The Memorial

I was having a difficult time. I was standing in my newly purchased navy blue suit, my hair coiffed and my feet in heels.  I could hardly see my own reflection staring back at me in the funeral home bathroom mirror.   My mind was turned inward, and spinning.  I wondered how long it would be [...]

Not Prepared for This

The surgery was taking forever.  What did that mean? We’d spent all late morning and afternoon in the surgical waiting room.  The gravity of the situation was clear by the crowd assembled this time.  My sister and I started the vigil, but people came and went to sit with us as the hours passed.  My [...]

First Birthday

The summer of 1990 passed quickly after that.  I spent my summer days going to classes at the university, fulfilling a full time schedule during those warm months that would enable me to start my first stint of student teaching in the winter term.  Wayne State asked its students to fulfill three semesters of student [...]

Visiting Hours

He looks like him. That was the first thing I thought of when I looked at my son.  He had Joe’s coloring, his hair color.  His eyes were dark, dark blue, which everyone told me meant his eyes would turn brown within the first year of life.  Everything about him, including his sex, was more [...]

Scary Thoughts

I tried to run away that spring. I was tired, and angry. It happened one cold Saturday afternoon when my mother was expecting her friend Janice and her baby Matthew for an afternoon of talking and eating and baby time. Dawn was still staying with us. My sister’s friend was still staying with us. My [...]

Never Surrender

It was a strange spring. B had had her baby, and her parents now knew that she’d given her up for adoption. She decided to try and spend more time at home to repair the rift between her and her parents. My great uncle had died, leaving us all shocked and sad and wondering what [...]

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 [...]

It Gave Me Pause

My mother’s story about her firstborn son that I had never met or even knew about haunted me. I kept wondering about him. He was eight years older than me. He was born in Atlantic City, NJ and adopted a few days after his birth in the summer of 1962. What was he like? Did [...]

The Summer of 1962

It was crazy weird to me that I was getting a charge out of someone else’s mother sending me a letter in the mail. But I was. I kept reading, and re reading the letter that Mindy Hart had written me. She was caring, she was thoughtful and she asked for me to respond. I [...]