On Mother’s Day, the kids and I have a tradition: we go on a hike by the river. I wish we did it every Sunday. But our weekends are so completely hyper-scheduled with games and practices and obligations. I spend more time sitting on the sidelines with people I barely know who happen to have…
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Why not a super close up the nose shot? I know it’s poetry month. There is all this division around genre–this is how you write fiction, this is how you write poems, this is how you write a personal essay, a lyric essay, blah blah blah. But the best pieces of writing have some…
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Above is a picture of my older son in the setting of many of his childhood nightmares. We happened to visit a church that housed the school he went to preschool in and we snuck around into that hallway so that he could confront it. He was kind of astonished by how big he felt,…
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A few days ago, someone asked me what my New Years resolutions were. That’s always seemed like such a Cathy thing to do–eat less, weigh less, obsess over my bathing suit less, get my boyfriend to marry me. So resolutions weren’t something I’d really thought about. A few days later my friend Ashley, who is…
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About a month ago, some really beautiful people in Santa Fe opened their home to me. I was in town for a poetry event, and as supporters of the theater, they often host performers. They bestowed immense kindness upon me, laughed with me, looked out for me and shared their wisdom. They made me feel…
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“Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.” Cheryl Strayed I don’t always remember my dreams, but the ones I remember always seem to be telling me something, and often I believe them in a way that I can’t believe reality. The other morning I woke in a strange place (I’ve…
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I’ve been thinking about mothers and motherhood–I mean, sure, we all have–it’s the most important, complicated relationship in our lives, isn’t it? But I’ve been thinking about it more than usual. As a mother, and as a child. You know when there’s a concept that you’re thinking about and everything else you read and see…
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This weekend began with a thunderstorm just after I returned from work. Rain fell in sheets over everything and I remembered the monsoon in Bangladesh viscerally–something flowed brighter in me. Out on my balcony, the potted Spider Lily, a descendent from my great-grandmother’s garden in Dhaka stood against the rail, unbowed against the falling water.…
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Community is the coming together of individuals “who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to rejoice together, mourn together and to delight in each other and make others’ conditions our own.” If I have used this…
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My children and I do not have the luxury of living together all the time. Sometimes they live with their father, sometimes they live with me. For Spring break, they spent a week with me and then a week with their father. By the end of our week together, we had gotten into a really…
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