“‘Dad has to move to Colorado,’ I told our sons. ‘He doesn’t have a choice’ ‘We’re not leaving her, right?,’ Aidan interrupted, his tone laced with terror. ‘We can’t just leave her!’ His voice was sandpaper rough, speaking the words I couldn’t. ‘We…we might have to make a tough decision.’ ‘I know,’ I whispered.”
“On my way home I received the phone call. It was totally incoherent from all the screaming. I desperately tried to find out what was happening. It was my daughter. ‘It’s Josh,’ I finally heard through the screams.”
“They get sad and say, ‘but you’re so young!’ You never truly know what people are going through. I had family members tell me, ‘We’re sorry for not visiting, but it was too hard to see you go through this.’ Or that seeing me would make it ‘all too real.’ It is real.”
“‘Yeah, it will be nice out, you can wear a dress.’ It didn’t occur to me an adult would look at my 5-year-old child and think wearing a dress was inappropriate. She was told she needed to leave class and go to the nurse’s office. The nurse told her, ‘She needed to cover her body.'”
“She gave me a nudge. I will never forget her saying, ‘I would be jealous if someone else carried for you.’ This was a huge, life changing thing she would be doing. She lets me ask all of the weird questions.”
“Easter is about waiting. I know, that sounds absurd. This is a holiday about a Friday free from work and fake grass you’ll be finding around your house for the remainder of the year. It’s about Peeps and your people. A guy on a cross and a guy in a (rather scary) bunny suit. Jesus waited 3 days; it took me 33 years.”
“Who could I trust to tell? I tried calling my mom, to no avail. She was cold and distant. It hurt. After my appointment, I came home, threw on Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Stay Together,’ and danced around the house with my daughter. I was going to be a mother. I was keeping her.”
“‘I lent a friend money. It’s gone. We’re not getting it back,’ he said. I was frozen. ‘How much money?’ My heart was racing. ‘Five thousand dollars?’ ‘Higher,’ he said between sobs. ‘TEN thousand? Twenty five? Fifty?’ I started to feel ill. It turns out, my husband hadn’t lent the money to a friend at all.”
“We walked quietly to the room. We found two seats and moved them close to the bed. You think you will say the right things, but you don’t in those moments. I was speechless.”
“The hairs on my neck stood up for the first time. After picking my daughter up from school, I got a text message from my husband, a principal. ‘We’re in lockout,’ it said. It was unprecedented. Suddenly, it felt serious.”
