Josh hands Riley a gift bag, jolly red and green, plump with surprises and spilling over with tissue, and we all sit forward, anticipating grace. All through Advent, I have been thinking:  On the surface of things, at least according to the understanding of their time, Mary and Joseph should never have married.  I’ve been […]

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 […]

We gather as family around the table to celebrate Josh’s birthday—Camille and Ray and Kevin and me with our kids, all following the hostess in the Japanese restaurant like ducks in a line, and I count the blessing.  In my heart, every meal is a eucharist. And when He had taken some bread and given thanks, He broke it […]

Gently, I lay a hand on Adam’s back, feeling the knobs of his spine, hard and round beneath my fingers.  Silently he watches as, with the other hand, I press a sticky note down on the desk in front of him. At the top, today’s date, scrawled quickly.  When matters; it anchors the whole thing. […]

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 […]

Riley walks in carrying a package, her arms wrapped wide around a big plastic mailer, and I suddenly remember to receive God’s gifts and give thanks. “There is a package for Mom,” she says, her chin bobbing against the load,” and I’m guessing it has something to do with Christmas.” She’s right, of course. To […]

From upstairs, I hear Riley saying her goodbyes to the members of her online class one by one, and every time the sentence full, as if acknowledgement simply must not be halfway done. In our home, where Autism rises like a wall, interrupting and limiting relationships, we exchange words as valuable currency; we fight for […]

“I guess it’s about that time,” Kevin says, glancing at the clock and then at me, meaning time for us to set aside our books and our lazy attitudes, time to get dressed in our wedding clothes. I think of the dress I bought, hanging upstairs on a hanger in the closet, the silver brocade […]

In the waiting room, I sit on a cushy sofa beside a water feature that transforms the wall into a waterfall. Rivulets gurgle, trickling down over curvy metal panels–shiny blue, polished silver, suggesting the play of light over undulating bodies of fish, a pulling current. The water disappears behind a panel at the bottom. I […]

The Lord is my shepherd; I lack nothing. I say it so quietly no one can hear, with my useless hands jammed under my thighs. From the exam room in the oral surgeon’s office, I watch as the dental assistant walks my son across the hall for x-rays. Her long hair, shiny with florescent light, […]