Closing Doors

Someone I know is pregnant. This statement is becoming increasingly rare as the years keep marching on in my life.  It used to be that everyone I knew was in a couple.  Then, couple by couple, everyone seemed to be getting engaged, and then married.  Back in “my day” (intone the Old Lady In Me [...]

Instant Message of Pain

I sat in front of the television, laptop balanced on my lap two days later.  It was ten or so, the little ones in bed, my husband in Michigan.  He worked there now, about eight days a month, him having been given the job after all but it being determined that it wasn’t a big [...]

Terminal

My sister and I had agreed to give my father the news together.  Two days after Christmas, with her husband watching our children, we drove the thirty minute trek to his home and asked him to sit down. I had repeated my mother’s doctor’s words at least a dozen times in the last five days.  [...]

On A Break

I was sitting across the table at a Big Boy restaurant from Mr. H. I’d come home for my Spring Break, and called his home phone number to arrange the meeting.  He’d included it in the long letter he’d sent me a few weeks ago at school, in response to my cry for help sent [...]

Promises in the Dark

This post will post on my fortieth birthday.  How appropriate.  The biggest game changer in my life, and my thoughts about it will be laid bare on my fortieth birthday.  Oh, there’s so much to say about it, looking back nearly 22 years later.  Getting back there, getting back to that place in my head [...]

Late

“I think I might be late.” I uttered the words nervously to Joe one cold January morning in a practice room.  We were both furiously practicing for this term’s auditions.  I was disappointed with my placement last trimester, and so I wanted to prepare as much as possible for the one performance that would determine [...]

July 14

I was working at Burger King that summer. I had ditched my mall job at the Children’s Place earlier in the spring.  They were unhappy with my constant need to have this day off or that as my senior year schedule heated up.  I needed a lot of Fridays off, a lot of evenings for [...]

A Boyfriend…Finally

The phone was ringing. In those days before the advent of Caller ID, you took your chances on who might be on the other end when you picked up the phone. These were also the days before cell phones, so the person on the other end could be calling for anyone in the house: me, [...]

Baby A for B

I was in the lobby of the hospital waiting for clearance to go upstairs and visit B and the baby. She’d had a baby girl early in the morning. I looked at her through the glass window for a few minutes before my mother decided we both had to go home, get a few hours [...]

Labor Day

My mother woke me in the darkness. “It’s time,” she told me. B was in labor, was having the baby. I pulled on my favorite sweater, which happened to be one of B’s old castoffs and piled with my mother in the car towards the hospital. Oddly, B had been spending the night at her [...]