Category Archives: school

Going nowhere, slowly

I’m trying to teach my daughter to drive, but there’s nowhere to go. We order our groceries online for delivery, prescriptions come with a three-month supply, and school is taking place in our basement on a laptop. Where to drive?

Why, even?

But I’m doing it anyway, the same way I browsed grocery stores all gaggle-eyed and hopeful when our family followed the six-food-elimination diet for eosinophilic esophagitis ten years ago. My daughter was misdiagnosed, it turned out, but we didn’t know that as we ate food without dairy, soy, eggs, nuts and wheat. I pushed my cart around the store aimlessly, hoping for a surprise. Maybe, I thought, this brand will have discovered a secret combination of ingredients that tastes like what I remember, for once. 

Sometimes, that surprise DID come. I found that Fruity Pebbles, that horrible day-glo cereal my husband loved that made my throat hurt from the intensity of the sugar, fit the diet perfectly. I brought it home like a trophy, drizzled it with rice milk, ate it with a big fake smile on my face. Continue Reading…

twitterby feather
Facebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmailby feather

All the Paths from Stuck to Motion

all-the-paths

1.

I put on clothes before I go downstairs every morning. It’s a new rule, in my head, a ward against a world in which so many have switched to sweatpants and pajamas all day and in which I know I would roll slowly down into deep sadness if I didn’t put on real clothes. Pants, top, bra. Deodorant. Brush hair and teeth. Deep, deep drags on the morning inhaler as my city fills with the bored smoke of too many fireworks celebrating nothing. The path from the bed to the closet to the bathroom is the first trip I take every day, moving from another-day-like-yesterday to maybe-this-shirt-will-make-me-feel-better.

2.

If the clothes I’ve put on are running clothes because the air quality has passed muster outside, the path down the stairs to the back foyer is next. Sneakers. Little stretchy pouch for my inhaler and my key and, now, for a mask I sometimes pull out and clutch in my hand as I trod past Lake Michigan, making ten-foot arcs around septuagenarians walking in pairs. Go too far north and the path is clogged with people, forcing my mask over my face, so I go west, past the shoe store and the shuttered bakery and the tiny nail spas that can’t be doing well. Past the rose garden, past the funny goose statue they dress in giant bows and rainbow capes. I come back to my yard, panting, and sit at the picnic table to upload photos of flowers and waves to Instagram. All my photos are of flowers and waves and food, all the miracles I pin there to remind myself that they exist, still, even among all of this. Continue Reading…

twitterby feather
Facebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmailby feather

Let Me Weep

I am a midnight writer
I am a sole survivor
I am chemicals colliding

Awake late in the night with a baby in my lap, I have turned the tv on low, the mist from the nebulizer clouding the screen. Though the steroid drugs wafting from the machine should amp my daughter up, she is limp across my thighs and sweating damply into the crook of my elbow. It takes twenty minutes to give her a full treatment, until the hissing starts breaking up and popping sounds come from the ampule of liquid feeding the machine. I run my finger down her velvety arm, feel my pulse quicken.

Years later, I find that an afternoon Diet Coke takes me past the edge of hyper over-exhaustion and into sleep. What should stimulate me — caffeine — sometimes helps me rest. I drink it in the bright sun streaming through my window and then lay on the couch, drifting. My daughter and I, it seems, have our own rules about sleep.

Continue Reading…

twitterby feather
Facebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmailby feather

If Then That

if-then-that

She was born fourteen years, six months, and thirty days ago, right on her due date, after a quick and powerful birth with most of the labor at home. She was 7 lbs 8 oz, two pounds heavier than her older sister, but we marveled at the similarities — her thick, curly black hair, her deep blue eyes, the slight jaundice that kept her under bilirubin lights for a day or two.

She came home and we all fell in love with her immediately. Her extra two pounds made sleep and nursing and everything so much easier, and it was like a dream compared to her sister’s nightmarish infancy. Like her sister, she was healthy and hearty, and in photos of the two of them at one month, two months, three months, they were impossible to tell apart. Until she got old enough for her eyes to turn the same dark brown as my mother, with long gorgeous eyelashes, they could have been the same baby.

At 12 weeks, I went back to work, photos of my two dark curly girls on my desk, side by side, baby and preschooler, carbon copies. Every few hours, I locked the door and pumped. Every night, I picked them up from daycare and buried my face into their necks that smelled like the daycare’s baby wipes, and we went home and ate takeout or macaroni and cheese and peas, with the baby gleefully nursing and then, eventually, eating jarred sweet potatoes and carrots and bananas and spinach. I felt a twinge of guilt — should I be making baby food? it doesn’t take that long… — but instead, we sat on the living room floor and cheered as the baby crawled between us, filling our time with each other.

I could have applied to graduate school, like I’d planned, but work was going well, so well that I thought I’d give it another year, not shake things up until the baby was two, or maybe three. I got a raise. “I can’t believe how well you’re doing,” my boss told me. “I was a wreck when I had my second baby!”

“Well, she’s a great sleeper,” I told her. Continue Reading…

twitterby feather
Facebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmailby feather

There Was Joy

rear-view-mirror

There are so many things I had to refuse her.

I was newly a mother of two when a doctor – a kind doctor, a thoughtful doctor – told me that my new daughter would almost certainly end up in the hospital with every respiratory infection she got. Not a great idea, he said about twice-a-week daycare. Probably not, he said about baby-and-parent music classes. No, I don’t think so, was his answer to my hopeful questions about baby swimming, a smaller daycare, a playgroup. After two hospitalizations in her first five months, I believed him.

Through that first winter watched through front windows into an empty courtyard or through car windows into big sister’s preschool, my new daughter and I eyed the world with suspicion: me because it contained too many germs and her because nothing in it made her feel quite right. There was no sleep, no break, no time apart for the two of us to learn the beauty of missing each other and being reunited. There was just us, with the world outside the window a mystery.

The winter turned into years, isolated and treading water. Continue Reading…

twitterby feather
Facebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmailby feather