September 21, 2018

I Will Miss You and I Will Miss Me

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…

September 7, 2018

Lucky Me

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…

July 13, 2018

Ten Gifts I Didn’t Deserve

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…