Talking Smack

By Johanna Bailey “Let’s leave the kids at home and meet up for a drink sometime!” Every time I join a new playgroup, there’s always at least one person who suggests a girls’ night out. I’m never sure exactly how to respond. Do I say that alcohol gives me a headache? That I’m on medication and can’t drink? That I’m allergic? Or do I say nothing at all and just hope that they won’t notice when I order orange juice at the bar? The truth is, I’m an alcoholic and heroin addict in recovery. Eight years into my sobriety, it doesn’t get any easier to say that out loud. Even more troubling is what—if anything—I say to my son, Nico, and when. He’s only three. When he asks why I don’t drink wine like daddy, I explain to him I don’t like the taste, just like he doesn’t like the taste of corn. And that’s all the explanation he needs. Read more …

By Johanna Bailey

By Julie Corby In the ten years between my wedding day and the day I met my children, I spent a lot of time fantasizing about the traditions we would celebrate once I finally became a mother. The celebrations I imagined looked a lot like those from my own childhood. There would be Christmas stockings stuffed full of Clementine oranges, chocolate coins, and Bonnie Bell lip smackers; dyed Easter eggs hidden in an obvious way around the living room; piñatas and paper donkey tails poised in the backyard for a birthday party. I pictured my Jewish husband showing the children how to light the menorah. I saw cookie baking and hot cider drinking, Halloween costumes, and fireworks on the Fourth of July. They were all joyful celebrations—I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the rituals and expressions that come along with loss and grief. Ever since I have known him, my husband has lit a candle on the Read more …

By Julie Corby

Hunting for a Middle Ground

By Liza Greville I don’t think the concepts “puppet show” and “gun safety” had ever cohabited in my consciousness before a quick conversation my son and I had recently. “So what’s going at school tomorrow?” I asked our two boys as they got ready for bed. “Nothing.” Chad paused. “Oh, but we do have two assemblies tomorrow. A puppet show then one on gun safety.” A puppet show and an assembly on gun safety. I thought a program on gun safety was, in principle, a very good idea, but I was a little curious about just what that program would be. We live in a little town of about forty-five hundred people tucked into the Allegheny National Forest in the north central part of Pennsylvania. It’s truly beautiful country. We’re a one-stoplight town, and for most of my childhood, we were a no-stoplight-town. No McDonald’s. No Starbucks. It’s forty-five minutes to a Wal-Mart, two-plus hours to a Target. A Whole Read more …

By Liza Greville

By Sheryl Kraft Daylight savings time, April 1989. Huddled in my warm house reading a book to my two sons, three-year-old Jonathan perched on my right knee and 18-month-old Jeremy on my left: I contemplate what it will mean to set the clocks one hour ahead later this evening. Just one hour seems immensely insignificant. Ten hours wouldn’t even be enough. My breast cancer diagnosis just four months prior – when the skies were dark by four o’clock and the world, once full of promise, crumbled around me – made me long for time to fast-forward; for it to take me to a safer place, to a failsafe future where things are straight instead of crooked. “Mommy?” Jonathan cocks his head, full of rich brown curls, to one side. His eyes search my face, which is frozen in thought. “What happens next, Mommy?” His question, so earnest and pure. My first-born child oozes sweet patience and a rich curiosity; just Read more …

By Sheryl Kraft

By Emily Dagostino There was a brief bout that began around week 10 of my pregnancy when I cried for a week. Even a weekend getaway couldn’t quell the desperation: For two days in Door County, Wisconsin, I took long baths and lay in bed, not embraced by my husband’s arms but by the once-familiar dull gray weight of depression. An increased regimen of daily gratitude and exercise pushed me through it, and I smiled through the next couple of months as my belly swelled. At the apex of my pregnancy, as I prepared to enter the last leg, I left the world as it was—the simple but expensive home with the high taxes, the stable but sometimes silly job, the family and the familiar—for a writing retreat 800 miles away in a bucolic estate amid the luscious country of Northern Virginia. I placed myself purposely off the digital map: no cell phone, no TV. I checked email sporadically but Read more …

By Emily Dagostino

By Susan Vaughan Moshofsky “EWW! MOM! You and Dad did THAT? Why couldn’t you have waited ‘til I was out of the house? I thought you guys were NORMAL!” My 10-year-old daughter, Rachel, waggled her finger at me accusingly, her eyes still wide from the news of my pregnancy. I struggled for the right words. “Honey, every person you know is here on this planet because their parents did ‘that.’ There wouldn’t be any babies, ever, if people didn’t, and besides, it’s perfectly normal for people who love each other,” I explained. “MOM! I don’t want a baby in this house! We have enough to do around here already! It will wake me up, cry, and bug me! And I don’t want you coming to school looking pregnant! All the boys will know what you and Dad did!” Rachel folded her arms and glared accusingly at me across the breakfast bar. “Well, honey, a baby is coming, and we hope Read more …

By Susan Vaughan Moshofsky

By Patricia Hermes Why Now? It’s a question I have asked myself many times over the months leading up to this day and it comes to me again as I step from the car onto the cemetery lawn, the heels of my boots settling into the wet snowy earth, as though I too, am being drawn downward. It’s been fifty years since I stood here last, my coat clutched tightly against the biting winter wind, too stunned to even weep, watching as the almost impossibly tiny casket of my infant daughter, Mary Beth, was lowered into the hole in the earth that had been prepared for her. Why return now? And perhaps equally important, why not before? Why, for fifty years, has my daughter laid in a spot unmarked, her grave nothing more than a small depression in the earth? Why have I waited so long to have a stone installed, some marker, something to proclaim that she lived—and died? Read more …

By Patricia Hermes

Mothering from Afar

By Katy Read Kim Voichescu was running into conflicts with the staff at her sons’ school. Sometimes she was kept from seeing her kids’ records or picking up her boys after school. She suspected that people there might secretly doubt her qualifications as a parent. One day, a school secretary came right out and said it to her face: “Well, you’re not a real mother.” Voichescu is a real mother, but she doesn’t live with her children. She doesn’t have physical custody of her two boys, now ten and thirteen, but she does share joint legal custody with their father, and that entitles her to access their educational records and to other parental rights. For Voichescu, who has spent tens of thousands of dollars and years in court fighting to get physical custody, the secretary’s comment was a pin against a big balloon of pent-up frustration. Now, a year later, Voichescu can’t remember exactly what she said to the woman, Read more …

By Katy Read

Taken for a Spin

By Katy Read The headlines, naturally, gave me pause. Here was yet another way for me to screw up as a parent. “Warm but Watchful Parents Can Keep Kids from Heavy Drinking,” announced a headline in U.S. News & World Report in June. A new study, the magazine went on to say, suggests that parents “have a lot of influence when it comes to preventing their child from developing a heavy drinking habit.” Two sociologists at Brigham Young University had surveyed five thousand adolescents and found that the ones who didn’t drink heavily were most likely to describe their parents as warm and nurturing, and also diligent about monitoring and discipline. Teens who drank more than four drinks at a time, the researchers found, considered their parents either less warm, less strict or both. The results of the BYU study were widely publicized last summer, with news media across the country presenting it as evidence that good parents can prevent Read more …

By Katy Read

Wedding Guests

By Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser The wedding was about to begin. My not-quite-two-year-old daughter, Saskia, wriggled on my lap and I glanced again toward the doorway in the back of the room. Caroline was late. We’d been invited to this wedding—my husband, daughter, and sons—essentially as Caroline’s “plus five.” I held Saskia’s warm hands and she clenched my fingers. She knew me as her mama. I was her mama, and I was waiting for her other mama to arrive. Caroline, who’d asked Saskia call to her Auntie Cece, was the one who gave birth to her, and Caroline was the bride’s sister. There were no formal terms, exactly, for the rest of us. The room quieted and I glanced over to my husband. We smiled at each other, sharing one of those here-we-are looks that couples in unlikely places exchange. We’d met the bride only twice. The processional music started up. Saskia got still watching the tiny parade in front of her. Read more …

By Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser