In first grade, I made my mother a vase. Crafted with masking tape, shoe polish, and a repurposed glass jar, it was a new item designed to look vintage. With age comes value and significance, but I didn't know that yet.    The teacher guided us in this creation. First, tear off dozens of pieces of one-inch-wide masking tape that feels like paper, but resembles dry sand and smells vaguely of chemicals. Don’t try to make the ends neat, she said, the more jagged the better.  Next, plaster the entire canister with masking tape positioned every which way. We want mess, we want disorganization. Embrace imperfection. Make it complete enough to cover each square millimeter of the glass, overwhelming and canceling out everything it used to be.  Then, dip old rags or torn bits of t-shirts into dark brown Kiwi-brand shoe polish. Use the globs of stain that smells like gasoline and sweet wax to paint over the taped canister. Watch it change from ecru to sienna, from a known thin...

Year before last, on your birthday, I visited a Wind Phone. Do you know about those? Old fashioned handset telephones with curly cords, not connected to any pesky wires, placed in parks or gardens around the world for people to use.   Remember when I was in Dallas and you were in the hospital and I'd call every day to check in, and I kept calling every Sunday after you got home? Remember I always said, "Hi, it's me," and you'd say, "Hel-llo," a song that was a mix between comfortably expected and comical, your voice dropping a few notes between syllables?  Remember my senior year in college when Brandon broke off our engagement four months before the wedding, and I called, wordless, only to sob into the phone, and you sat on the other end of the line for hours listening to me cry, just being together?   Remember that time I called and told you Amy's grandmother died, and you moaned that nobody tells you anything, and I said they might talk to you mor...

The brain, that tired old thing, may forget poverty.  Yes, the brain -- in its middle-age fog, full of passwords and calendar dates and the shoe sizes of children -- may forget the squeeze of too-tight shoes with sprung seams and worn-flat soles, or the tickling drip of water from a wet dishcloth draped across the back of a neck to feign coolness when air conditioning is too expensive. The brain may forget poverty, but the body remembers. Photo by meo/Pexels   The brain may sweep the day's headlines for signs of an end to the dysfunction in government that holds paychecks for ransom. The brain may even acknowledge a comfortable safety net of savings that can pay the bills, but the body remembers the long brittle wait in anticipation of relief.  Then the body becomes a ball of knotted kite string perched on the back of a scratchy couch, the raised plaid yarns scoring a pattern of squares into knobby knees. The body recalls staring through a dusty window, harsh sunlight sla...

I see those parents dropping off their cherished children at college. I see photos of the family minivan - so recently scattered with Cheerios and Happy Meal toys - now filled to the windows with clothes, bedding, and furniture. I see dads manning a push-cart full of belongings up a sidewalk and into a dorm elevator. I see moms helping their children make the twin-sized bed, unfurl the curtains across the window, fold into drawers the clothes that suddenly seem so big and still so small. I see fierce goodbye hugs laced with tears, parents telling children to call home every single day to check in. A complicated potpourri of pride and joy and grief and embarrassment.  And I remember how my going-off-to-college experience looked nothing like that.  As a child of parents who couldn't be relied upon, I mostly did it alone. My dorm, 1998 I suppose I always assumed I'd go to college. I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I'd been told over and over that colleg...

There is no headstone. No rectangular concrete marker with a rounded edge across the top to blunt the grief. No carved heart of incongruously shiny granite, no lichen-embossed urn to hold flowers and remind me of my emptiness. There are no words carved indelibly to remind anyone that she was. My mother wanted to be cremated, and have her ashes scattered in the mountains. She thought funerals were barbaric, all those people hovering over an expensive coffin holding a person who's gone, all that wailing and swaying, all that sadness.  She hated the idea of people coming to sit at a marker to mourn her. Celebrate, she said, because I've gone somewhere better. No use being sad. Perhaps she didn't understand that funerals and graves and headstones aren't for the dead. They're for the living. For the ones left behind who have nothing to hold but air and memories. For the ones who are left with no way to prove their loved one existed except this box she rested in for a whi...

I carried a pink lunchbox every day.  Bumpy and thick, the molded plastic was designed to keep the contents cold during sweltering Texas school days. The outside had horizontal furrows, too narrow to stick my finger inside, but I traced them anyway like they were Braille and I was trying to understand life. The inside of the lunchbox featured separate compartments for a sandwich and chips, plus a Thermos or can of Coke (it's all called Coke in Texas).  Actual lunchbox, photo courtesy of eBay But on this day there was no drink, and the lunchbox was considerably lighter at the loss.  It must have been the end of the month, because at home we had run out of whatever I usually brought to drink in the school cafeteria. There would be no trips to the grocery store until my dad got paid, our next booklet of paper food stamp coupons arrived, or we found time and gas money to visit the SoS Spirit of Sharing pantry in the next town over. It was the late '80s, either 3rd or 5th grad...

Do you remember what I was like back then, a food stamps kid so out of place among the shiny glass towers and $150 designer jeans and yet you hired me despite the uncertainty in my eyes and my lack of marketing experience but I guess I write a good cover letter and I can still remember how expensive the stores smelled and the Alamo-shaped facade of the building where I cut my teeth and I wanted so much to be as cool as you, so devil-may-care with your tinted glasses lenses and longish hair and gravelly voice and not a one of my business classes ever mentioned how much swearing there'd be in a creative office but not me I never said the right thing, never fit in, never rocked to the easy rhythm of belonging even that summer when most of the building went to happy hour every Thursday and I learned how to drink with all the young up-and-comings in Midtown and Deep Ellum and Lower Greenville and you used to rib me joking asking if you could buy my first and last drink because I'd h...

The picture is not of my mother's hand.  It's a stranger's hand, an anonymous woman's palm pressed flat against a sea of grainy white-gray snow.  The fingers are gently stretched straight. Waves of wrinkles rise over knuckles, like maybe the joints feel a little slow and stiff of late. The nails are short and rounded – practical but well kept – and ever so slightly discolored in silent acknowledgement of mature age. Three tendons stand out in ridges on the back of the hand, a testament of strength. Against a background of tawny skin, roadmaps of blue-green veins crisscross, telling of all the places it's been.  The hand is held next to the imprint of a wild animal's foot – bear or wolf, I can't remember – to illustrate the awesome size and impact of nature. But it's not the paw I care about. I've cropped most of the footprint out of the picture like so many forgotten details.  I desperately want to hold that hand.  I want to reach through the...

The weight was almost unmanageable.   When I was young my mother owned a manual typewriter, all metal and heft. It came in a box like a suitcase with a latch and plastic handle, and I was certain it weighed more than I did.  The machine itself was cream and gray with seafoam-green accents straight out of the 1960s. It smelled of ink and machine oil. Trapezoid keytops bore letters in a san-serif font on heavy plastic, and there was no number 1 - my mom explained the lowercase L doubled for the number. The keybasket where all the typebars come together was embossed with the silver words "De Luxe" atop a wash of seafoam.  The keys didn't yield like computer keyboards nowadays - back then if I wanted to communicate I had to put effort behind it, jam my point home with just my index fingers. On that machine my mom taught me my first typed sentence, about the goings-on of a quick red fox and a lazy brown dog.  I didn't have much else to write about in elementary school. I ...

We're on the downhill side of parenting.  Yesterday, my husband pointed out that we have more years behind us than in front of us when it comes to having our firstborn at home.  At age 10, there are 8 years left until he (fingers crossed) launches into the next stage of life - college, a fulfilling job, or some other as-yet-unforeseen step. Eight Christmases, eight birthdays, eight summers. And then suddenly, adulthood.  Social media regularly reminds me how small he once was, in a time I only hazily remember. Plenty of moms will tell you with sorrow in their throats how they miss those baby and toddler and preschooler ages.  I have mixed feelings. One side of my heart aches at how quickly my son is growing up, every day becoming more his own person and less mine.  But the other half of my heart knows I wouldn't relive those years even on a dare. They were a monumental struggle for me, a mountain I wasn't sure I would survive climbing. Many times I was lost in ...

All you can do is not think about it. Don't picture your child hearing loud bangs like the biggest door slamming. Don't imagine the confusion clouding his face, quickly replaced by the understanding that he's in danger. Don't share the panic he feels when he thinks he's forgotten the active shooter drills he practiced , those terrifying moments when adults pretend that someone has arrived to hurt them even though adults are supposed to keep them safe. photo by Nicole Hester/The Tennessean via AP Don't visualize his eyes getting wide with fear and his sweet face draining of color as his teacher gathers the children into a knot and tells them to go go go silently, quickly, to their safe space, wherever that is. Don't think of the black tip of a long gun bobbing as it's carried down the hall past the cafeteria with its small seats, past the trophy case full of pride, past your child's classroom door.  Try not to imagine your child wetting her pants in s...

I'm standing in that unused space between the kitchen and the raised dining room with the fake parquet floor. In front of me is a waist-high set of black wire shelves where my dad keeps the detritus of his day - wallet, plastic coin pouch that he squeezes to open, bits of paper with notes about Jesus being Lord and yesterday's lotto numbers. And he's yelling at me: "Extraneous details! I don't need extraneous details!" I'm 7 or 11 or 9, and he can't name my school teachers, my favorite cartoons, or the friend at whose house I just slept over. All those details I try to tell him about my days or my nights, in that winding and never-to-the-point way of children's stories, are cut off with a scolding that I am drowning him in a wash of tiny, impertinent minutiae. Points so fine you'd think he'd been stabbed.    I feel shrunken and unimportant, like a once-intricate wax figure melted down into a blob of generalities.  7-year-old me So when my s...

America worships children.  Parenthood is a religion with its own symbols, texts, and rites. The adoration of a protruding stomach, a dog-eared copy of What To Expect When You're Expecting, baptism by potty training. We warn other drivers of our babies on board as we move toward monuments built for children, stuffed full of entertainment or education or endless (unnecessary) consumer supplies. Then we drag our hours to the alter to be sacrificed for play dates, extracurricular activities, and child-centered vacations. Parents are a body continually devoured, week after tiresome week. Yet America generally ignores mothers.  Judged for not having children as well as having too many, women are pushed out of the hospital 48 hours after pushing out a new life, still bloody and battered. While fathers return to old responsibilities, mothers take one of two paths: Devote the minutes of the day to enriching play and early learning for which they have no training, or work like they're ...

I had to ask my son last night.  I didn't want to scare him by telling him what happened in Texas, but I had to know how his teachers had prepared him for what has happened at far, far too many schools since Columbine High School.  "Honey, have your teachers talked to you about what to do if a bad guy with a gun came inside the school?"  He didn't even hesitate. He didn't even hesitate. "Yeah. They said to lock the door and go out the window," my son answered. "Unless the bad guy is coming in through the window, then we go out the door."  My sweet child -- who has been alive fewer years than have passed since a gunman blasted his way through a glass panel at Sandy Hook Elementary and killed 20 first-graders and six staff -- has been trained on what to do during a shooting.  He is not law enforcement. He was not conscripted into the military.  He is 9.  I know how he's the first one to come to the aid of another person. I've seen him sto...

"Enough psychiatric prescriptions are written each year to give one to every person in America. If we are treating everyone, what are we really treating? Life? Because life isn't a symptom." Four years ago, these words were spat at me by a miserable man trying to pass himself off as a psychiatrist employed by the No. 2 hospital system in the world.  Last Friday, his voice echoed through my head while I stared at my bottle of alprazolam. Brand name: Xanax.  My anxiety first showed up in grade school and was thought to be a "nervous stomach." The kind of stomach that prevented me from eating out in public because I would become so nervous that I'd vomit.  By high school I suffered panic attacks that left me sitting on cold tile floors, sweating and shaking and fighting nausea. As an adult, I learned yoga breathing and coping strategies. Still, I occasionally get so upset or anxious that I run back and forth to the bathroom with bowel complaints.  Thanks to co...