“Mom, guess what?!” Riley says. From the living room, I can hear the zip as she opens her bookbag, the rattle of papers as she searches. “What?” I ask, somewhat dutifully, being both distracted and also fully familiar with Riley’s enthusiasm for ordinary details. Once, she behaved this way before producing a list of movies […]

Once upon a time, there lived a boy who struggled to talk, and because he struggled to talk, he also struggled to make connections, even with the people he loves. “Adam, tonight you pick the topic of conversation,” Kevin says, as we, The Blessed Ones, gather around our table at the end of the day. […]

Mid-morning, and my friend and I wander to the table, navigating around stacks of books and piles of tools, cardboard boxes, the basket of beach towels that belongs in the linen closet. The innards of several rooms sit on my living room floor, as though we turned the walls inside out and shook loose the […]

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 […]

I gather plates for Adam’s birthday cake; they clink in my hands. He wanted chocolate–the cake (the frosting, the ice cream), and I have already carried it in, along with the knife, long and shiny and sharp. The cake looks imperfect, and therefore perfect for us, shaped like a sweet, dark hill. I placed the […]

I lose my patience promptly at 11 o’clock, as though the last of it just fell away, grain by grain, at the turn of the hour. “What have you been doing for the last hour?” I ask, bleary-eyed and frivolous, sleep seeping in at the edges of my vision. Riley stands just outside my bedroom […]

The Spirit says, pray, so we do. Happy Friday, friends!

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 […]

Late afternoon, I fold bath towels, touching the unraveling sides with my fingers, thinking of all the skin these towels have dried, all the cleaning, all the blessing in their worn softness; thinking this can happen to bodies too, that I want to age and unravel through years of humble service. The warmth of the […]

“There you are, Mom,” Riley says, even though I have been walking beside her the last half hour, even though she has never lost sight of me.  She says this with joy and without rebuke, as though I am the prodigal, momentarily disappeared and just returned, as though she’s been watching for me. She continues […]