Author Archives: Debi

Lucky Me

vision-sunshine

This summer, my younger daughter — already the survivor of a lifetime of medical drama — was diagnosed with three distinct visual disorders. Her eyes don’t focus at the same speed, they strain easily once they’ve achieved focus, and each eye moves at a different speed when traveling across the page. Discovering these issues was yet another example of my internal voice — whispering constantly that something was not quite right — being the most truthful voice in the room. Still, despite my relief at having an answer to my daughter’s struggles with reading, something else has been nagging at me as the school year begins.

As background, it’s important to note that my life left its intended course the moment that this daughter, Sammi, my youngest, was born. Her immediately obvious state of vaguely-unwell dragged me away from my job and into the flexible world of freelance work nearly thirteen years ago. I’ve been home to walk her and her sister to school, to stay on top of doctors’ appointments, to supervise homework, to read aloud, to take her for annual vision screenings, to sit by her side in the operating room before she had sixteen different surgeries. I knew the names of her teachers, her friends, her longtime bully. I knew her daily life because I was home.

And I was home, not because I chose it, but because I am incredibly, incredibly lucky. Continue Reading…

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Make It New, Give It Life

basement

This last week of summer vacation, my daughters are redecorating the basement.

They are thirteen and sixteen, past needing space for a vast collection of magnetic princesses and plastic animals, the dollhouse closed up and stored beneath the stairs. The collection of pony puzzles and foam building toys and inexplicable plastic parts from birthday-party-goody-bags have been sorted, donated, stored or thrown out. Elmo and Dora the Explorer are long gone. What remains is a small enough collection of things that the basement — home to all things daughter for a dozen years — is ready to become a teenager hangout. They are planning it themselves.

Like many projects, this was supposed to be an all-summer-long plan, but here we are in the last week of summer vacation, frantically painting. I brought paint sample pamphlets from Home Depot for them, blues and reds and greens and purples and yellows. They’re the same kinds of sample cards that their father used to give them to hold while he wheeled them through the store in the oversized carts when they were very tiny, on the one day each week when he’d bundle them quickly out of the house in the early morning so I could get a few precious extra hours of sleep. They still talk about playing with the doorknobs in the store. They still remember the carts.

This week, they finally chose a light blue for the walls of their hangout. My older daughter says “It’s going to be like looking at the sky!” Continue Reading…

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I’ll Hold Two Hands

three-cups-of-tea

I have two nurturing, empathetic daughters. Both went away to overnight camps this summer and came back with appropriately maternal nicknames. One daughter was affectionately nicknamed “Nancy,” a name her camp friends said sounded like someone’s mom, because she greeted her friends each morning with “did you sleep well?” The other daughter, equipped with a bag of crocheting, another bag of butterscotches, and sipping a can of ginger ale, felt called to wake her friends in time for class in the morning; they called her Grandma.

I glowed with pride when they told me.

Because their loving natures make them muse regularly about what it will be like to have their own children, I feel full approval to imagine myself as a grandmother, someday. My grandparents were not a part of my life, but my daughters have been lucky to have two grandmothers and a grandfather, giving me a window into all the choices I might have someday about how to conduct myself in those magical, far-off years. I have thought often about the way I want to behave. After all, becoming a grandmother does not end my tenure as a mother, nor as a wife. How to proceed? Who will I be? Continue Reading…

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The Summer of Still-No-Book

summer-of-no-book

I set a goal in January: by June, I would have a solid crummy-first-draft of my book done. I even went to a workshop on how to create a daily writing practice; notes in my backpack, pressed daily up against my laptop, give me a roadmap and a way out of every excuse. I have the tools. I have the story.

It is August, and I do not have the solid crummy-first-draft.

I have forty-one crummy-first draft chapters, all leading up to a moment in the plot of my story when the drama comes to a full boil and holds there for six months. No matter how many times I sit down at my computer to write past it, I find myself doing other writing, working, checking Facebook, or editing previous chapters. Sometimes, I sit instead with the book proposal and churn through another chunk. Continue Reading…

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Ten Gifts I Didn’t Deserve

grateful-sun-flowers

In the years I’ve spent as a parent, I’ve been humbled hundreds of times. Sometimes one of my daughters has a proclivity the other lacks. Other times, the health challenges of one make me see the relative good health of the other as anything but a given. Most often, though, I am humbled by the ways I see the challenges of other children and families. The things I took for granted always, always, reveal themselves to be as symptoms of my own ignorance. I could make the list below almost endless, pages and pages of gifts that no one is guaranteed but that I — somehow, luckily — was given. I will never take them for granted again. Never. Continue Reading…

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