Category Archives: friends

Sister in the Periphery

girlsThe story of a sick little girl is compelling. The story that spans across years of doctors and procedures, melting into each other in a pool of brackish gloom, punctuated by moments of glittery hope — that’s good reading, right there. You want to know: did she get better? did they figure out what was wrong? how did it all turn out?

That’s the story I’ve been telling about our family, and it’s true. It has driven every other decision in our life, in one way or another, for as long as our younger daughter, Sammi, has been a force on this earth. Figuring out how to keep her healthy, to help her breathe, to feed her and manage her doctors’ appointments and procedures and surgeries, to hold my own head up and make it through my own fears each day: these are the things that dictated the way we navigated the world.

But there is another story in the periphery. We have another child.

I don’t write much about my older daughter Ronni largely because she is now thirteen. She deserves the right to decide what information about her goes public, and so I’ve refrained from sharing her experience so far until now. Until yesterday. Continue Reading…

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Weddings and Doctors

This week, I’m taking part in Brain, Child Magazine’s Brain Debate on the topic of inviting children to weddings and other formal occasions. It seems, at first glance, unrelated to my more usual subject matter. Here on Swallow, My Sunshine, I write about my younger daughter’s medical journey. What does bringing a child to a wedding have to do with that?

For me, the central issue in both these issues is instinct. When my brother and his fiancé forbade me to bring my newborn daughter, Ronni — my first born child — to their wedding, I was upset. I couldn’t understand it, and, as I describe in that article on Brain, Child, I tried to reason with them that I would be sure my newborn would not interrupt their ceremony. When I finally offered to have a sitter stay with my newborn baby in the hotel lobby, my sister-in-law-to-be shouted at me, “No! I will not compete with a baby at  my wedding!”

It made sense, then. It wasn’t about disruption or inappropriate behavior or my own distraction — it was about the possibility that a baby would upstage the bride. After only three weeks of parenting, we hired a postpartum doula to stay with our baby at the hotel where the wedding reception was held. Even then, the bride bristled at my desire to leave the reception and nurse my baby whenever the doula called; she had read that babies only need to nurse every three hours. Once I could see the situation for what it was, every instinct in me prickled against the woman my brother was about to marry. We were utterly different, she and I. My new baby daughter — her only niece, and at the time of that conversation, still growing inside me — wasn’t important to her. It was up to me (and her father) to care about our new daughter. Continue Reading…

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Pink and Smooth

Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable. -Jane Austen

In early June of 2011, my daughter Sammi had the final endoscopy in a series of eight, each one marking a phase of her six-food-elimination diet for eosinophilic esophagitis. Each scope after the first one — the one that provided the diagnosis — was to test for the effect that a food had on the surface of her esophagus. A negative reaction would look like eczema in that muscular tube running from her throat to her stomach — patches of white, clustered cells, sometimes so thoroughly irritated that long, deep ridges would form, as though the disease itself had run a fingernail down the tissues there. That was the state of things when she had been diagnosed in June of 2010. Continue Reading…

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Bodies, Attended with Love

bodiesThis past weekend, I saw something exquisitely expressed, over and over, as though the universe was patiently explaining it to me in as many ways as it could. Here, it said to me, notice this. You don’t get it yet? Ok, notice this.

By the time I lay, exhausted and filled to the brim on Sunday evening, I had finally seen it. It was bodies, magnificent in every way, thrust at me all weekend, telling me the story of all the forms reverence can take. Continue Reading…

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Mother Blessing

tostados

More than ten years ago, I attended a mother-blessing, also known sometimes as a blessingway, for one of my closest friends. Andrea was due shortly thereafter with her second child, a daughter. Surrounded by a small group of powerful, loving women, Andrea and her still-gestating daughter were touched by healing hands and given tokens of energy and affection in the form of beads to make a bracelet Andrea could use as a focus in labor.

Mid-way through the evening, we gathered in the kitchen of the host, Andrea’s friend, for food and drink. She bustled around in front of the stove and returned with a steaming ceramic bowl of refried black beans, smelling strongly of garlic, and a platter of corn tostados. We all slathered the crunchy, oversized tortilla chips with the savory beans, and I knew that, perhaps in small part due to the circumstances heavy with love and support, I’d fallen in love with a food. Continue Reading…

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