I chose the dates of my travel deliberately. I wanted to be in a new place while this old grief washed over me. The grief feels the same, but I am profoundly different.
If farming isn’t the thing that gets your debit card out, how about economic development? How about job training and skill-building development? Fresh wants to help people do nourishing work that involves all of this.
“Why are there two cupcakes left?” I question my former mother-in-law. The woman who opened her heart to me when I married her only son, when I gave birth to her only grandchild. The woman who now only looks at me and shrugs. It’s what happens when you have her son arrested for domestic abuse.
Above all, let me be a person, not a patient, not a survivor, not a wearer of ribbons, not a statistic.
Moms don’t get enough rest and we are sick of people telling us to rest more! We know this, and there is nothing we can do about it. We go to bed tired, and we wake up tired and we spend our day tired.
I get up and gently lean into the walker, placing my head on her shoulder. She starts to cry. Few moments later, I sense her moving away. She hates this emotional shit as much as I do. That’s why we get along – despite the language barrier. We both feel the cold water rising.
Well versed in the lexicon of seeking permission, my fifteen year old daughter is endlessly fascinated by the relative absence of the concept of permission in American High School life.
Get a surprise gift and a signed bookplate by Jen Pastiloff.
We need to walk away from the corners where the labels are, and move toward the center where the people are, in their Santa hats and yarmulkes, their habits and burkas, topis and kufis and zucchettos, giving dolls to skeptical teenagers, feeding each other, and without spite, saying “Merry Christmas” or whatever comes from a place of best intentions.
Maybe many things that moved through the girl’s body over the years can be explained by the animal’s presence, a hovering, not threatening but not comfortable, a memory that isn’t a memory because it never was clear.
They say living with chronic illness is a marathon, not a sprint, and to take it sometimes minute by minute, one foot in front of the other.
You used to stand there, looking into the refrigerator and ask to eat those bits of vegetables. Those fit-in-your-hand premade sandwiches. They were all so nicely arranged, just sitting there, waiting to be eaten. She’d close the door and offer to cook you something instead. You’d nod, say: “Yes, please,” because maybe manners would make her like you and you always loved her cooking.
That fercockt tree would become a member of our family. So much so, that I’d say goodnight to it every night. Maybe because I knew that without it, my family wouldn’t be.
Trauma is like ivy. No, it’s an actual snake that suffocates and devours. It winds itself up and around every part of your life and squeezes all of your dreams and relationships. It oozes into your cells and hides there.
