Conversation With Mom Quotes

Archer?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. Hey, you might be able to take away my magical powers, but the power of sarcasm was still at my disposal. “Is your last name Newport or Vanderbilt? Maybe followed by some numbers? Ooh!” I said, widening my eyes, “or maybe even Esquire!” I’d hoped to hurt his feelings or, at the very least, make him angry, but he just kept smiling at me. “Actually, it’s Archer Cross, and I’m the first one. Now what about you?” He squinted. “Let’s see . . . brown hair, freckles, whole girl-next-door vibe going on . . . Allie? Lacie? Definitely something cutesy ending in ie.” You know those times when your mouth moves but no sound actually comes out? Yeah, that’s pretty much what happened. And then, of course, my mom took that opportunity to end her conversation with Justin’s parents and call out, “Sophie! Wait up.” “I knew it.” Archer laughed. “See you, Sophie,” he called over his shoulder as he disappeared into the house.

Need I remind you that this Selection was your idea?” She sighed. “Listen to your daughter,” Dad said. “Very smart girl. Gets it from me.” “Don’t you want some more sleep?” she asked flatly. “No, I’m feeling very refreshed,” he said. I wasn’t sure if it was because he wanted to continue the conversation or if he felt he needed to keep his attention on Mom. Either way, he was clearly lying. “Dad, you look like death punched you in the face.” “You must get that from me, too.” “Dad!

I turn to head outside when the boys make their way back into the house. Kel stops in the doorway and puts his hands on his hips, then looks up at me. “Are you my sister’s boyfriend?” I’m thrown off by his directness. I pull my jacket on and shake my head. “Um, no. Just her friend.” “She told my mom you were taking her on a date. I thought only boyfriends took girls on dates.” “Well,” I pause. “Sometimes boys take girls on dates to see if they want them to be their girlfriend.” I notice Caulder standing beside me, taking in the conversation as if he’s just as curious. I wasn’t prepared to have to explain the rules of dating right now. “So it’s like a test?” Caulder asks. “To see if you want Layken to be your girlfriend?” I shrug and nod. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.” Kel laughs. “You aren’t gonna like her. She burps a lot. And she’s bossy. And she never lets me drink coffee, so she probably won’t let you have any, either. And she has really bad taste in music and sings way too loud and leaves her bras all over the house. It’s gross.” I laugh. “Thanks for the warning. You think it’s too late to back out now?” Kel shakes his head, missing my sarcasm completely. “No, she’s already dressed so you have to take her now.” I sigh, pretending to be annoyed. “Well, it’s just a few hours. Hopefully she won’t burp a lot and boss me around and steal my coffee and sing to her really bad music and leave her bra in my car.” Or hopefully she will.

It’s so annoying, eating-disorder brain. Anytime I’m having a conversation with someone over a meal, there’s another conversation happening internally—judgments and criticisms and self-loathing that press on me with such severity. They’re a brutal distraction. I can never be present with whoever I’m with. My focus is always more on the food than the person.

Mom and Dad exchange a nervous glance and have a telepathic conversation about it. I hear every word. Do we let her out? It's past curfew. True, but look at that—at least she asked! I know! I can hardly believe it! She could have sneaked out, but she asked! I know! We're good parents! "What time will you be back?" Dad asks.

Okay, here are the top ten reasons why I can't stand my sister Lucy: 10. I get all her hand-me-downs, even her bras. 9. Whem I refuse to wear her hand-me-downs, especially her bras, I get the big lecture about waste and the environment. Look, I am way concerned about the environment. But that does not mean I want to wear me sister's old bras.I told Mom I see no reason why I should even have to wear a bra, seeing as how it's not like I've got a lot to put in one, causing Lucy to remark that if I don't wear a bra now, then if I ever do get anything up there. it will be all saggy like those tribal women we saw on the Discovery Channel. 8. This is another reason why I can't stand Lucy. Because she is always making these kind of remarks. What we should really do, if you ask me, is send Lucy's old bras to those tribal women. 7. Her conversations on the phone go like this: "No way... So what did he say?... Then what did she say?... No way... That is so totally untrue... I do not. I so do not... Who said that?... Well, it isn't true... No. I do not... I do not like him... Well, okay, maybe I do. Oh, gotta go, call-waiting.

A conversation between Ellie and her mom: [Ellie] "I guess it's true that love makes you blind." "No," my mom said. "It doesn't make you blind. You're very, very aware of everything about the one you truly love, whether you know it from what your eyes tell you or your heart. So no, love doesn't make you blind. It paralyzes until you can't breathe or run away from it.

I let it all out--my mom's date,my dad's conversation,my confusion about it all.Caleb doesn't laugh,he doesn't pull away,he doesn't talk .. He just lets me be me. When I settle down,I lean back and witness the mess I've made on his shirt."I made ur shirt all gross," I say between sniffles. "Forget the shirt.What's going on? I could.nt understand a word you mumbled into my chest." Now I'm half laughing and half crying.

Mom taught me not to look away from the worst but to believe that we can all do better. She never wavered in her conviction that books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose - electronic (even though that wasn't for her) or printed, or audio - is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in human conversation. Mom taught me that you can make a difference in the world and that books really do matter: they're how we know what we need to do in life, and how we tell others. Mom also showed me, over the course of two years and dozens of books and hundreds of hours in hospitals, that books can be how we get closer to each other, and stay close, even in the case of a mother and son who were very close to begin with, and even after one of them has died.

Mom said, "His spirit is there," and that made me really angry. I told her, "Dad didn't have a spirit! He had cells!" "His memory is there." "His memory is here," I said, pointing at my head. "Dad had a spirit," she said, like she was rewinding a bit in our conversation. I told her, "He had cells, and now they're on rooftops, and in the river, and in the lungs of millions of people around New York, who breathe him every time they speak!

Dear Mom, I'm as tight as a girdle. How do I accept love? --B Dear Potato Face, Just say 'thank you,' then shut up. --M

How often a mother initiated a conversation with her child was not predictive of the language outcomes—what mattered was, if the infant initiated, whether the mom responded.

Trying to learn from customer conversations is like excavating a delicate archaeological site. The truth is down there somewhere, but it’s fragile. While each blow with your shovel gets you closer to the truth, you’re liable to smash it into a million little pieces if you use too blunt an instrument.

I need a break after school," she told me later. "School is hard because a lot of people are in the room, so you get tired. I freak out if my mom plans a play date without telling me, because I don't want to hurt my friends' feelings. But I'd rather stay home. At a friend's house you have to do the things other people want to do. I like hanging out with my mom after school because I can learn from her. She's been alive longer than me. We have thoughtful conversations. I like having conversations because they make people happy.

Rule of thumb: You should be terrified of at least one of the questions you’re asking in every conversation.

I must have been in the car for a long time because eventually my sister found me there. I was chain-smoking cigarettes and crying still. My sister knocked on the window. I rolled it down. She looked at me with this curious expression. Then, her curiosity turned to anger. "Charlie, are you smoking?!" She was so mad. I can't tell you how mad she was. "I can't believe you're smoking!" That's when I stopped crying. And started laughing. Because of all the things she could have said right after she got out of there, she picked my smoking. And she got angry about it. And I knew if my sister was angry, then her face wouldn't be that different. And she would be okay. "I'm going to tell Mom and Dad, you know?" "No, you're not." God, I couldn't stop laughing. When my sister thought about it for a second, I think she figured out why she wouldn't tell Mom or Dad. It's like she suddenly remembered where we were and what had just happened and how crazy our whole conversation was considering at all. Then, she started laughing. But the laughing made her feel sick, so I had to get out of the car and help her into the backseat. I had already set up the pillow and the blanket for her because we figured it was probably best for her to sleep it off a little in the car before we went home. Just before she feel asleep, she said, "Well, it you're going to smoke, crack the window at least." Which made me start laughing again. "Charlie, smoking. I can't believe it." Which made me laugh harder, and I said, "I love you." And my sister said, "I love you too. Just stop it with the laughing already.

When was the last time you’d told Mom about something that had happened to you? At a certain point, the conversations between you and Mom became simplified. Even that was not done face to face, but by telephone.

The truth was, I liked talking about my mom. Bringing her up in casual conversation-putting words about her out into the universe- felt like keeping a piece of her here with me, even though she had been gone so long already.

I'm here." St. Clair is angry. "I'm just sorry I'm not there. With you. I wish there was something I could do." "Wanna come beat her up for me?" "I'm packing my throwing stars right now." I sniffle and wipe my nose. "I'm such an idiot. I can't believe I thought he liked me.That's the worst part, knowing he was never even interested." "Bollocks.He was interested." "No,he wasn't," I say. "Bridge said so." "Because she's jealous! Anna, I was there that first night he called you. I've seen how he looked at you in pictures." I protest,but he interrupts. "Any bloke with a working prick would be insane not to like you." There's a shocked pause,on both ends of the line. "Because,of course,of how intelligent you are. And funny.Not that you aren't attractive.Because you are. Attractive. Oh,bugger..." I wait. "Are you still there,or did you hang up because I'm such a bleeding idiot?" "I'm here." "God,you made me work for that." St. Clair said I'm attractive.That's the second time. "You're so easy to talk to," he continues, "that sometimes I forget you're not one of the guys." Scratch that. He thinks I'm Josh. "Just drop it. I can't take being compared to a guy right now-" "That's not what I meant-" "How's your mom? I'm sorry, I've hogged ur entire conversation,and this was supposed to be about her,and I didn't even ask-" "You did ask. It was the first thing you said when you answered. And technically I called you. And I was calling to see how the show went, which is what we've been talking about.

Anytime I’m having a conversation with someone over a meal, there’s another conversation happening internally—judgments and criticisms and self-loathing that press on me with such severity. They’re a brutal distraction. I can never be present with whoever I’m with. My focus is always more on the food than the person.

Sometimes coming out isn't about us. It's not fair that we have to carry the emotional burden of sharing our secret and making sure the person we're coming out to is okay, but we make concessions for the people we care about. Besides, I may have run the scenarios for this conversation but my mom had been running scenarios about my entire life since the day she had learned she was pregnant with me.

Why are we slow dancing?” Luka rests his chin on top of my head. “This is how my parents argued,” he confesses quietly, a grin in his voice. “Or I guess, this is how they had big conversations. My dad said he liked to keep my mom close, but I really think he wanted a way to politely restrain her.

She could see that familiar look on her mom's face. It was her I'm-just-making-conversation-but-really-hoping-you'll-share-something-important look.

It seems like our town has closed down these days leading up to the funeral. Old people still sit on their porches and talk, but their conversations aren't sprinkled with laughter anymore. Since the new, little kids haven't played outside, as if their moms are afraid someone might snatch them out of their yards and send them off to war.

You’re not gonna believe what just happened to me,” Jase says the minute I flip my cell open, taking advantage of break at the B&T. I turn away from the picture window just in case Mr. Lennox, disregarding the break sign, will come dashing out to slap me with my first-ever demerit. “Try me.” His voice lowers. “You know how I put that lock on the door of my room? Well, Dad noticed it. Apparently. So today, I’m stocking the lawn section and he comes up and asks why it’s there.” “Uh-oh.” I catch the attention of a kid sneaking into the hot tub (there’s a strict no-one-under-sixteen policy) and shake my head sternly. He slinks away. Must be my impressive uniform. “So I say I need privacy sometimes and sometimes you and I are hanging out and we don’t want to be interrupted ten million times.” “Good answer.” “Right. I think this is going to be the end of it. But then he tells me he needs me in the back room to have a ‘talk.’” “Uh-oh again.” Jase starts to laugh. “I follow him back and he sits me down and asks if I’m being responsible. Um. With you.” Moving back into the shade of the bushes, I turn even further away from the possible gaze of Mr. Lennox. “Oh God.” “I say yeah, we’ve got it handled, it’s fine. But, seriously? I can’t believe he’s asking me this. I mean, Samantha. Jesus. My parents? Hard not to know the facts of life and all in this house. So I tell him that we’re moving slowly and—” “You told him that?” God, Jase! How am I ever going to look Mr. Garret in the eye again? Help. “He’s my dad, Samantha. Yeah. Not that I didn’t want to exit the conversation right away, but still . . .” “So what happened then?” “Well, I reminded him they’d covered that really thoroughly in school, not to mention at home, and we weren’t irresponsible people.” I close my eyes, trying to imagine having this conversation with my mother. Inconceivable. No pun intended. “So then . . . he goes on about”—Jase’s voice drops even lower—“um . . . being considerate and um . . . mutual pleasure.” “Oh my god! I would’ve died. What did you say?” I ask, wanting to know even while I’m completely distracted by the thought. Mutual pleasure, huh? What do I know about giving that? What if Shoplifting Lindy had tricks up her sleeve I know nothing about? It’s not like I can ask Mom. “State senator suffers heart attack during conversation with daughter.” “I said ‘Yes sir’ a lot. And he went on and on and on and all I could think was that any minute Tim was gonna come in and hear my dad saying things like, ‘Your mom and I find that . . . blah blah blah.’” I can’t stop laughing. “He didn’t. He did not mention your mother.” “I know!” Jase is laughing too. “I mean . . . you know how close I am to my parents, but . . . Jesus.

Ermaline has entered the room noiselessly and is whispering to Nana. When she leaves, Nana and Papa start talking about friends of Mom's who are in the middle of a scandalous divorce. Mom and Dad keep glancing at Adam, and Nana keeps asking Mom and Dad questions, pulling their attention back to the conversation. I have seen this before. It's Nana's highly effective and very annoying way of not mentioning the elephant in the living room. But why does she have to think of Adam as an elephant? Why can't he just be their son? ~pgs 40-42; Hattie on adults

You going to the game tonight?" I was about to answer,but another voice rang out from just behind me. "She'd better," Jack said as he wrapped an arm around my waist and pulled me back against him. I could smell the fresh leather on his letterman jacket as I crunched against it. "Why is that?" I asked,smiling and instantly warm in his arms.I still couldn't get over the fact that Jack Caputo and I were...together. It was hard to think the word. We had been friends for so long.To be honest, he had been friends with me and I had been secretly pining for him since...well, since forever. But now he was here. It was my waist he held. It didn't seem real. "I can't carry the team to victory without you," he said. "You're my rabbit's foot." I craned my neck around to look at him. "I've always dreamed of some guy saying that to me." He pressed his lips to the base of my neck, and heat rushed to my cheeks. "I love making you turn red," he whispered. "It doesn't take much. We're in the middle of the hallway." "You want to know what else I love?" His tone was playful. "No," I said, but he wasn't listening. He took his fingers and lightly railed them up my spine,to the back of my neck.Instant goose bumps sprang up all over my body,and I shuddered. "That." I could feel his smile against my ear. Jack was always smiling.It was what made him so likable. By this time,Jules had snaked her way through the throng of students. "Hello, Jack.I was in the middle of a conversation with Becks.Do you mind?" she said with a smirk. Right then a bunch of Jack's teammates rounded the corner at the end of the hallway,stampeding toward us. "Uh-oh," I said. Jack pushed me safely aside just before they tackled him, and Jules and I watched as what seemed like the entire football team heaped on top of their starting quarterback. "Dating Jack Caputo just might kill you one day." Jules laughed. "You sure it's worth it?" I didn't answer,but I was sure. In the weeks following my mother's death, I had spent nearly every morning sitting at her grave.Whispering to her, telling her about my day, like I used to each morning before she died. Jack came with me to the cemetary most days. He'd bring a book and read under a tree several headstones away,waiting quietly, as if what I was doing was totally normal. We hadn't even been together then. It had been only five months since my mom died. Five months since a drunk driver hit her during her evening jog. Five months since the one person who knew all my dreams disappeared forever. Jack was the reason I was still standing. Yeah,I was sure he was worth it.The only thing I wasn't sure about was why he was with me.

Go and I had a game inspired by our mom, who had a habit of telling such outrageously mundane, endless stories that Go was positive she had to be secretly fucking with us. For about ten years now, whenever Go and I hit a conversation lull, one of us would break in with a story about appliance repair or coupon fulfillment.

And your mom?” Blake clears his throat. “She’s not with us.” I remember the conversation Blake and I had on the way down and tense. I can only imagine what my mother will say. But my mother just smiles brilliantly. “That’s good! Too many boys your age get spoiled by their mothers. They don’t know how to cook, how to do laundry. Tina is going to be a busy doctor. She’ll need someone to do all that for her. Better if you’re not used to having someone else take care of you.

I don't want to tear him down while he's so lit up, so I throw on my best gentle tone and remind him of our early dating conversations, where he seemed to agree with me that religion is a thing that stunts growth, not a thing that promotes it.

I ask Mom if love ever made her feel alone. If it ever made her feel like she was starving in a room full of food. She laughs. 'Only every day.' She leans over to me, across the gap between us, so that the side of her head touches mine....She whispers something, but I can't hear the words. 'I never thought I'd be the type of person who would do that to someone,' I say. 'Now it's exactly what I am. Forever.' Mom nods. 'It's always like that.' 'What do you mean?' I ask. 'Whenever I've made a choice in my life, a real choice...I can always feel the change, after I choose. The better versions of myself, moving just out of reach.' It's exactly what I think. So there's nothing to say.... 'I'm always losing better versions of myself,' she says. 'I don't know. You just have to keep trying.' [Kaui, in conversation with her mother Malia]

Their home is white and precise, an advertisement for right angles. When he’s sure no one’s looking, Benji silently nudges the shoe-rack one inch out of line and touches a couple of the photos on the wall so that they’re hanging ever so slightly crooked, and as he walks across the rug in the living room he lets his big toe fleetingly mess up some of the fringe. When he reaches the terrace door he sees Kevin’s mom’s reflection in the glass. She’s going around mechanically putting everything back to how it was, without missing a beat of her telephone conversation.

Genetics means that my parents really aren't my parents. I know Galen has thought this all along, but I still can't accept it. I also can't completely shun the possibility either. Especially after I just conducted a symphony of fish. How would I even start that conversation with my mom? "So, Galen thinks you've been lying to me for the past eighteen years." Even if I didn't say it directly, that's what it amounts to. And when she asks where I'd get an idea like that? "Well, I recently discovered I can hold my breath for almost two hours and tell fish what to do. I couldn't help but notice that you can't." Yeah, not happening. There's got to be some other way...

I suppose you want me to stand out here on the street and tell you all about me and Mom's conversation?" "Psh, no," she said. "I listened at the door." "That's my girl.

You could sit down with another mom, even one halfway around the world whose life was very different from your own, and find easy conversation, shared spirit,

Recently I was having a conversation with a mom who is trying to wrestle through the implications of grace in her parenting methods and responsibilities. She admitted that she had read too many books. She had exhausted herself trying to be a good mom and meet all the needs of all her children, raising them for the Lord....Now, in the middle of all her pain and exhaustion, she's trying to embrace grace but continues to be crippled by fear and guilt. "I wish I had never read those books," she admitted. "I feel guilty and exhausted all the time." I asked her, "How would you raise your children if all you had was the Bible?" "Well, I guess I would love them, discipline them, and tell them about Jesus." I smiled and answered, "Right.

I called Mom from the hotel during the period of peace, I'd turned out all of the lights and closed the curtains in pursuit of sensory deprivation. It was Black and sensationless. All There was in the room was my voice and mom's voice trickling out of the phone's earpiece, and this feeling passed through me-this feeling of what a gift it is that people are able to speak to each other while they're alive. These casual conversations, this familiar voice heard through a Las Vegas hotel room telephone. It was strange to realize that, in one since, all we are is our voice.

Hey, did you hear about Brad Miller?” he asked, already forgetting about the Lissie conversation. “He got his car taken away for getting another speeding ticket. Of course he tried to tell his parents it was a setup.” Violet laughed. “Yeah, because the police have nothing better to do than to plan a sting operation targeting eleventh-grade idiots.” She was more than willing to go along with this diversion from conversations about Jay and his many admirers. Jay laughed too, shaking his head. “You’re so cold-hearted,” he said to Violet, shoving her a little but playing along. “How’s he supposed to go cruising for unsuspecting freshmen and sophomores without a car? What willing girl is going to ride on the handlebars of his ten-speed?” “I don’t see you driving anything but your mom’s car yet. At least he has a bike,” she said, turning on him now. He pushed her again. “Hey!” he tried to defend himself. “I’m still saving! Not all of us are born with a silver spoon in our mouths.” They were both laughing, hard now. The silver spoon joke had been used before, whenever one of them had something the other didn’t. “Right!” Violet protested. “Have you seen my car?” This time she shoved him, and a full-scale war broke out on the couch. “Poor little rich girl!” Jay accused, grabbing her arm and pulling her down. She giggled and tried to give him the dreaded “dead leg” by hitting him with her knuckle in the thigh. But he was too strong, and what used to be a fairly even matchup was now more like an annihilation of Violet’s side. “Oh, yeah. Weren’t you the one”—she gasped, still giggling and thrashing to break free from his suddenly way-too-strong grip on her, just as his hand was almost at the sensitive spot along the side of her rib cage—“who got to go to Hawaii . . .” She bucked beneath him, trying to knock him off her. “. . . for spring break . . . last . . .” And then he startled to tickle her while she was pinned beneath him, and her last word came out in a scream: “YEAR?!” That was how her aunt and uncle found them.

Mom used to brag to her friends when I was in grade school about what a “good husband” I was going to make some woman one day, what with my unusual sensitivity, my love of conversation, and my ability to wax a mean kitchen floor.

Mom!" he cried out. She shrugged. You're not a virgin, and I'm promoting her pleasure as well. The girl will enjoy it a lot more. They don't always, you know." She scanned the rest of the table. "I'm sure you two bucks think you're the stud for all those does," she remembered me and amended,"well maybe just you and Logan, but I'm telling you. Girls fake it eighty percent of the time." That opened a whole new channel of adoration from Logan. He wanted to know it all. The rest of the conversation was a question and answer forum from Logan while Mark looked ready to throw up. I even caught Mason listening intently to her. He told me later that he'd be stupid to pass up information like that.

Believe it or not, I don’t just sit through hours of conversations with you silently judging you. And if it takes me a while to tell you things like ‘Hey, my wife left me for my college roommate,’ maybe it has nothing to do with you, okay? Maybe it’s because I don’t like saying that sentence aloud. I mean, your mom didn’t leave when your dad cheated on her, and my mom didn’t leave my dad when he broke my fucking arm, and yet I couldn’t do anything to make my wife stay.

Conversations are like movies. There has to be a villain to make them interesting. Often it’s difficult to find a safe, distant and common villain. Our desire to have a conversation is so strong that we end up making someone close to us a villain. “Mom, your favourite child did this.” “Dear husband, your mother did this.” “Son, your wife did this.” These are just attempts of a human mind to do an interesting conversation but they end up in a full fledged drama at home.

I need you to be serious right now.” “Probably you shouldn’t have drugged me, then.” She rolls her eyes and waves in dismissal. “It was chloroform. You’ll be fine.” “And Rayna?” She knows what I’m asking, and she nods. “She should be waking up right about now.” Mom sits back in her chair. “That girl has the personality of a mako shark.” “Says the nut job who chloroformed her own daughter.” She sighs. “One day you’ll understand why I did that. Today is obviously not that day.” “No, no, no,” I say, palming the air with the universal “don’t even” sign. “You don’t get to play the responsible parent card. Let’s not forget the little matter of the last eighteen-freaking-years, Nalia.” There. I said it. This conversation is finally going to happen.

Amy will be fine. Amy ..." Here was where I should have said, "Amy loves Mom." But I couldn't tell Go that Amy loved our mother, because after all that time, Amy still barely knew our mother. Their few meetings had left them both baffled. Amy would dissect the conversations for days after—"And what did she mean by ..."—as if my mother were some ancient peasant tribeswoman arriving from the tundra with an armful of raw yak meat and some buttons for bartering, trying to get something from Amy that wasn't on offer.

But that’s not even what she’s asking. Cassie wants to know if I’ll still walk home with her after school every day, if I’ll watch movies with her that I miss hald of because I’m answering her bizarre questions; if I’ll still tolerate her mindless chatter and scattered conversations. If I’ll still be nice to her. This girl who speaks slowly and runs awkwardly, who can only manage short spurts of eye contact and stiffens under anyone’s touch, who struggles to match appropriate emotions with situations. Who finds joy in the simplest of things, who will never sit at a cafeteria table or in a bathroom and say mean things behind people’s back. Who understands more than most people give her credit for. Who’s heart can’t seem to hold animosity, even towards those who have been cruel to her. Who only ever wanted to be a friend to me since the moment she stepped out of her mom’s car with a bag of cookies. “Of course, I will,” I promise. “Yeah, okay.” She finally looks up to offer me a wide grin and a nod. “Are you going to eat those Junior Mints?

Don’t spend a week prepping for meetings; spend an hour and then go talk to people. Anything more is stalling. Don’t spend months doing full-time customer conversations before beginning to move on a product. Spend a week, maybe two. Get your bearings and then give them something to commit to.

what happens when a baby doesn’t get those positive, nurturing responses? Say, if a mom is on her own with no help, or depressed, or in a violent relationship? She may really want to be a loving, responsive parent, but is that possible under those circumstances? Dr. Perry: This is one of the central problems in our society; we have too many parents caring for children with inadequate supports. The result is what you would expect. An overwhelmed, exhausted, dysregulated parent will have a hard time regulating a child consistently and predictably. This can impact the child in two really important ways. First, it affects the development of the child’s stress-response systems (see Figure 3). If the hungry, cold, scared infant is inconsistently responded to—and regulated—by the overwhelmed caregiver, this creates an inconsistent, prolonged, and unpredictable activation of the child’s stress-response systems. The result is a sensitization of these important systems.

Ready for what?” Just then, Jonah came bouncing over, wearing a blue-and-red dinosaur costume. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” he yelled louder than necessary. My mom put her hand on his shoulder and he stopped bouncing. She continued to look at me, waiting for an answer. “I’m going out with Isabel,” I said. “You didn’t tell me that,” Mom said. I panicked, my mind rewinding through the week to try to pick out the conversation I could’ve sworn I had with my mom so I could reference it now. It didn’t exist. “You said you’d take us trick-or-treating,” Jonah whined. “Ashley can take you,” I said. My sister shook her head. “Nope. I’m going to a Halloween party tonight.” “Can’t Mom take you?” I asked Jonah, desperate now because I knew how he got when he had his mind set on something. Mom gave me her disappointed look but to Jonah said, “Yes, I’ll take you.” The dinosaur head tipped forward as he looked at the ground in a pout. It was a really pathetic sight. As I clung to my stained shirt, I knew neither

Mom said that has been true for her—that being a woman has meant being someone who gets talked over in conversations or ignored; someone who gets judged as a body instead of as a sentient soul; someone who, no matter who you are or what you are doing, always has to be on guard, lest someone else decide that you’re going to be his victim.

Mom said that has been true for her - that being a woman has meant being someone who gets talked over in conversations or ignored; someone who gets judged as a body instead of as a sentient soul; someone who, no mater who you are or what you are doing, always has to be on guard, lest someone else decided that you're going to be his victim.

I'm going to tell Mom and Dad, you know?" "No, you're not." God, I couldn't stop laughing. When my sister thought about it for a second, I think she figured out why she wouldn't tell Mom or Dad. It's like she suddenly remembered where we were and what had just happened and how crazy our whole conversation was considering all that. Then, she started laughing.

When David and I went to visit my mom, she treated me well and seemed interested in our lives, focusing less on what she needed from me or how I should be taking care of her. Mom saved those conversations for our daily phone calls because she thought David wouldn't find out about this other side other. But he could see the changes in me when I talked to my mom.

You could sit down with another mom, even one halfway around the world whose life was very different from your own, and find easy conversation, shared spirit, someone who understood why you might bring your ten-year-old into a malarial jungle rather than leave him behind, someone who understood what unspeakable things sometimes befell children and to what lengths you might go to fend them off, someone who saw the horrors and the threats and the carving up and the carving out and also how hard they were to schedule around and how little they cared about your job and how much they wanted just to be touching you all the time and what they looked like when they first woke up in the morning and how they learned to talk and walk and read and how quickly they outgrew their clothes and how it was to live every moment of every day in that world—even the moments when someone else’s kid was shitting thousands of tiny larva into a bucket, even the moments when someone else’s kid was shaking with a fever whose cause you could not discern, even the moments when someone else’s kid had her own baby stuck against her pelvis, draining her life in its efforts to be born.

Since the conversation had deteriorated to a loop, Dortmunder abandoned it and looked out his window instead at the thin sunlight out there, until Murch’s Mom made the right turn onto Eighth Avenue and sank contentedly into the perpetual blockage there, a traffic snarl well into its second century, running—or not running—from below Penn Station up to above the Port Authority bus terminal.

Well,” I said, trying to keep my tone light as I walked over to put my arms around his neck, though I had to stand on my toes to do so. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? You told me something about yourself that I didn’t know before-that you didn’t, er, care for your family, except for your mother. But that didn’t make me hate you…it made me love you a bit more, because now I know we have even more in common.” He stared down at him, a wary look in his eyes. “If you knew the truth,” he said, “you wouldn’t be saying that. You’d be running.” “Where would I go?” I asked, with a laugh I hoped didn’t sound as nervous to him as it did to me. “You bolted all the doors, remember? Now, since you shared something I didn’t know about you, may I share something you don’t know about me?” Those dark eyebrows rose as he pulled me close. “I can’t even begin to imagine what this could be.” “It’s just,” I said, “that I’m a little worried about rushing into this consort thing…especially the cohabitation part.” “Cohabitation?” he echoed. He was clearly unfamiliar with the word. “Cohabitation means living together,” I explained, feeling my cheeks heat up. “Like married people.” “You said last night that these days no one your age thinks of getting married,” he said, holding me even closer and suddenly looking much more eager to stick around for the conversation, even though I heard the marina horn blow again. “And that your father would never approve it. But if you’ve changed your mind, I’m sure I could convince Mr. Smith to perform the ceremony-“ “No,” I said hastily. Of course Mr. Smith was somehow authorized to marry people in the state of Florida. Why not? I decided not to think about that right now, or how John had come across this piece of information. “That isn’t what I meant. My mom would kill me if I got married before I graduated from high school.” Not, of course, that my mom was going to know about any of this. Which was probably just as well, since her head would explode at the idea of my moving in with a guy before I’d even applied to college, let alone at the fact that I most likely wasn’t going to college. Not that there was any school that would have accepted me with my grades, not to mention my disciplinary record. “What I meant was that maybe we should take it more slowly,” I explained. “The past couple years, while all my friends were going out with boys, I was home, trying to figure out how this necklace you gave me worked. I wasn’t exactly dating.” “Pierce,” he said. He wore a slightly quizzical expression on his face. “Is this the thing you think I didn’t know about you? Because for one thing, I do know it, and for another, I don’t understand why you think I’d have a problem with it.” I’d forgotten he’d been born in the eighteen hundreds, when the only time proper ladies and gentlemen ever spent together before they were married was at heavily chaperoned balls…and that for most of the past two centuries, he’d been hanging out in a cemetery. Did he even know that these days, a lot of people hooked up on first dates, or that the average age at which girls-and boys as well-lost their virginity in the United States was seventeen…my age? Apparently not. “What I’m trying to say,” I said, my cheeks burning brighter, “is that I’m not very experienced with men. So this morning when I woke up and found you in bed beside me, while it was really, super nice-don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it very much-it kind of freaked me out. Because I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of thing yet.” Or maybe the problem was that I wasn’t prepared for how ready I was…

Local Girl Missing, Feared Dead. Beneath it was a photo of me-my most recent school photo. “Oh, no.” My heart filling with dread, I took the paper from Mr. Smith’s hands. “Couldn’t they have found a better picture?” Mr. Smith looked at me sharply. “Miss Oliviera,” he said, his gray eyebrows lowered. “I realize it’s all the rage with you young people today to toss off flippant one-liners so you can get your own reality television shows. But I highly doubt MTV will be coming down to Isla Huesos to film you in the Underworld. So that can’t be all you have to say about this.” He was right, of course. Though I couldn’t say what I really wanted to, because John was in the room, and I didn’t want to make him feel worse than he already did. But what I wanted to do was burst into tears. “Is that about Pierce?” John looked uneasy. Outside, thunder rumbled again. This time, it sounded even closer than before. “Yes, of course, it is, John,” Mr. Smith said. There was something strange about his voice. He sounded almost as if he were mad at John. Only why would he be? John had done the right thing. He’d explained about the Furies. “What did you expect? Have you gotten to the part about the reward your father is offering for information leading to your safe return, Miss Oliviera?” My gaze flicked down the page. I wanted to throw up. “One million dollars?” My dad’s company, one of the largest providers in the world of products and services to the oil, gas, and military industries, was valued at several hundred times that. “That cheapskate.” This was all so very, very bad. “One million dollars is a lot of money to most people.” Mr. Smith said, with a strong emphasis on most people. He still had that odd note in his voice. “Though I recognize that money may mean little to a resident of the Underworld. So I’d caution you to use judiciousness, wherever it is that you’re going, as there are many people on this island who’ll be more than willing to turn you in for only a small portion of that reward money. I don’t suppose I might ask where you’re going? Or suggest that you pay a call on your mother, who is beside herself with worry?” “That’s a good idea,” I said. Why hadn’t I thought of it? I felt much better already. I could straighten out this whole thing with a single conversation. “I should call my mom-“ Both Mr. Smith’s cry of alarm and the fact that John grabbed me by the wrist as I was reaching into my book bag for my cell phone stopped me from making calls of any sort. “You can’t use you phone,” Mr. Smith said. “The police-and your father-are surely waiting for you to do just that. They’ll triangulate on the signal from the closest cell tower, and find you.” When I stared at him for his use of the word triangulate, Mr. Smith shook his head and said, “My partner, Patrick, is obsessed with Law & Order reruns.

Mom agreed but pointed out that she’d been doing the same with others too—talking about books with my sister and brother and some of her friends. “I guess we’re all in it together,” she said. And I couldn’t help but smile at the other meaning of the phrase. We’re all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.

SOCIAL/GENERAL ICEBREAKERS 1. What do you think of the movie/restaurant/party? 2. Tell me about the best vacation you’ve ever taken. 3. What’s your favorite thing to do on a rainy day? 4. If you could replay any moment in your life, what would it be? 5. What one thing would you really like to own? Why? 6. Tell me about one of your favorite relatives. 7. What was it like in the town where you grew up? 8. What would you like to come back as in your next life? 9. Tell me about your kids. 10. What do you think is the perfect age? Why? 11. What is a typical day like for you? 12. Of all the places you’ve lived, tell me about the one you like the best. 13. What’s your favorite holiday? What do you enjoy about it? 14. What are some of your family traditions that you particularly enjoy? 15. Tell me about the first car you ever bought. 16. How has the Internet affected your life? 17. Who were your idols as a kid? Have they changed? 18. Describe a memorable teacher you had. 19. Tell me about a movie/book you’ve seen or read more than once. 20. What’s your favorite restaurant? Why? 21. Tell me why you were named ______. What is the origin of your last name? 22. Tell me about a place you’ve visited that you hope never to return to. get over your mom’s good intentions. 23. What’s the best surprise you’ve ever received? 24. What’s the neatest surprise you’ve ever planned and pulled off for someone else? 25. Skiing here is always challenging. What are some of your favorite places to ski? 26. Who would star as you in a movie about your life? Why that person? 27. Who is the most famous person you’ve met? 28. Tell me about some of your New Year’s resolutions. 29. What’s the most antiestablishment thing you’ve ever done? 30. Describe a costume that you wore to a party. 31. Tell me about a political position you’d like to hold. 32. What song reminds you of an incident in your life? 33. What’s the most memorable meal you’ve eaten? 34. What’s the most unforgettable coincidence you’ve experienced or heard about? 35. How are you able to tell if that melon is ripe? 36. What motion picture star would you like to interview? Why? 37. Tell me about your family. 38. What aroma brings forth a special memory? 39. Describe the scariest person you ever met. 40. What’s your favorite thing to do alone? 41. Tell me about a childhood friend who used to get you in trouble. 42. Tell me about a time when you had too much to eat or drink. 43. Describe your first away-from-home living quarters or experience. 44. Tell me about a time that you lost a job. 45. Share a memory of one of your grandparents. 46. Describe an embarrassing moment you’ve had. 47. Tell me something most people would never guess about you. 48. What would you do if you won a million dollars? 49. Describe your ideal weather and why. 50. How did you learn to ski/hang drywall/play piano?

You need an argument, and the nature of any argument is that its validity doesn't depend on who you are. [...] When talking about violence, again, the facts are whatever they are – how many people got shot, how many died, what was the color of their skin, who shot them, what was the color of their skin. Getting a handle on these facts does not require one to say, 'As a black man, I know x, y, and z .' The color of your skin simply isn't relevant information. When talking about the data – that is, what is happening throughout a whole society – your life experience isn't relevant information. And the fact that you think it might be is a problem. [...] Now this isn't to say that a person's life experience is never relevant to a conversation [...] it can be used to establish certain kinds of facts. I mean, if someone says to you, 'Catholics don't believe in hell', it's perfectly valid to resort, 'Actually my mom is a Catholic, and she believes in hell'. Of course there's a larger question of what the Catholic doctrine actually is – but if a person is making a statement about a certain group of people and you are a member of the group, you might very well be in a position to falsify his claim on the basis of your experience. But a person's identity and life experience often aren't relevant when talking about facts. And they're usually invoked in ways that are clearly fallacious.

As far as my mom was concerned, she’d never done anything wrong. It kind of left our conversation nowhere to go. The only way to progress it would have been if I’d said, “Yes, you’re right. Everything that happened in my life was my fault, or my grandmother Nona’s fault, or my grandfather Tom’s fault.” I couldn’t say that because it wasn’t true. She’d had a part in it. Plus, I just don’t operate like that . . . I’ll meet you halfway, but you have to meet me, too.

I’d go with him. We’d be old enough. We’d make a whole new life together, a normal one. Ever since that bus ride, I’d been carrying my love for him around in my pocket. I should have handed it to him then and there in exchange for the gloves, but the briars and brickles of shame had been too sharp. By the time they receded, it felt stupid to bring it up. Then that faded, and all I could do was wait for an opening, some situation where he and I were hanging out and shooting love darts at each other. When it arrived, I’d say, all joshing, Hey, you remember when you thought I needed gloves? Yeah, he’d laugh. I’ve wanted to give you my paper airplane necklace ever since. And our relationship would bloom from there. Every day, I looked for this opening. It could be tomorrow. “Time to go,” Dad said, finally. His face was glistening. Me and Sephie’s pops and quarters were long gone and our stomachs were growling. We’d been sitting near the door, wishing Dad would take the hint and leave, but he’d kept up at that hot conversation with Bauer. We followed him outside. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” Dad said when we finally slid inside the van, his voice full of bravado. Except I could tell he was scared. Mom wasn’t going to be happy that we were out so late on a school night and that Dad was driving drunk, but that wasn’t it. No, he looked jumping-ghost scared, and that made me uneasy. It did even worse to Sephie. It must have. That’s the only explanation for why she broke the rule about inviting conversation with Dad when he’d been drinking. “Are you okay, Daddy?” She hardly ever called him that anymore. I didn’t think he was going to respond, but he finally did, his voice all bluster. “As okay as a man can be in a country where nothing’s sacred.” I wondered what he meant. He and Bauer had talked about so many things. Well, I wasn’t going to

She never wavered in her conviction that books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose—electronic (even though that wasn’t for her) or printed, or audio—is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation. Mom taught me that you can make a difference in the world and that books really do matter: they’re how we know what we need to do in life, and how we tell others.

So how do you like being a working mother? the other working mother asked, and the mother—the tired, unhappy working mother, working her dream job and not holding her baby—that mother stared stupidly and wanted to present her theories about how this was all a trick, a trick to get them to do everything, a trick they could not escape. Yet her brain no longer worked as it once had. The friendly working mom waited. Was she supposed to say something? What was a “conversation”?

School is hard because a lot of people are in the room, so you get tired. I freak out if my mom plans a play date without telling me, because I don’t want to hurt my friends’ feelings. But I’d rather stay home. At a friend’s house you have to do the things other people want to do. I like hanging out with my mom after school because I can learn from her. She’s been alive longer than me. We have thoughtful conversations. I like having thoughtful conversations because they make people happy.”*

A note about me: I do not think stress is a legitimate topic of conversation, in public anyway. No one ever wants to hear how stressed out anyone else is, because most of the time everyone is stressed out. Going on and on in detail about how stressed out I am isn’t conversation. It’ll never lead anywhere. No one is going to say, “Wow, Mindy, you really have it especially bad. I have heard some stories of stress, but this just takes the cake.” This is entirely because my parents are immigrant professionals, and talking about one’s stress level was just totally outlandish to them. When I was three years old my mom was in the middle of her medical residency in Boston. She had been a practicing obstetrician and gynecologist in Nigeria, but in the United States she was required to do her residency all over again. She’d get up at 4:00 a.m. and prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner for my brother and me, because she knew she wouldn’t be home in time to have dinner with us. Then she’d leave by 5:30 a.m. to start rounds at the hospital. My dad, an architect, had a contract for a building in New Haven, Connecticut, which was two hours and forty-five minutes away. It would’ve been easier for him to move to New Haven for the time of the construction of the building, but then who would have taken care of us when my mom was at the hospital at night? In my parents’ vivid imaginations, lack of at least one parent’s supervision was a gateway to drugs, kidnapping, or at the very minimum, too much television watching. In order to spend time with us and save money for our family, my dad dropped us off at school, commuted the two hours and forty-five minutes every morning, and then returned in time to pick us up from our after-school program. Then he came home and boiled us hot dogs as an after-school snack, even though he was a vegetarian and had never eaten a hot dog before. In my entire life, I never once heard either of my parents say they were stressed. That was just not a phrase I grew up being allowed to say. That, and the concept of “Me time.

For a while I considered dropping out of Barnard to help. It felt unbearably selfish, just downright wrong, to be indulging myself with an education in the liberal arts at a fancy private college while Mom and Dad were on the streets. But Lori convinced me that dropping out was a lamebrained idea. It wouldn’t do any good, she said, and besides, dropping out would break Dad’s heart. He was immensely proud that he had a daughter in college, and an Ivy League college at that. Every time he met someone new, he managed to work it into the first few minutes of conversation. Mom and Dad, Brian pointed out, had options. They could move back to West Virginia or Phoenix. Mom could work. And she was not destitute. She had her collection of antique Indian jewelry, which she kept in a self-storage locker. There was the two-carat diamond ring that Brian and I had found under the rotten lumber back in Welch; she wore it even when sleeping on the street. She still owned property in Phoenix. And she had the land in Texas, the source of her oil-lease royalties.

Chelsea, of course, was the first one to speak up. “Okay, am I the only one who noticed how gi-mungous Mimi Nichols’s dress makes her ass look? Of course, you can barely notice it since her freakishly giant boobs are practically hanging out the top of it.” Chelsea glanced at Jules and grinned. “No offense, of course,” she offered, raising her eyebrows at Jules’s chest. Claire giggled, and Jules wrinkled up her face in disgust at Chelsea’s teasing barb. “You’re just jealous,” she retorted, eyeing Chelsea’s chest in return. “Touche, Jules. Touche!” Chelsea admitted. Claire wanted so badly to join in on the catty conversation, but she was terrible at finding other people’s flaws . . . at least intentionally. Still, she gave it her best shot. “And what about Jennifer Cummings?” she asked accusingly, trying to mimic one of Chelsea’s cutting looks. They looked around at one another, wondering what it was that they weren’t getting. Chelsea was the only one brave enough to ask, “What about her, Claire?” “She does not even look kind of cute!” Claire stated, her face a mask of mock horror. They all stared at her, not sure what to say. And then once again, of course, it was Chelsea who broke the stunned silence. “I swear, Claire-bear, I am going to call your mom and tell her you need to start riding the short bus. You really need to start practicing your bitchy comments. What are you gonna do when we’re not here to get your back?” Claire rolled her eyes, too oblivious to be insulted, which was why she was the perfect friends for Chelsea, who was too insulting to be obvious. “Geez, Chels, I don’t even ride the bus.” Jules couldn’t help herself; despite her best efforts to hold on to her detached cool, she started laughing. And pretty soon they were all laughing, even Claire, who still didn’t realize what they were laughing at. “You guys are so mean!” Violet charged accusingly. “Can’t you just have fun and stop picking everyone part?” Chelsea looked disgusted. “You’ve gone soft, haven’t you? Jay has made you soft!” Violet rolled her eyes, smiling despite her best efforts. “Whatever. Everyone’s soft compared to you.” “Ouch!” Chelsea pretended to be wounded. But again, she just couldn’t pull it off.

A child, with parents who are unable or unwilling to provide safe enough attachment, has no one to whom she can bring her whole developing self. No one is there for reflection, validation and guidance. No one is safe enough to go to for comfort or help in times of trouble. There is no one to cry to, to protest unfairness to, and to seek compassion from for hurts, mistakes, accidents, and betrayals. No one is safe enough to shine with, to do “show and tell” with, and to be reflected as a subject of pride. There is no one to even practice the all-important intimacy-building skills of conversation. In the paraphrased words of more than one of my clients: “Talking to Mom was like giving ammunition to the enemy. Anything I said could and would be used against me. No wonder, people always tell me that I don’t seem to have much to say for myself.” Those with Cptsd-spawned attachment disorders never learn the communication skills that engender closeness and a sense of belonging. When it comes to relating, they are often plagued by debilitating social anxiety - and social phobia when they are at the severe end of the continuum of Cptsd.

A flash of lightning ghosts into the room, and when it leaves again, my eyes follow it back out to sea. In the window's reflection, I glimpse a figure standing behind me. I don't need to turn around to see who creates such a big outline-or who makes my whole body turn into a goose-bump farm. "How do you feel?" he says. "Better," I say to his reflection. He hops over the back of the couch and grabs my chin, turning my head side to side, up and down, all around, watching for my reaction. "I just did that," I tell him. "Nothing." He nods and unhands me. "Rach-Uh, my mom called your mom and told her what happened. I guess your mom called your doctor, and he said it's pretty common, but that you should rest a few more days. My mom insisted you stay the night since no one needs to be driving in this weather." "And my mother agreed to that?" Even in the dark, I don't miss his little grin. "My mom can be pretty persuasive," he says. "By the end of the conversation, your mom even suggested we both stay home from school tomorrow and hang out here so you can relax-since my mom will be home supervising, of course. Your mom said you wouldn't stay home if I went to school." A flash from the storm illuminates my blush. "Because we told her we're dating." He nods. "She said you should have stayed home today, but you threw a fit to go anyway. Honestly, I didn't realize you were so obsessed-ouch!" I try to pinch him again, but he catches my wrist and pulls me over his lap like a child getting a spanking. "I was going to say, 'with history.'" He laughs. "No you weren't. Let me up." "I will." He laughs. "Galen, you let me up right now-" "Sorry, not ready yet." I gasp. "Oh, no! The room is spinning again." I hold still, tense up. Then the room does spin when he snatches me up and grabs my chin again. The look of concern etched on his face makes me feel a little guilty, but not guilty enough to keep my mouth shut. "Works every time," I tell him, giving my best ha-ha-you're-a-sucker smirk. A snicker from the entryway cuts off what I can tell is about to be a good scolding. I've never heard Galen curse, but his glower just looks like a four-letter word waiting to come out. We both turn to see Toraf watching us with crossed arms. He is also wearing a ha-ha-you're-a-sucker smirk. "Dinner's ready, children," he says. Yep, I definitely like Toraf. Galen rolls his eyes and extracts me from his lap. He hops up and leaves me there, and in the reflection, I see him ram his fist into Toraf's gut as he passes. Toraf grunts, but the smirk never leaves his face. He nods his head for me to follow them. As we pass through the rooms, I try to remember the rich, sophisticated atmosphere, the marble floors, the hideous paintings, but my stomach makes sounds better suited to a dog kennel at feeding time. "I think your stomach is making mating calls," Toraf whispers to me as we enter the kitchen. My blush debuts the same time we enter the kitchen, and it's enough to make Toraf laugh out loud.

Riley shook her head. “I married Brad after I got my Associate's degree in culinary arts. I worked in the Bakery at the same grocery store as Brad, and now I'm a stay at home mom.” She paused. “If you remember my senior yearbook, I was voted most likely to be the best mom.” “Oh, you have time yet.” Stella joked and Riley backhanded her in the ribs. “You're an awesome mom. Be glad you haven't proven anyone wrong. It's not all it's cracked up to be.” She paused. “That same yearbook said I'd be in prison with a wife named Roberta.” ~Conversation between Riley and Stella, "Sugar and Spies: Spy Sisters Book 1

And from Isabel’s perspective, things didn’t sound alarming at all. “I need a break after school,” she told me later. “School is hard because a lot of people are in the room, so you get tired. I freak out if my mom plans a play date without telling me, because I don’t want to hurt my friends’ feelings. But I’d rather stay home. At a friend’s house you have to do the things other people want to do. I like hanging out with my mom after school because I can learn from her. She’s been alive longer than me. We have thoughtful conversations. I like having thoughtful conversations because they make people happy.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t the same conversation about mental health back then that there is now. I hope any new mothers reading this who are having a hard time will get help early and will channel their feelings into something more healing than white marble floors. Because I now know that I was displaying just about every symptom of perinatal depression: sadness, anxiety, fatigue. Once the babies were born, I added on my confusion and obsession about the babies’ safety, which was ratcheting up the more media attention was on us. Being a new mom is challenging enough without trying to do everything under a microscope.

Subject: Some boat Alex, I know Fox Mulder. My mom watched The X-Files. She says it was because she liked the creepy store lines. I think she liked David Duchovny. She tried Californication, but I don't think her heart was in it. I think she was just sticking it to my grandmother, who has decided it's the work of the devil. She says that about most current music,too, but God help anyone who gets between her and American Idol. The fuzzy whale was very nice, it a little hard to identify. The profile of the guy between you and the whale in the third pic was very familiar, if a little fuzzy. I won't ask. No,no. I have to ask. I won't ask. My mother loves his wife's suits. I Googled. There are sharks off the coast of the Vineyard. Great big white ones. I believe you about the turtle. Did I mention that there are sharks there? I go to Surf City for a week every summer with my cousins. I eat too much ice cream. I play miniature golf-badly. I don't complain about sand in my hot dog buns or sheets. I even spend enough time on the beach to get sand in more uncomfortable places. I do not swim. I mean, I could if I wanted to but I figure that if we were meant to share the water with sharks, we would have a few extra rows of teeth, too. I'll save you some cannoli. -Ella Subject: Shh Fiorella, Yes,Fiorella. I looked it up. It means Flower. Which, when paired with MArino, means Flower of the Sea. What shark would dare to touch you? I won't touch the uncomfortable sand mention, hard as it is to resist. I also will not think of you in a bikini (Note to self: Do not think of Ella in a bikini under any circumstanes. Note from self: Are you f-ing kidding me?). Okay. Two pieces of info for you. One: Our host has an excellent wine cellar and my mother is European. Meaning she doesn't begrudge me the occasional glass. Or four. Two: Our hostess says to thank yur mother very much. Most people say nasty things about her suits. Three: We have a house kinda near Surf City. Maybe I'll be there when your there. You'd better burn this after reading. -Alexai Subect: Happy Thanksgiving Alexei, Consider it burned. Don't worry. I'm not showing your e-mails to anybody. Matter of national security, of course. Well,I got to sit at the adult table. In between my great-great-aunt Jo, who is ninety-three and deaf, and her daughter, JoJo, who had to repeat everyone's conversations across me. Loudly. The food was great,even my uncle Ricky's cranberry lasagna. In fact, it would have been a perfectly good TG if the Eagles han't been playing the Jets.My cousin Joey (other side of the family) lives in Hoboken. His sister married a Philly guy. It started out as a lively across-the-table debate: Jets v. Iggles. It ended up with Joey flinging himself across the table at his brother-in-law and my grandmother saying loud prayers to Saint Bridget. At least I think it was Saint Bridget. Hard to tell. She was speaking Italian. She caught me trying to freeze a half-dozen cannoli. She yelled at me. Apparently, the shells get really soggy when they defrost. I guess you'll have to come have a fresh one when you get back. -F/E

I trudge toward the porch, entertaining the idea of running the other way. But technically, I shouldn't be in any trouble. It wasn't my car. I'm not the one who got a ticket. Samantha Forza did. And the picture on Samantha Forza's driver's license looks a lot like Rayna. She told Officer Downing that she swerved to keep from hitting a camel, which Officer Downing graciously interpreted as a deer after she described it as "a hairy animal with four legs and a horn." Since no one formed a search party to look for either a camel or a unicorn, I figured we were in the clear. But from Mom's expression, I'm miles from clear. "Hi," I say as I reach the steps. "We'll see about that," she says, grabbing my face and shining a pen light in my eyes. I slap it away. "Really? You're checking my pupils? Really?" "Hal said you looked hazy," she says, clipping the pen back on the neckline of her scrubs. "Hal? Who's Hal?" "Hal is the paramedic who took your signature when you declined medical treatment. He radioed in to the hospital after he left you." "Oh. Well, then Hal would have noticed I was just in an accident, so I might have been a little out of it. Doesn't mean I was high." So it wasn't small-town gossip, it was small-county gossip. Good ole Hal's probably transported hundreds of patients to my mom in the ER two towns over. She scowls. "Why didn't you call me? Who is Samantha?" I sigh and push past her. There's no reason to have this conversation on the porch. She follows me into the house. "She's Galen's sister. I didn't call because I didn't have a signal on my cell. We were on a dead road." "Where was Galen? Why were you driving his car?" "He was home. We were just taking it for a drive. He didn't want to come." Technically, all these statements are true, so they sound believable when I say them. Mom snorts and secures the dead bolt on the front door. "Probably because he knows his sister is life threatening behind the wheel." "Probably.

surgery has warped the faces of every woman over thirty; they don’t look younger, just not quite human in a way society has decided to pretend not to see. Half of the people are talking more to the holograms from their rings or badges than they are to the people around them. What conversation I can hear is mostly gossip: who’s shagging who, who’s making money, who’s losing it, who’s not invited to the next party like this. Maybe the technology is different, but the shallowness of the scene is probably universal. So this is the life my father escaped when he chose to go into science, to leave Great Britain and join Mom in California. He was even smarter than I knew.

There's a pause in the conversation when I really want to ask Matt what he's thinking despite it being probably the most cliché thing to ask a guy. When Matt still doesn't take his eyes off the names, I open my mouth to ask if he has any questions. He beats me to it. "Where's Megan?" he asks. "Oh, she was Marcus Pitts then," I say. "She was born a boy. He dad took the accident as an opportunity to leave them, mostly because he couldn't take the transgender thing. After they moved, Megan's mom let her wear whatever- be whoever- she wanted. She dressed in girl clothes from then on out." "But she was only, what, like five?" "I guess when you know, you know," I say with a shrug.

My mother has always loved piano music and hungered to play. When she was in her early sixties, she retired from her job as a computer programmer so that she could devote herself more fully to the piano. As she had done with her dog obsession, she took her piano education to an extreme. She bought not one, not two, but three pianos. One was the beautiful Steinway B, a small grand piano she purchased with a modest inheritance left by a friend of her parents’. She photocopied all of her music in a larger size so she could see it better and mounted it on manila folders. She practiced for several hours every day. When she wasn’t practicing the piano she was talking about the piano. I love pianos, too, and wrote an entire book about the life of one piano, a Steinway owned by the renowned pianist Glenn Gould. And I shared my mother’s love for her piano. During phone conversations, I listened raptly as she told me about the instrument’s cross-country adventures. Before bringing the Steinway north, my mother had mentioned that she was considering selling it. I was surprised, but instead of reminding her that, last I knew, she was setting it aside for me, I said nothing, unable to utter the simple words, “But, Mom, don’t you remember your promise?” If I did, it would be a way of asking for something, and asking my mother for something was always dangerous because of the risk of disappointment.

But I only went because it was Kennedy’s idea. Kennedy’s mom spends half her life at Costco, so they have these huge bags of candy bars and drums of licorice at home. Plus, they have a giant TV with every cable channel, which means I spent a lot of time at Kennedy’s house eating candy and watching Friends. But then one day Kennedy started thinking she was fat and wanted to go on a diet, and she was, like, “Bee, you can’t eat licorice because I don’t want to get fat.” Kennedy is totally crazy like that, and we always have the craziest conversations. So she made this huge declaration that we weren’t allowed to go to her house anymore because it makes her fat and instead we had to go to Youth Group. She called it her “Youth Group diet.

Grief is a cocoon from which we emerge new. Last year Liz’s beloved partner became very sick and started dying. I was far away, so each day I would send her messages that said, “I am sitting outside your door.” One day, my mom called and asked, “How is Liz?” I thought for a moment about how to answer. I realized I couldn’t because she’d asked me the wrong question. I said, “Mama, I think the question is not ‘How is Liz?’ The question is ‘Who is Liz? Who will she be when she emerges from this grief?’ ” Grief shatters. If you let yourself shatter and then you put yourself back together, piece by piece, you wake up one day and realize that you have been completely reassembled. You are whole again, and strong, but you are suddenly a new shape, a new size. The change that happens to people who really sit in their pain—whether it’s a sliver of envy lasting an hour or a canyon of grief lasting decades—it’s revolutionary. When that kind of transformation happens, it becomes impossible to fit into your old conversations or relationships or patterns or thoughts or life anymore. You are like a snake trying to fit back into old, dead skin or a butterfly trying to crawl back into its cocoon. You look around and see everything freshly, with the new eyes you have earned for yourself. There is no going back. Perhaps the only thing that makes grief any easier is to surrender completely to it. To resist trying to hold on to a single part of ourselves that existed before the doorbell rang. Sometimes to live again, we have to let ourselves die completely. We have to let ourselves become completely, utterly, new. When grief rings: Surrender. There is nothing else to do. The delivery is utter transformation.

What happened?” Dallas asked immediately, his hand reaching out toward Louie. I didn’t miss how Lou took his hand instantly. “She called me a brat,” Louie blurted out, his other little hand coming up to meet with the one already clutching our neighbor’s. I blinked and told myself I was not going to look at Christy until I had the full story. “Why?” Dallas was the one who asked. “He spilled some of his hot chocolate on her purse,” it was Josh who explained. “He said sorry, but she called him a brat. I told her not to talk to my brother like that, and she told me I should have learned to respect my elders.” For the second time around this woman, I went to ten. Straight through ten, past Go, and collected two hundred dollars. “I tried to wipe it up,” Louie offered, those big blue eyes going back and forth between Dallas and me for support. “You should teach these boys to watch where they’re going,” Christy piped up, taking a step back. Be an adult. Be a role model, I tried telling myself. “It was an accident,” I choked out. “He said he was sorry… and your purse is leather and black, and it’ll be fine,” I managed to grind out like this whole thirty-second conversation was jabbing me in the kidneys with sharp knives. “I’d like an apology,” the woman, who had gotten me suspended and made me cry, added quickly. I stared at her long face. “For what?” “From Josh, for being so rude.” My hand started moving around the outside of my purse, trying to find the inner compartment when Louie suddenly yelled, “Mr. Dallas, don’t let her get her pepper spray!” The fuck? Oh my God. I glared at Louie. “I was looking for a baby wipe to offer her one, Lou. I wasn’t getting my pepper spray.” “Nuh-uh,” he argued, and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Christy take a step back. “I heard you on the phone with Vanny. You said, you said if she made you mad again you were gonna pepper spray her and her mom and her mom’s mom in the—” “Holy sh—oot, Louie!” My face went red, and I opened my mouth to argue that he hadn’t heard me correctly. But… I had said those words. They had been a joke, but I’d said them. I glanced at Dallas, the serious, easygoing man who happened to look in that instant like he was holding back a fart but was hopefully just a laugh, and finally peeked at the woman who I’d like to think brought this upon herself. “Christy, I would never do that—” ... I cleared my throat and popped my lips. “Well, that was awkward.” “I’m not a brat.” Louie was still hung up and outraged. I pointed my finger at him. “You’re a tattletale, that’s what you are. Nosey Rosie. What did I tell you about snitches?” “You love them?

The important parts of my story, I was realizing, lay less in the surface value of my accomplishments and more in what undergirded them—the many small ways I’d been buttressed over the years, and the people who’d helped build my confidence over time. I remembered them all, every person who’d ever waved me forward, doing his or her best to inoculate me against the slights and indignities I was certain to encounter in the places I was headed—all those environments built primarily for and by people who were neither black nor female. I thought of my great-aunt Robbie and her exacting piano standards, how she’d taught me to lift my chin and play my heart out on a baby grand even if all I’d ever known was an upright with broken keys. I thought of my father, who showed me how to box and throw a football, same as Craig. There were Mr. Martinez and Mr. Bennett, my teachers at Bryn Mawr, who never dismissed my opinions. There was my mom, my staunchest support, whose vigilance had saved me from languishing in a dreary second-grade classroom. At Princeton, I’d had Czerny Brasuell, who encouraged me and fed my intellect in new ways. And as a young professional, I’d had, among others, Susan Sher and Valerie Jarrett—still good friends and colleagues many years later—who showed me what it looked like to be a working mother and consistently opened doors for me, certain I had something to offer. These were people who mostly didn’t know one another and would never have occasion to meet, many of whom I’d fallen out of touch with myself. But for me, they formed a meaningful constellation. These were my boosters, my believers, my own personal gospel choir, singing, Yes, kid, you got this! all the way through. I’d never forgotten it. I’d tried, even as a junior lawyer, to pay it forward, encouraging curiosity when I saw it, drawing younger people into important conversations.

Hey, did you hear about Brad Miller?" he asked, already forgetting about the Lissie conversation. "He got his car taken away for getting another speeding ticket. Of course he tried to tell his parents that it was a setup." Violet laughed. "Yeah, because the police have nothing better to do than to plan a sting operation targeting eleventh-grade idiots." She was more than willing to go along with this diversion from conversations about Jay and his many admirers. Jay laughed too, shaking his head. "You're so cold-hearted," he said to Violet, shoving her a little but playing along. "How's he supposed to go cruising for unsuspecting freshman and sophomores without a car? What willing girl is going to ride on the handlebars of his ten-speed?" "I don't see you driving anything but your mom's car yet. At least he has a bike," she said, turning on him now. He pushed her again. "Hey!" he tried to defend himself. "I'm still saving! Not all of us are born with a silver spoon in our mouths." They were both laughing, hard now. The silver spoon joke had been used before, whenever one of them had something the other one didn't. "Right!" Violet protested. "Have you seen my car?" This time she shoved him, and a full-scale war broke out on the couch. "Poor little rich girl!" Jay accused, grabbing her arm and pulling her down. She giggled and tried to give him the dreaded "dead leg" by hitting him with her knuckle in the thigh. But he was too strong, and what used to be a fairly even matchup was now more like an annihilation of Violet's side. "Oh, yeah. Weren't you the one"-she gasped, still giggling and thrashing to break free from his suddenly way-too-strong grip on her, just as his hand was almost at the sensitive spot along the side of her rib cage-"who got to go to Hawaii..." She bucked beneath him, trying to knock him off her. "...For spring break...last..." And then he started to tickle her while she was pinned beneath him, and her last word came out in a scream: "...YEAR?!" That was how her aunt and uncle found them. Violet never heard the key in the dead bolt, or the sound of the door opening up. And Jay was just as ignorant of their arrival as she was. So when they were caught like that, in a mass of tangled limbs, with Jay's face just inches from hers, as she giggled and squirmed against him, it should have meant they were going to get in trouble. And if it had been any other teenage boy and girl, they would have. But it wasn't another couple. It was Violet and Jay...and this was business as usual for the two of them. Even her aunt and uncle knew that there was no possibility they were doing anything they shouldn't. The only reprimand they got was her aunt shushing them to keep it down before they woke the kids. After Jay left, Violet took the thirty dollars that her uncle gave her and headed out. As she drove home, she tried to ignore the feelings of frustration she had about the way her aunt and uncle had reacted-or rather hadn't reaction-to finding her and Jay together on the couch. For some reason it made her feel worse to know that even the grown-ups around them didn't think there was a chance they could ever be a real couple.

I mean that after the little accident with your mom, you'd think you'd never come out here again." My heart stops. I'm not exaggerating. I swear, for a pure second, my chest seized and all the blood flowing in my veins pauses. I can't believe he would say something like that. From the look on everyone's faces, they can't believe it either. Aidan's the first to react as he growls, "Shut up! You jerk...how can you say something like that?" Dunstan ignores Aidan's outburst as he keeps his eyes trained on me. His face is indifferent, but I know he's smirking on the inside. Why's he doing this? What does he want me to do? React? I would, if I could get any movement back in my freakin' legs. However, they seem to be paralyzed at the moment. I settle for glaring at him. "Don't tell me you haven't gotten over it. It's been, what? Ten years since?" "He said shut up!" Nadia snarls. She bares her teeth in primal fury and seems almost ready to pounce on him. But if he catches on, Dunstan doesn't show it. "I just think it's amazing you'd still come out here. I know I wouldn't." "Mr. Lebelle, it is in my power to turn this boat around and end this tour early. So I suggest that you stop this conversation at once," Babette threatens him. She doesn't shout, but her iron tone is just as—if not more—frightening as any yelling could be.

Our conversation went a little like this: “God, if I lay down my need for those who hurt me to be punished, it doesn’t mean that what they did is okay, right?” “Right.” “So, just to be clear, we are in agreement that what they did is wrong, correct?” “Kim, what they did was wrong. I’m sorry you were hurt.” “When I surrender this to You and release those who hurt me, You know for sure that I’m not saying that I agree with them, right?” “Do you trust Me?” “I trust You, God, but do I still get to be strong? Does surrendering and letting go mean that I’m weak?” “Are you relying on your strength or Mine? You are strong when you trust in Me and rely on My strength.” Ugh. And just like that, God broke through another layer of my old need to protect myself through control. It felt so important to me to be strong. My entire childhood I had to be strong for my mom and siblings. I had to be strong to be brave and defend myself. I had to be strong so fear would not cripple me. And it seemed to me that to trust in God, to surrender, to depend on His strength, to forgive those who hurt me, and to not demand punishment meant I could no longer be strong. I hated that! As I was pondering why this upset me so much, another lie was exposed—the lingering belief that no one can take care of me like I can. Part of me still thought I couldn’t really trust God with my heart and emotions.

For Hal, the general deal with his maternal uncle is that Tavis is terribly shy around people and tries to hide it by being very open and expansive and wordy and bluff, and that it’s very excruciating to be around. Mario’s way of looking at it is that Tavis is very open and expansive and wordy, but so clearly uses these qualities as a kind of protective shield that it betrays a frightened vulnerability almost impossible not to feel for. Either way, the unsettling thing about Charles Tavis is that he’s possibly the openest man of all time. Orin and Marlon Bain’s view was always that C.T. was less like a person than like a sort of cross-section of a person. Even the Moms Hal could remember relating anecdotes about how as a teenager, when she’d taken the child C.T. or been around him at Québecois functions or gatherings involving other kids, the child C.T. had been too self-conscious and awkward to join right in with any group of the kids clustered around, talking or plotting or whatever, and so Avril said she’d watch him just kind of drift from cluster to cluster and lurk around creepily on the fringe, listening, but that he’d always say, loudly, in some lull in the group’s conversation, something like ‘I’m afraid I’m far too self-conscious really to join in here, so I’m just going to lurk creepily at the fringe and listen, if that’s all right, just so you know,’ and so on.

Growing up in a home of abuse, you struggle with the notion that you can love a person you hate, or hate a person you love. It’s a strange feeling. You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad, where you either hate them or love them, but that’s not how people are. There was an undercurrent of terror that ran through the house, but the actual beatings themselves were not that frequent. I think if they had been, the situation would have ended sooner. Ironically, the good times in between were what allowed it to drag out and escalate as far as it did. He hit my mom once, then the next time was three years later, and it was just a little bit worse. Then it was two years later, and it was just a little bit worse. Then it was a year later, and it was just a little bit worse. It was sporadic enough to where you’d think it wouldn’t happen again, but it was frequent enough that you never forgot it was possible. There was a rhythm to it. I remember one time, after one terrible incident, nobody spoke to him for over a month. No words, no eye contact, no conversations, nothing. We moved through the house as strangers, at different times. Complete silent treatment. Then one morning you’re in the kitchen and there’s a nod. “Hey.” “Hey.” Then a week later it’s “Did you see the thing on the news?” “Yeah.” Then the next week there’s a joke and a laugh. Slowly, slowly, life goes back to how it was. Six months, a year later, you do it all again.

At the time of solitude, I went where Narmada was sleeping. She got awake and sat up. She neither got scared nor nervous but she immediately got off the bed. She kept both her hands tied on her chest. I was standing so close to her that my face was near her face. We could sense each other’s breath. I called out her name and could not speak anything else. After a moment, I started - “I love you Narmada…I like to be with you…I want to marry you.” She got nervous and said - “Please, go to your room, why have you come here? It may cause trouble if Jaanki sees us like this.” She was neck down. Her eyes were on the floor. Her heart was beating fast. “Don’t you want to talk to me? Why are you angry with me? Why don’t you trust on my feelings for you?” - I softly asked her. “I guess you don’t like my friendship with Varsha. You and Varsha are poles apart.” - I added. She said - “You please go. It would not be nice if someone sees us like this. I do not want anything from you.” I said - “But I am dying for you and I know you too are made for me.” Her eyes suddenly fell on maid behind the curtains of the door who was trying to listen to our conversation. Narmada said - “You please leave right now, we’ll talk later. Mom is not at home.” I went by on her prescriptive tone. She was fighting for her self-being and the reason was only Varsha. She felt suffocated with my friendship with Varsha. I was glad to hear her words - “WE’LL TALK LATER”. This meant, she gave her consent to my love. She understood my restlessness. -- Excerpts from Romantic Novel "Narmada

"You’re the first girl I’ve met around here who’s real, and who cares about things and likes to do things. But half the time, you decide the conversation’s over in mid-sentence and take off. Or you ignore me when we’re at school and other people are around, and you tell your cousin that there’s nothing going on between us and that you’re not interested me at all." "Me? What about you?" "What about me?" "You’re the master of saying one word and disappearing. And you have all these things that you care about, like Bea and Oliver and surfing and acting, but most people would never know that. Your father thinks you can’t wait to be a banker and all your friends think you don’t care about anything. And meanwhile you’ve gone from a person who acted like he cared about me to a professional bodyguard doing a favor for my aunt. I mean, what is the whole Secret Service act about?” His jaw was clenched. “I don’t want anything to you.” “Nothing’s happened to me.” “Oh, like when you got hit by a car?” “It didn’t hit me.” “But I should have been there. I got caught up, talking to Mr. Dudley, and I was late, and I let you stand out there all alone.” “Quinn, that makes no sense.” “I just don’t want it to happen again.” “What don’t you want to happen?” “I don’t want anyone I care about to get hurt on my watch.” That shut us both up. We were silent for a while, each looking out our respective windows as we sped along the highway. And then I figured it out. “This is about your mom, isn’t it?” He just sort of shrugged. And then he said, “Probably.” I moved closer and leaned into him. After a moment he put his arm around my shoulder. And we just stayed like that, not talking, the rest of the way to the airport.

Different form, same function. Many companies that create blue oceans attract customers from other industries who use a product or service that performs the same function or bears the same core utility as the new one but takes a very different physical form. In the case of Ford’s Model T, Ford looked to the horse-drawn carriage. The horse-drawn carriage had the same core utility as the car: transportation for individuals and families. But it had a very different form: a live animal versus a machine. Ford effectively converted the majority of noncustomers of the auto industry, namely customers of horse-drawn carriages, into customers of its own blue ocean by pricing its Model T against horse-drawn carriages and not the cars of other automakers. In the case of the school lunch catering industry, raising this question led to an interesting insight. Suddenly those parents who make their children’s lunches came into the equation. For many children, parents had the same function: making their child’s lunch. But they had a very different form: mom or dad versus a lunch line in the cafeteria. Different form and function, same objective. Some companies lure customers from even further away. Cirque du Soleil, for example, has diverted customers from a wide range of evening activities. Its growth came in part through drawing people away from other activities that differed in both form and function. For example, bars and restaurants have few physical features in common with a circus. They also serve a distinct function by providing conversational and gastronomical pleasure, a very different experience from the visual entertainment that a circus offers. Yet despite these differences in form and function, people have the same objective in undertaking these three activities: to enjoy a night out.

So what did you and Landon do this afternoon?” Minka asked, her soft voice dragging him back to the present. Angelo looked up to see that Minka had already polished off two fajitas. Damn, the girl could eat. “Landon gave me a tour of the DCO complex. I did some target shooting and blew up a few things. He even let me play with the expensive surveillance toys. I swear, it felt more like a recruiting pitch to get me to work there than anything.” Minka’s eyes flashed green, her full lips curving slightly. Damn, why the hell had he said it like that? Now she probably thought he was going to come work for the DCO. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t, not after just reenlisting for another five years. The army wasn’t the kind of job where you could walk into the boss’s office and say, “I quit.” Thinking it would be a good idea to steer the conversation back to safer ground, he reached for another fajita and asked Minka a question instead. “What do you think you’ll work on next with Ivy and Tanner? You going to practice with the claws for a while or move on to something else?” Angelo felt a little crappy about changing the subject, but if Minka noticed, she didn’t seem to mind. And it wasn’t like he had to fake interest in what she was saying. Anything that involved Minka was important to him. Besides, he didn’t know much about shifters or hybrids, so the whole thing was pretty damn fascinating. “What do you visualize when you see the beast in your mind?” he asked. “Before today, I thought of it as a giant, blurry monster. But after learning that the beast is a cat, that’s how I picture it now.” She smiled. “Not a little house cat, of course. They aren’t scary enough. More like a big cat that roams the mountains.” “Makes sense,” he said. Minka set the other half of her fourth fajita on her plate and gave him a curious look. “Would you mind if I ask you a personal question?” His mouth twitched as he prepared another fajita. He wasn’t used to Minka being so reserved. She usually said whatever was on her mind, regardless of whether it was personal or not. “Go ahead,” he said. “The first time we met, I had claws, fangs, glowing red eyes, and I tried to kill you. Since then, I’ve spent most of the time telling you about an imaginary creature that lives inside my head and makes me act like a monster. How are you so calm about that? Most people would have run away already.” Angelo chuckled. Not exactly the personal question he’d expected, but then again Minka rarely did the expected. “Well, my mom was full-blooded Cherokee, and I grew up around all kinds of Indian folktales and legends. My dad was in the army, and whenever he was deployed, Mom would take my sisters and me back to the reservation where she grew up in Oklahoma. I’d stay up half the night listening to the old men tell stories about shape-shifters, animal spirits, skin-walkers, and trickster spirits.” He grinned. “I’m not saying I necessarily believed in all that stuff back then, but after meeting Ivy, Tanner, and the other shifters at the DCO, it just didn’t faze me that much.” Minka looked at him with wide eyes. “You’re a real American Indian? Like in the movies? With horses and everything?” He laughed again. The expression of wonder on her face was adorable. “First, I’m only half-Indian. My dad is Mexican, so there’s that. And second, Native Americans are almost nothing like you see in the movies. We don’t all live in tepees and ride horses. In fact, I don’t even own a horse.” Minka was a little disappointed about the no-horse thing, but she was fascinated with what it was like growing up on an Indian reservation and being surrounded by all those legends. She immediately asked him to tell her some Indian stories. It had been a long time since he’d thought about them, but to make her happy, he dug through his head and tried to remember every tale he’d heard as a kid.

He called the next morning at seven. I was sound asleep, still dreaming about the kiss that had rocked my existence the night before. Marlboro Man, on the other hand, had been up since five and, he would explain, had waited two hours before calling me, since he reckoned I probably wasn’t the get-up-early type. And I wasn’t. I’d never seen any practical reason for any normal person to get out of bed before 8:00 A.M., and besides that, the kiss had been pretty darn earth shattering. I needed to sleep that thing off. “Good morning,” he said. I gasped. That voice. There it was again. “Oh, hi!” I replied, shooting out of bed and trying to act like I’d been up for hours doing step aerobics and trimming my mom’s azalea bushes. And hiking. “You asleep?” he asked. “Nope, nope, not at all!” I replied. “Not one bit.” My voice was thick and scratchy. “You were asleep, weren’t you?” I guess he knew a late sleeper than he heard one. “No, I wasn’t--I get up really early,” I said. “I’m a real morning person.” I concealed a deep, total-body yawn. “That’s strange--your voice sounds like you were still asleep,” Marlboro Man persisted. He wasn’t letting me off the hook. “Oh…well…it’s just that I haven’t talked to anyone yet today, plus I’ve kind of been fighting a little sinus trouble,” I said. That was attractive. “But I’ve been up for quite a while.” “Yeah? What have you been doing?” he asked. He was enjoying this. “Oh, you know. Stuff.” Stuff. Good one, Ree. “Really? Like, what kind of stuff?” he asked. I heard him chuckle softly, the same way he’d chuckled when he’d caught me the night before. That chuckle could quiet stormy waters. Bring about world peace. “Oh, just stuff. Early morning stuff. Stuff I do when I get up really early in the morning…” I tried again to sound convincing. “Well,” he said, “I don’t want to keep you from your ‘early morning stuff.’ I just wanted to tell you…I wanted to tell you I had a really good time last night.” “You did?” I replied, picking sleepy sand from the corner of my right eye. “I did,” he said. I smiled, closing my eyes. What was happening to me? This cowboy--this sexy cowboy who’d suddenly galloped into my life, who’d instantly plunged me into some kind of vintage romance novel--had called me within hours of kissing me on my doorstep, just to tell me he’d had a good time. “Me, too,” was all I could say. Boy, was I on a roll. You know, stuff, and Me, too, all in the same conversation. This guy was sure to be floored by my eloquence. I was so smitten, I couldn’t even formulate coherent words. I was in trouble.

You want to kiss her, right?” “What?” I have lost track of our conversation. I was thinking about how if Kit called me her friend, then I would have multiplied my number of them by a factor of two. And then I considered the word flirting, how it sounds like fluttering, which is what butterflies do. Which of course looped me back to chaos theory and my realization that I’d like to have more information to provide Kit on the topic. “Do. You. Want. To. Kiss. Her?” Miney asks again. “Yes, of course I do. Who wouldn’t want to kiss Kit?” “I don’t want to kiss Kit,” Miney says, doing that thing where she imitates me and how I answer rhetorical questions. Though her intention is to mock rather than to educate, it’s actually been a rather informative technique to demonstrate my tendency toward taking people too literally. “Mom doesn’t want to kiss Kit. I don’t know about Dad, but I doubt it.” My father doesn’t look up. His face is buried in a book about the mating patterns of migratory birds. It’s too bad our scholarly interests have never overlapped. Breakfast would be so much more interesting if we could discuss our work. “So if you want to kiss Kit, that means you want her to see you like a real guy,” Miney says, and points at me with her cup of coffee. She’s drinking it black. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with Miney. Maybe she’s just tired. “I am a real guy.” How come even my own sister sees me as something not quite human? Something other. “I have a penis.” “And just when I think we’ve made progress you go and mention your penis.” “What? Fact: I have a penis. That makes me a guy. Though technically there are some trans people who have penises but self-identify as girls.” “Please stop saying that word.” “What word? Penis?” “Yes.” “Do you prefer member? Shlong? Wang? Johnson?” I ask. “Dongle, perhaps?” “I would prefer we not discuss your man parts at all.” “Wait, should I text Kit immediately and clarify that I do in fact have man parts?” I pick up my phone and start typing. “Dear Kit. Just to be clear. I have a penis.” “Oh my God. Do not text her. Seriously, stop.” Miney puts her coffee down hard. She’ll climb over the table and tackle me if she has to. “Ha! Totally got you!” I smile, as proud as I was the other day for my that’s what she said joke. “Who are you?” Miney asks, but she’s grinning too. I’ll admit it takes a second—something about the disconnect between her confused tone and her happy face—and I almost, almost say out loud: Duh, I’m Little D. Instead I let her rhetorical question hang, just like I’m supposed to

Was that a moment? Did she just have a “moment” in front of everyone in the restaurant? She’d come to fix that problem. To fix herself, and what had happened? Instead, she’d just made a big mess. Now there would be no dinner. Now there would be no conversation. Now there would be no unplugging. Allyson’s breaths came short, fast. And this . . . this was worse than mascara on her eye. It was worse than her meltdown in front of the newlyweds. She’d lost control in front of her friends. She was getting worse, not better. How could she return home worse than she started? Sean would be so disappointed, and then who knew what tomorrow would bring? Yet another failure to heap upon all the other ones.

I don’t remember having one conversation with my dad in the three days I was home, but looking back at my journal, I see I wrote about him. I scrawled about how I heard him telling my mom that I needed to go back. I was unhappy; he thought the hiking was better for me. I wonder why he told these things to my mother, nothing to me. I wonder if overhearing his approval encouraged me to finally fly back to the trail. Maybe. Maybe my father’s faith in my walk—in me—made me feel strong enough to leave. His actual words, as I wrote them in my notebook, were, “She’s an adult now, she can do what she wants. It doesn’t mean she’s not selfish.” He almost understood.

Not all babies are cute when they’re born no matter how many new parents try to convince you otherwise.  This is yet another lie the half-baked “theys” lead you to believe.  Some babies are born looking like old men with wrinkled faces, age spots, and a receding hairline.                When I was born, my father George took my hospital picture over to his friend Tim’s house while my mom was still recuperating in the hospital.  Tim took one look at my picture and said, “Oh sweet Jesus, George.  You better hope she’s smart.”  It was no different with my son, Gavin.  He was funny looking.  I was his mother, so I could say that.  He had a huge head, no hair, and his ears stuck out so far I often wondered if they worked like the Whisper 2000, and he was able to pick up conversations from a block away.

It’s amazing how a conversation between two moms ends up sounding like a battle between people with Tourette’s.

I frequently forward the message that our spirit people are quite all right where they are. They respond with eagerness when a guest recognizes them, and are happy to spend some time conversing back and forth, through me. Yet they also seem to know that this kind of communication is only temporary, so most are quick to point out before they leave that they will meet their physical friends one day in the future. A forty-ish woman came for an appointment one day with her friend. As I tuned in, I felt the presence of a young woman who’d passed before her time in a vehicle accident. My client acknowledged her daughter, who had died at the age of nineteen while traveling to a camping weekend with friends. The spirit conveyed her joy at her mother’s presence, and insistently repeated that she really was safe and happy. Her younger sister needed to hear this message in particular, and she urged her mother to pass it on. “Do you miss us?” the mother asked. “Do you think about us and miss us, are you counting the days till we can be together again, too?” With a feeling of frustration from the spirit, I had to translate, “I’m fine!” yet again. This spirit came across as being almost dismissive of her family’s grief. As her mother cried on my couch, the spirit came through very much like a teenaged girl, saying “Oh Mom, come on! I’m fine!” After we concluded, I spent some time in meditation asking for help. How could I translate a spirit’s genuine well-being, without sounding dismissive myself? How could I show my clients that the spirit people are so certain of meeting again, that they rarely spend much time trying to convince us?

Thanksgiving A man calls his son on the phone the day before Thanksgiving and has a very important and startling conversation with him. “Son,” he says, “I have called to tell you that your mother and I are getting a divorce.  After 40 years of marriage I just can’t stand this anymore.  I am sick of her and can’t be in the same house with her any longer. We are finished.” “What are you talking about, you can’t leave mom?”  The son says. “Don’t try and change my mind, I have already decided.  We are getting the divorce tomorrow,” the father says, standing firm. The son is in total disbelief.   “You can’t do this dad.  We need to talk.  I am going to call my sister and we will fly there tonight and we will all talk it over tomorrow.”  And with that he hangs up. The father turns to his wife, smiles and says, “Our kids will be here for Thanksgiving and they are paying for their own way!

For I am the Lord your God who takes hold of your right hand and says to you, Do not fear; I will help you.” —Isaiah 41:13 (NIV) One day I was standing in line at the store, when a woman tapped me on the arm. “Remember me?” she asked. It was Margo, a girl I’d gone to middle school with. We did the usual those-were-the-days banter and then she said, “A while back I picked your mom up one night on Lahser Road.” My mother was fighting the onset of Alzheimer’s, and she used to get up in the middle of the night, don her Sunday finest, and walk three miles to church in the freezing Michigan dark. I started to thank Margo, but she stopped me. “I thought my life was crumbling,” she said, “that I’d wasted years for nothing. I couldn’t lie in bed crying anymore, so I just threw something on and went driving. I didn’t know what I was going to do. That’s when I saw her.” “Mom?” “We had the most incredible conversation. She said she knew how I felt, that things may seem dark now, but they will get better because God is always near. And she was right. They did. Your mom was such a kind soul and good listener. I will never, ever forget that night.” Mom’s been gone now for a few years. I sometimes wonder about her need to get to church when the hour was darkest. I think she knew what she was about more than we might have suspected and maybe not quite as lost as we assumed. She was searching for something in that cold dark, something she knew was there. My old school friend said she’d never forget that night. Neither will I. Lord, I search for You when the hour is darkest and I am most lost. Direct my steps to You. —Edward Grinnan Digging Deeper: Pss 73:28, 139:7–8; Jn 1:5

Our mother, in several beautiful ways, may have been a little crazy. For example: who dries their clothing with a hurricane coming? Like Ossie, Mom got distracted easily. It was seventy-thirty odds whether she would remember a conversation with you. Her moods could do sudden plummets, and she’d have to “take a rest” in the house, but she’d always emerge from these spells with a smile for us.