Friday, August 26, 2011

Catch 22

By Maggie Stockmann

How many kids do you have? Is she your oldest?

Such a simple question with such complicated answers. All that goes into deciding how to answer – Will I see this person again? Are we in public? Am I strong enough to tell the truth? Am I strong enough to give the quick happy answer? Compromise?

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Still Thankful for Longing

By  Marilyn Guggenheim

I take great comfort from this passage in Edwidge Danticat’s memoir Brother, I’m Dying:

When my daughter was born, her face blood-tinted, her eyelids swollen with tiny light pink patches that Colleen the midwife called angel kisses, her body coiled around itself as if to echo the tightness of her tiny fists, I instantly saw it as one of many separations to come. She was leaving my body and going into the world, where she would spend the rest of her life moving away from me.