I Will Miss You and I Will Miss Me

leaves-in-grass

In the autumn of 2009, when I took this photo, I was the mother of a four year old and a seven year old, walking to school hand-in-hand on both sides. My swirling girls danced in the kitchen each afternoon, fell to their soft bottoms on the hardwood floor and laughed, got up and did it again. I side-eyed the one who had yet to finish her milk and the one who distracted her, but there was so much joy every afternoon in that kitchen that I know I also joined in the dance. I worried and I danced. I leapt and I fell. The leaves outside our windows fell and fell.

“The trees are all naked!” my littlest one said, in shock, one day in late October, and I wrote it down in my list of cute-things-they-said.

We were always together, we three. Continue Reading…

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Ten Gifts I Didn’t Deserve

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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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I Was Always There

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I hate this picture.

I hate that my daughter — normally so sunny, so funny and vital and affectionate and bright — asked me to take this photo. She asked me because she wanted to keep a record of her time staying in the cardiac intensive care unit at the children’s hospital, where she was trapped after surgery to move her aorta from where it was crushing her esophagus. She asked me to take this picture — this haunting, heartbreaking picture — because I’d suggested that she keep a journal of each day, mostly so she could see herself getting better each day. I hadn’t anticipated that she’d be awake for the photos the first day. Somehow, though, she pried her eyes apart and did her best to smile, right there, as the sun was beginning to set on day one. Continue Reading…

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Carrots Are Miracles

carrots-are-miracles

Some time during the 10th century in what is now Iran — but what was then Persia — the precursor to the modern-day carrot became a part of the human diet. It started off purple in color, and then eventually mutated and changed until it emerged as the bright orange carrot we know today. I know this because of research available on the web site of the World Carrot Museum. As best as I can tell, there is no way to visit the World Carrot Museum, which is a shame, because I would love to see it.

Carrots, to me, are the perfect combination of natural miracle and human ingenuity. Root vegetables, in general, are unlikely food sources. I am awed by the path they had to follow to make their way into our diets. At some point prior to their emergence in the diet of the 10th century Persians, someone had to discover them.  Continue Reading…

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We Just Do It

lunchschoolEvery day, parents everywhere let go of their children’s hands and put them on busses, wave goodbye to them after a morning walk, or kiss them goodbye from the front seat of the cars they drive through a long line of other parents and guardians. Parents send their children to school and into someone else’s arms.

The phrase in loco parentis is one I learned early in life, helping my father proofread the textbooks he wrote on educational administration. It is Latin for “in place of parents,” and it forms the legal standing for schools professionals to act as responsible for and in guardianship of the students in their care. On a practical level, it allows them to call an ambulance for a child who has been hurt, to administer medication with a legal guardian’s permission, and to supervise those students throughout a school day. “In place of parents” is exactly how all parents hope their children’s schools are behaving. Continue Reading…

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