The Transfiguration Altarpiece is an altarpiece of the Transfiguration of Jesus by Perugino, dating to 1517 and now in the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria in Perugia. I’m not sure what this space is anymore, or who I will be in a month, a year, a season. My creativity is dead. Missing. On a long hiatus. I blame death, the vagaries of aging, the imminent departure of the boy, who will not be in this house by this time next week. I’ve followed the rule of threes for 18 years now. We’re whittling it down to two, then one, then none. The fall will be confusing and chaotic. Rebirth, reinvention, is ..read more

What lies ahead? I have spent the last several months sitting on the couch, occupying the chair, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve completed the entire output of Denise Mina, consulted a credible psychic medium who did not follow up (was it me? was it her?), and written journal entries with asides to my imagined survivors. I, along with my partner, have cajoled, encouraged, and supported the boy, life changes around the corner for all of us, some presumably more permanent than others.  The other shoe has started its leisurely, tragic fall. My body is signaling its age (the pain th ..read more

Photo by Tyler Delgado on Unsplash Sixteen. What does it bring up for you? If you took an elevator to your sixteenth year, what scene you would walk in on? My elevator brings me to an early morning in November 1985, a room tinged with kerosene, sweat, and mildew. A girl and a baby lie on a bloodied bed. The girl is naked from the waist down, the baby still attached. This is liminal moment, the quietness between the drama of birth and the eventual arrival of paramedics. There is no way to escape. I am hollow inside. My mother’s elevator travels to an early summer evening in 1966. The doors ope ..read more

Hugo wants to avoid thinking about the boy’s college application process. It’s another Sunday of triangulation, the three of us in the living room, one working because his work overflows, one studying and completing homework because his school schedule is intense, and one who should be writing but can’t really focus on much of anything but filling out mock-ups of the Common App and scraping the Reddit barrel for gleanings of college application process wisdom. I knew this fall, the boy’s last in school, would be tough, that not only would his workload be huge (with a total of five Advanced Pl ..read more

The path ahead (image by writingtosurvive) The last several months have been difficult. On the good side, I’m almost done writing that book (details to be shared at a later date). Also on the good-in-a-bad-situation side, my sick relative has been through radiation and ongoing chemo, which, along with an earlier surgery, have been effective to date. To spread that good side stuff out a little further, it is also fortunate that we have the room for him to live with us, and that my husband has the capacity to do things like drive him to appointments. The boy is doing well in school, though I wo ..read more

Bathroom selfie. Twenty-five years ago, it was meat. A year and a half ago, alcohol. Television in various forms has come and gone, mostly replaced by mindless internet surfing and streaming with the occasional DVD tossed in the mix. My daily newspaper, the routine of unfolding and refolding, of following the lede, has been usurped by links, clicks, and refreshes. And two days ago, I deactivated Facebook with little fanfare. This break is unlikely to last, but I’ve been surprised at the ease of leaving, the statuses left unsaid, the photos not uploaded, the thumbs left in neutral position. I ..read more

I sometimes think I’m done. Eight years with the same individual therapist, hundreds of hours spent emoting and exculpating, and I am finished, polished, complete. After all, things are going pretty well compared to eight years ago. I’m a licensed therapist myself now, engaged in the world, professional and (generally) successful, so different from the isolated, depressed stay-at-home parent I was when I started. I am more self-accepting and grounded, able to ride out the occasional depressive patch. But four a.m. wakeups eat away at me. Worries about inadequacy erode my self-respect. This jo ..read more