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.

read more
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…

read more
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.

read more

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...

read more
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,...

read more
MY MOTHER’S STORY

MY MOTHER’S STORY

In A Patchwork Memoir I wrote:

My grandmother Edith—I called her “Granny”—was raised on a farm with fruit orchards near Sonoma. Her father died of TB when she was little, and her mother never married again, saying…

read more