is asleep in bed, my husband is overseas for work, and I‘m taking advantage of the free evening to tidy our walk-in storage cupboard. I’m doing well. I‘ve…

[T]here is so much richness, variety, and messiness that new mothers stand to gain, not only in altered writing habits, but also in observing the language acquisition and the speech…