Category: The Valley
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Do the Next Thing
We live in an apartment complex built in 1994. The layout features external cement-slab staircases that lead up to the second-story suites. Joe and I just so happen to inhabit an apartment on the second floor. About a year into our stay, we noticed that the first cement stair was…
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Surviving Mother’s Day After Losing your Mother
Or child. Or, perhaps both. I can’t really think of a day I have dreaded more than Mother’s Day this year. The traumatic, tragic, all-too-fast death of my mom-turned-best friend, bookended by the loss of our unborn baby, made me not particularly eager for May 12th to roll around. Not…
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A Mother’s Day Memory
I think back to Mother’s Day a year ago. We ate ham and angel food cake on a Sunday afternoon, everyone clad in pink and green, taking selfies and playing CodeNames while fighting to keep the mothers out of the kitchen. The premise of the game is quite simple: hopeful…
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Taylor
It was quite a start to 2024. I had already taken more medication, spent more time on bedrest, been in more hospitals (for myself, anyway), and dealt with more physical pain than all of 2023 combined. And it was day 4. I woke up on January 2nd around 1:00 AM…
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Bonus Post: Abecedarius
To conclude National Poetry Month, I joined my Creative Writing class in crafting an abecedarian acrostic — a unique pattern of poetry in which the first letter of every line follows the order of the alphabet. 5 students and their teacher cried as we shared our stories, and I relish…
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Our God is For Us
December 1. December 1. That was the date playing over and over in my head. I’ll take a pregnancy test on December 1. My period was several weeks late, but I was no stranger to disappointment in the pregnancy test realm, so I really didn’t want to rush the process. Joe and I…
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Some Questions for Mom
(Couldn’t pass up an opportunity to indulge some National Poetry Month shenanigans. I bring to you: an epistolary poem) 🙂 Mom, I looked into the cabinets of my classroom yesterday. I found craft supplies you put in totes and shipped my way. Glitter glue, crayons and stickers stacked on the…
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Now
The recap is over. Tracing back over journal entries and digging deep into the recesses of my memory has brought us to now, where I’m no longer recounting days past but reporting on the present. I’m not sure which is scarier. In some ways, I was able to pick out…
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November 2
I’m not ready to write about this one yet. Not really, anyway. Recapping this journey from August 8 to November 2 has felt almost like a self-enforced mandate — I don’t want to let myself forget a single thing. But in the same way, the writing has brough space to…
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October 31
[Disclaimer: my apologies to those who receive this one twice 🙂 I accidentally clicked send instead of schedule.] Apparently in hospice care, there’s a day known as the rally day. It’s also commonly called the last good day. Mom had had an abundance of good days — far outliving the…
House on the Rock 