Oct 29, 2019
Songs and Stories to Keep the Ghosts at Bay
We all have them, those unmet needs or wishes from our own childhood, the painful bits that creep in and affect how we parent.
We all have them, those unmet needs or wishes from our own childhood, the painful bits that creep in and affect how we parent.
On Friday, April 22, 2016, three months after my brother’s third release from S. Wilder Youth Development Center, he was rushed to the ER after being shot in the heart.
There are times I envy art’s effectiveness in a bilingual context, its ability to transcend language.
On the heels of my diagnosis, I feel there is no way to construct a narrative around what’s happening to me—a deep betrayal for a writer.
If all adoptees felt not only safe, but empowered in their families and their communities, I would feel better—but not lucky.
Will my intestines turn the sacred bread into holy shit, or does the miracle not extend that far into the digestive process?
I wish I’d known Molly years ago. I wish I had known her when I was twelve years old, wondering who in my life would still love me if they knew my secret.
I wanted her language, her understanding of Honduras, a family like hers. I wanted things she could never give me.
Adoption didn’t give me a forever mother. Being in reunion with my birth mother did not make me wholly mothered, either.
Navigating the burdens of expectation as a married woman in Nigeria
The story is no longer me and my vehicles but my mother and hers. We called it an accident, but it wasn’t.
On space debris and a father's remains.
Like a drawing is and is not mine once I’m finished with it, my son is not mine, not really, because he is himself.
In the battered barbershop chair, Faris sits slightly camouflaged and crumpled, as though he is a mystery even to himself.
Aging is a funny thing. You’re not sure if the world has changed, or if a hundred cellular mutations have changed your place in it.
This folder contained memories I did not have, information about a family I did not know.
I believe that loving a dog is basically mortgaging future heartbreak against a decade or so of camaraderie—I’d understood this when I got Red. But when confronted with it, I felt shamefully angry at myself for even getting him.
Being disabled means hundreds of thousands of people believe they always know better than you do.
Maybe, over time, the ephemera of Jack’s life will become less explosive, like a landmine whose triggering mechanism has eroded, rendering it harmless.
My heart’s deepest desire was to see my mother again, yes, but also to glimpse a portrait of normalcy that I had never known in the years of her illness.
