Year: 2010

  • Being Happy

    In the last month I’ve felt peace I couldn’t imagine or expect. Story Jane, our daughter, was born 16 days late. More beautiful and simply okay than I dared to hope. She’s okay…she’s here…and I’ve felt more relaxed than I can ever remember feeling. I really feel like a mom! Or more specifically: like a…

  • My First Novel (gag)

    My Little Pony My First Novel I feel shy about it. “My novel,” I’d say as an awkward pubescent might say “my private parts.” I labored over my love-story-gone-wrong for years. I grew it paragraphy by paragraph. I wrote and re-wrote. I cried and got stuck and fought my way onward. I kept writing, and…

  • Overdue

    I’ve been up, I’ve been down. I’ve been optimistic, I’ve been sure, and I’ve been utterly defeated. She didn’t–she hasn’t­–come. My daughter’s still stewing / baking / dreaming / swimming in utero, while my mind whirs away trying to find meaning, a plan, an approach, a place of quiet where the whappa whappa sounds will…

  • Due Date

    Yes, I’m waiting to go into labor. On the other side of it, I can imagine holding her. That new baby smell. I can imagine having a family of four, and it being a sweet sweet thing. I can also imagine the first few weeks and months being hard. The agony of sleep deprivation, the…

  • Money Changes Everything: the Bay Bridge Carpool Toll

    I yearn for the simpler days when we weren’t all talking about, and exchanging, money in the mutually beneficent system known as Casual Carpool.

  • Learnin’

    I’m starting to see how having a baby could be not only possible, but possibly beautiful.

  • Going Back

    And all I had to do for a week was to care for Alejandro–which wasn’t half as hard as it is here, when I’m working and constantly running around–and to show him the small things I remembered: the dock, the clams, the constant need for life jackets and bug spray.