1Apr 5, 2024
All I ask, Riley sitting beside me at the bar in the kitchen for lunch, us with our bright-fresh salads, glint of forks, napkins folded in neat rectangles, is, do you want to say the prayer? Umm, that’s okay, she says, I’m good, and then, her voice wavers, and her eyes suddenly fill with tears. […]
2Aug 25, 2023
On the Fridays when Josh spends the day with us, Riley, Josh, and I have conversations about what they’ll do for each other in-case-of-seizure. They sit at the bar, our couple, their fingers interlaced, while I stand in front of them at the kitchen sink, my hands preoccupied with washing. “Now Josh,” I begin. He […]
3Jul 21, 2023
I pray with Riley at night. After she brushes her teeth, she comes to get me, shows up beside my bed like she used to as a child, and I lay aside my book and pull my body back out of bed and slow step my way across the hall to her room. Sometimes I […]
4Jun 9, 2023
In our house, we have learned to keep time this way, in days since the last seizure, but this is not something we carry along, not at all like some battered suitcase stuffed with all our worries and dragged along behind, but rather something acknowledged and touched by our hands and burned in the pasture, […]
5Dec 30, 2022
I run my finger over the scars on the dresser in my bedroom, Grandma, twice etched, raw, like an incision in the wood in Riley’s handwriting. Always in twos. I murmur the dark echo of an old cliché, the shadow of an old joke still half bitter to me, but only by half, because God […]
6Nov 25, 2022
In the hallway at our neurologist’s office, as Riley and I breeze along behind the medical assistant on the way to an exam room, I realize again how much my daughter has grown up. It’s a flaw of ours as parents, that while we encourage and facilitate growth in our children, we lack proficiency in […]
7Apr 29, 2022
The curtains open and the music swells, and I imagine flitting, light-winged, across the stage, which looks blue, lit like the sky. I imagine the freedom of soaring, the air wrapping about my waist like a pair of lifting hands. They will soar on wings like eagles, I remember. They will run and not grow […]
8Apr 1, 2022
Restoration fills our talk of home. Kevin and I never finish the conversation. We watch Riley pause in every doorway whispering some memorized OCD monologue, bending at the waist like a bobblehead doll, and Kevin says to me, “One day, she’s going to fly through doorways.” Adam stumbles over answering a simple question, searches his […]
9Dec 24, 2021
“It’s so pretty out here,” I say, the words like an exhale. Golden brown leaves skitter across the asphalt, and everywhere I look I see another vibrant shade–the sky, cool blue; the trees, a sunset arch sheltering our pathway. I breathe a prayer, remembering something C.S. Lewis said, something that fits: We do not want […]
10Nov 12, 2021
When Riley cries, she turns red, as though her whole body must make up for any failure to express herself clearly in words. This morning as we walk to the car, her eyes, which were already rimmed an angry color, look pink from the press of her palms as she rubs away her tears. The […]