Two things have gotten me thinking about the nature of memories: the recent controversy over the now-discredited A Million Little Pieces and the continual slog through mom’s stuff.For those of you who missed the hooplah, James Frey recently admitted that parts of his bestselling “memoir” were made up or exaggerated, a revelation that has sparked much discussion on the pages of The New York Timesabout the nature of Truth and a publisher’s obligation to discern it. Perhaps it’s a bad week to relaunch my efforts to sell my own motherhood memoir Imperfect Serenity, though that’s my goal. Aside from wanting to sell the book I worked so hard on, I want to defend memoirs and memories, even though both are often imperfect. I’m not defending [...]

Well, despite the ambitions in my last post, it hasn’t been that creative a week, unless you count the creativity involved in arranging more wine glasses in our dining room display case. I’m starting to bring things home from my mother’s, and finding places to put them is a challenge.Those of you who have been reading this blog for awhile may recall that we spent last summer trying to clear out our basement. Now I’m filling it up again with things of my mom’s that I’m not ready to part with: a bag of sympathy cards, a box of pictures, unused notebooks that we don’t need now but could use someday, a doll dressed in the habit of the Sisters of the Assumption (the nuns [...]

The kids are back in school, Tom is back at work, and I’m at the coffee shop with my lap top, finally. I’ve been looking forward to writing for at least a week, feeling like a plane in a holding pattern waiting for the go-ahead from traffic control to land. Now there’s finally some space, though there are still plenty of potential distractions. We have plumbing issues and a dent in our car that we postponed dealing with in December. The house is a mess, and I really need to get it organized before I start bringing in things from my mom’s apartment, which is of course the big project for the month. In addition to sorting out her legal affairs, I have to sort [...]

It has been a week since my mother died at home. The hospice nurse and I sat with her and held her hands as her spirit left, a moment that was harder for me than I had expected. I was so grateful that the nurse had just arrived; she ministered to both me and my mother with her gentle presence. It was especially good to have the nurse there afterwards, to talk about how much she liked my mother and to wait with me until the funeral director arrived. The funeral director is an old friend of our family’s, so she also talked about my mother’s strength and wit. From those first moments after she was gone, I started being able to see my mom [...]

This time nine years ago I was waiting for my daughter Megan to be born. Her due date was December 2nd, but she wasn’t born until the 20th after we finally induced labor. The long, uncertain wait for her arrival was complicated by the fact that I had fractured my elbow the day before Thanksgiving. For his part, Tom was working full-time while getting his MSW, and he had several papers due in mid-December. So I had to wait, trusting that, despite my impatience for Megan to be born, the timing would all work out.Nine years later, I sit waiting for my mother to die, which everyone seems certain will happen soon, though no one knows how soon. We are anticipating sadness rather than joy, [...]

This blog has taken a low priority lately. So has selling my book, cleaning the basement, and preparing for my class, which is nearing its end. My mom is getting even weaker, barely able to sit up in bed, so most of my week has been spent coordinating care for her. At least I finally got her to hire an aid for several hours a day. She also got a catheter, so she’s not hobbling to the commode by herself in the middle of the night. Both of these are a huge relief for me. I’m also trying to cut down on my stress by avoiding committee meetings and anything that requires my mental or emotional energy. I did, though, sneak out to a movie [...]

I’ve tried to make sure my children don’t grow up with what I call “the Lincoln Memorial image of God.” We’ve talked about how God is not a man or a woman, and God is not white or black. This came up again the other night at dinner, and Luke responded, “Do you mean God is like Michael Jackson?” I need all the laughs Luke provides these days since watching my mom decline is so sad and exhausting. She’s been talking about God as well, but her image of the Divine is not as funny as Luke’s.For the past week my mom has been complaining that she doesn’t understand people who say that God talks to them since He never talks to her. She seems [...]

Yesterday morning we were running late. Tom had to leave early for a meeting, so I was trying to herd the proverbial cats and make their lunch, and write an e-mail, and get dressed myself in time to catch a train to work. So of course it was the day Megan couldn’t find anything to wear, and Luke couldn’t stop himself from distracting her until I yelled at him, at which point he cried and called me a meanie. We finally got in the car at 8:00 which is pretty much the last minute we can leave and still make it to school before they start giving out tardy notes. So when the car finally started rolling and I heard a dull grinding sound, I [...]

The concept of the genetically engineered “designer baby” has been in the news lately. Somehow it came up at dinner, and I asked the kids what they thought of the idea that parents could choose what kind of qualities their children would have before they were born. Megan reacted immediately: “They shouldn’t be able to change their baby because their baby has something different from any other baby in the world. They should just be happy about what’s special about that baby.”Pretty good answer for an eight-year-old. It made me think about what’s special about my own children and what I would have missed if I had been able to design a child that matched me like a fine accessory. I certainly wouldn’t have chosen [...]