I glance at Zoe and sigh, looking through the garage to the open door, past the concrete gray and the exposed beams, the chrome of bikes against the walls, the chain and track of the automatic door, to the warm light coming from the living room windows. The garage, with it’s steel shade, looks like […]

I scan the bustling auditorium for Riley and Adam and immediately find them, my two opposite kids, naturally sitting on opposite sides of the room. Adam looks back at me from a lonely spot on the second row and grins, his gaze both an acknowledgment and an assessment. He’s good, but do I need anything? […]

When they ask Adam to name his role for the end-of-the-year play at school, he chooses, “Kevin,” says his father’s name in that deep, gravelly voice, just grunts it out like a fact. His teacher smiles telling me this. “I said, ‘Now Adam, you can pick any name you want. Are you sure?’” she says, […]

Zoe turns on the stairs to look back up at me, just a flutter of robe and tassel, a flash of royal blue, that hat crowning her swishing hair, and I think, This is one of those moments I’ll remember. Some moments are like that, so weighted and important and real we can reach out […]

“Mom?” Riley reaches into the cabinet to my right, rising up on her toes behind me, leaning like a shoot. I wash dishes at the sink, my sore hands soothed by the hot water, the soft soap. The bottoms of my feet hurt from standing so long, and at the end of an afternoon spent […]

“What do you appreciate about your mom?” Kevin asks the kids on Mother’s Day, while we sit in the booth thumbing the laminated menus, waiting for the server to reappear and take our order for lunch. I shift uncomfortably, looking away, sliding my hands against the red vinyl booth, feeling that it will burden them […]

I joke and call myself a hoop jumper, me with my hair flying wild around my face and my exercise clothes still on from before carpool; me with a pen in one hand, and a mess of papers stretched across the desk in indistinguishable stacks, some paper-clipped, some loose and, as Kevin would say, “flapping […]

How easy it is to sink to that place where the smallest things we do for love don’t feel like love at all, to that shadowland where we believe wholeheartedly in withholding, where we forget that giving is the means to abundance. Adam sulks over his dinner, flicking his eyes toward me, his look pit-dark. […]

Fresh from the shower on an 80-degree day that feels thick with the promise of Summer, Adam spins–literally–into the kitchen wearing flannel pajama pants–buffalo check–and a salt-washed long-sleeved t-shirt as blue as his eyes. I wonder how he doesn’t instantly feel that sticky prickle of after-shower sweat at the base of the neck and the […]

Just home from a walk with a friend–skin flushed with sun; fallen petals from the cherry trees stowaways in my hair, on the edge of my shirt, even precariously crumpled against one sticky ankle–and Riley comes to meet me at the door. I hear her carefully set down whatever she has in her hands; I […]