We watch them and are amazed. They are like the Internet and Velcro and DVD players and cell phones, everyday staples that weren't even imagined when we were young. My husband and I gawk. "Unbelievable," he says. "Fascinating," I add. Different, we say, and agree that this time different is, indeed…
Read More“However motherhood comes to you it’s a miracle.” - Valerie Harper
She never believed. Not in her core. Not the way she believes that morning follows night.
Or that ice melts in the heat. Or that if you throw something into the air, it will fall back to earth. This kind of certainty eluded her.
Tara’s faith was tenuous. Some days she hoped. Some days she despaired. Most days she wondered if she would ever be a mother…..
Read MoreIn the beginning, I did it for my children - or that's what I told myself. I made Halloween costumes, for them. I asked my husband to fashion a giant spider web between two oak trees on the front lawn, for them. I dangled creepy looking spiders and bats from ceilings, bought plates festooned with witches, packed away everything that was summer and replaced it with anything that was Halloween.
I even painted my face green…
Read More"May I always put the needs of others before my own. May I so love my family, friends, and co-workers that they see only Your goodness in me. May Your love and Your light shine through in everything I do." - A prayer for growing spiritually. Beth Spence Cann may never have said this prayer. It's Catholic and she was Congregationalist. But she lived it. She put the needs of others before her own. It was the best thing about her. And, in the end, it was the worst. She was murdered two weeks ago by a man she tried to save…
Read MoreLucy is my first grandbaby, and her song just came. I didn't go looking for it. It found me. I was singing all the time back then, when my daughter was pregnant. "You Are The Sunshine of My Life" and "My Special Angel." "You'll Never Know Just How Much I Love You" and, of…
Read MoreThey ate my Jack and the Beanstalk tree. From stem to leafy stem they felled it, devoured it, and made it disappear. Rabbits, I fumed. Bandits and thieves. And other names I cannot repeat. It wasn't, for the record, a real Jack and the Beanstalk tree. It didn't grow from magic beans overnight and disappear above the clouds into a land of giants. It wasn't even a tree, just a leggy, flowering plant. But it was taller than I am by at least a foot, and to the 3- and 4-year-olds who called it their Jack and the Beanstalk tree, it seemed to reach the sky…
Read More`The victories, when they come, will be sweet," someone, many someones, told us after my granddaughter Lucy was born.
But we didn't believe in victories then or that life would ever be sweet again. We were stunned and scared and grieving the child Lucy wasn't. The words "Down syndrome" had rocked our world.
We should have listened to the people in the trenches, mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers, people who knew and loved someone with a disability who kept telling us: She will be fine. You will be fine. You will be better than fine. Wait. You'll see. We've seen.
Read MoreWe wore dresses - my grandmother, my mother, and I. My grandmother's was frilly and swirled when she walked. My mother's was light brown, a color she seldom wore but wore well. And mine was turquoise with puff sleeves, a cinched waist, and a white mock-apron top, which I thought was very Heidi-like.
I was into Heidi back then.
Read Morewatch him all the time. He is my entertainment and my muse. For years, I'd come into my office, glance out my window and across the street and there would be Al, buffing his car, scrubbing his gutters, mowing his lawn, trimming, digging, raking, painting, hammering, hosing, chipping, shoveling, season after season, always doing something. Or he would be walking Dante, his wife Katherine's big black dog, smiling and talking to everyone he met along the way…
Read MoreI can’t stop thinking about my friend Jill’s new grandson. I look at his photo and smile. I speak his name - Chase Henry – just to say it. And I tell people – neighbors, friends, people at the gym, strangers in line at the deli - about this little boy, whom no one has met yet, but who is already, totally loved. “It isn’t official, but here’s our baby BOY!” Jill’s daughter e-mailed. The phone call she’d been waiting for had finally come. After years that felt like decades, Tara and her husband Rob are at long last parents-in-waiting.
Read MoreAdam has lived three years and two months on this earth and has figured out many things in his short time here. He knows to say “please” and “thank you.” He knows how to play Diego games on the computer. He knows to get a flashlight and look under the couch when a piece of the map puzzle is missing. And he knows words and concepts that we didn’t teach him…
Read MoreThey told their stories and I listened. But I'd heard them before and I knew I'd hear them again, so there was no need to pay strict attention to details, to memorize names and dates, to note the people and the cities they mentioned.
For the stories were predictable, like songs on a radio. You could count on them the way you can count on hearing "Dancing Queen" when you're driving and switching stations. My mother-in-law, my father, my Aunt Lorraine - each of them regaled me with tales that I didn't write down because I didn't think I had to. Because all I had to do was nudge them and say, "Can you tell me that story again?"
Read Moret's eight in the morning and my husband and I are talking about laying stones around the periphery of the garden, big stones, more boulder than brick, in an effort to keep the dirt in and the rabbits out. It's a sensible plan, except for my worry about the little kids who cut through the garden and race down its slope. "Maybe stones are a bad idea," I say to my husband. "What if the kids fall?" "Maybe living near a street is a bad idea," he says, meaning you can't protect children from everything…
Read MoreI am my father's daughter. I have his hands, old hands, worker's hands, calloused and sun damaged. And I have his ways. His ways I accept. The hands stun me. I look at them and they are his, only smaller; the fingers short, the knuckles creased, the veins like tree roots too close to the surface. How and when did this happen? My father's hands fixed things. They were exact, like tweezers, plucking tubes from the back of our TV, testing them, until the one that was making the picture arc was found…
Read MoreI found it in a card shop in Concord, N.H. - Caardvark's, a place that is now closed. It was hanging on a wall and it was perfect.
I'd been looking for perfect. My daughter was newly engaged and I wanted something special to celebrate the moment. For this was my baby who was getting married, my youngest child leaving home not for a little while, not for college, or for a summer, or to test her wings. But to fly away - with someone else - forever.
Read MoreI wake to birdsong these days, to trills and cheeps and caws, a chorus that begins in the dark. It doesn't obliterate the noise of traffic and trains and planes and sirens. But I hear the birds first and I wake up smiling.
I don't know what kinds of birds are singing, but my friend Anne does. She can identify them by their sounds. Sometimes I'll walk…
Read More“The tooth is missing. It will never come in. Missing teeth are common among children with Down syndrome,” the specialist told my daughter and son-in-law months ago.
He didn’t cushion his words. He didn’t say, “May not.” He said never.
And then last week, there it was – a lower right lateral incisor, next to her lower right central incisor, exactly where it belongs.
Read MoreIt was easier when Father Coen was alive. His faith was strong and certain, and as long as he was here, my faith was strong and certain, too. I called him my window through whom I saw God. And he said, "God is everywhere. You know that." I know it sometimes, but not all the time. Not enough of the time. Not the way I knew it when he was here to remind me…
Read MoreI like to believe that it's a lack of thought and not meanness that makes people use words that hurt. That they're going with the flow, following the crowd, saying what everyone else is saying with no intent to wound.
But words do wound.
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