The night she died stars were nesting near my window. The wind was so still that echoes of the sea were the only sounds rising from the earth until the howl of one human heart filled the universe. “The nest of stars,” marjory wentworth They call them rainbow babies because they’re born after the death…
There is a reason why I never speak about Lizzy and Cecilia’s father. For most of Lizzy’s life I was trapped in a broken marriage with someone who never wanted to be a husband or a father. As a result, I was a single mother to Lizzy while I was still married and a divorced…
The bees graze cream-colored bells, the budding trees behind stretching brave branches to the open sky. Sunlight guides my path through shadow of holly tree and towering pine. Bare hydrangeas just beginning to leaf stark limbs stand sentinel. The mossy carpet is soft beneath my winter feet; pine needles and brittle twigs scatter my way….
March 20, 2023 Dear Lizzy, Today, you would have turned six years old. It is a struggle to imagine how beautiful you would be with your sunlit hair and oceanic eyes. It is harder to imagine how your personality would have evolved over the past four years, how much more Lizzy you would have become…
This past year has been the busiest of my life with a new marriage, pregnancy, full-time graduate school, multiple moves, homeschooling a new stepson, and approaching the date of finally getting Cece’s service dog. It has been hard to find time to write this calendar year, hard to process all of the changes that seem…
August 6, 2018, Georgetown, South Carolina A 17-month-old Lizzy tromped fearlessly through the shallows of the deserted island in the opposite direction of our companions on the shelling tour. Still smiling from the cresting waves of the boat trip, Lizzy picked up one tiny, pink-flip-flop-clad foot after another, splashing merrily. The sun twinkled rainbows across…
It’s a long time that I’ve loved you. Never, never go away. – “Love Song of the Little Bear”, Margaret Wise Brown An ash leaf drifts on the surface of the water, vermilion and thin, as the sand sucks slowly at my ankles. The bay’s chill embrace beckons with curling fingers, veins of sand running…
Dear Lizzy, It has taken me several weeks to work up the courage to write this letter, and it has proved even harder than I feared. I have been comparing Cecilia with you since she was born and even more so upon learning of her diagnosis. I have been trying to replicate experiences which you…
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. – William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming” I’ve had…
As human persons, we are born with an innate incapacity for self-regulation. Our initial understanding of self exists only in reference to our mothers; we are inescapably relational creatures from the first stirrings of conception. An infant can no more control his or her emotions than cause the sun to rise and set at will….