Driving home at night in the sluicing rain, I can barely make out the thick white lines that mark our lane.  Water arcs, pounding dull against the wheel wells, and Zoe says, “Go slow, Mom.  We’re almost home.” Go slow.  She’s right.  It really is the only safe way through. Tonight, it seems easier to […]

“I love you.” He says it slowly, the way he says everything, but lifting the word you, as if in emphasis.  It’s not enough just to fling the words into the air above her head and walk away.  He knows this.  Purposefulness has been a recent goal.  So instead, Adam bends his lean frame toward the […]

They cast a long shadow on the lawn, all legs, son in so many ways like his father.  It’s striking.  Nothing really prepares a mother for the moments when she looks at her children and sees something of the adults they’re becoming, the careful sculpting of the future.  No matter how broad those shoulders get, I […]

Some days just feel bruised—suddenly all purple-black and sore, tender. Putting the towels away, the still-warm stacks soft in my hands, I lean into the linen closet and allow the tears I’ve been swallowing to come, quietly.  At the moment, I am sick with seems and nevers, near-drowning in shadows and struggling hard just to breathe.  I can […]

She apologizes to Kevin like we autism mamas do, ignoring the sharp, slicing pain it brings just to say the words. I’m sorry, my daughter–she has autism.  She doesn’t mean nothing by it.   She says this gesturing over something Kevin barely noticed, a failure to say hello, a back turned, a little stumble over […]

The hour turns, and my friend waves me over, patting the chair beside. All evening, we have all only wanted to surround her, this iron-strong friend strong enough yet to admit that she needs us to lift her.  It takes a brave woman to allow the veil to fall—whisper-light—from her face, to sit uncovered and honest, to […]

I confess that when she comes to get me, I do not want to get up. I just picked up my book—Dorothea Frank’s Plantation, and I have precious few moments to mind-leap on down to the Lowcountry and shut out the world.  Every time this author punctuates a sentence with the word yanh, I smell the […]

https://instagram.com/p/1yb3PWtTXa/ At every event, Adam stands too close.  I have to keep drawing him back to me.  Sometimes I hook an arm around his waist, sometimes I just catch his eyes with mine and say, come here.  But he bounces forward, right up to that white-chalk line on the grass, and it’s not his turn […]