IDYLL

The second summer I went back to Minnesota, after tenth grade, my dad rallied briefly—and told Doug and me we could each invite a friend along on a trip to the northern lakes. So I asked Kathy, expecting her to turn me down. To my surprise, she accepted. And for the...

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LINDA

LINDA

As I mention in my 4-4-20 blog,”Haven,” Linda was my friend from my first day of eighth grade, when our homeroom teacher asked her to show me around our junior high school. At noon, in the cafeteria, she introduced me to her friends Daryl and Nikki—all of us children of divorce.

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SEVENTY-FIVE

SEVENTY-FIVE

Today is Earl’s birthday—and in honor of the occasion, I’m posting a vignette I wrote for A Patchwork Memoir:

I hate shopping for men—I never know what to get—and shopping for Earl is no exception. For his last birthday…

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IF ONLY

IF ONLY

My early experiences in life left me believing that whenever something bad happened, it was liable to snowball into an all-out catastrophe. My parents’ divorce, my mom’s cancer, and the move to California precipitated my first tailspin, but it wasn’t my last.

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NERVOUS BREAKDOWN?

As a teenager, I didn’t know how to explain my mom’s “transformation” after the move, even to myself, so I called it a “nervous breakdown.” But that sounds like something you recover from, doesn’t it? My mother was never again the person she’d seemed to me to be when...

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JACK

JACK

I’d always thought that my mom divorced my father because of the ways he disregarded her feelings, but there was more to the story, which I didn’t learn until I was an adult: she’d fallen in love with a man named Jack, whom she’d hoped to marry. She’d met him at work,...

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