-
Keep Up With Your Stuff
When my twelve-year-old daughter, Adelia, lost her wallet on the public city bus, I was actually pretty proud of her. For several weeks, she had been taking two trains in the morning (with a transfer at one of the busiest central transit stations in the country) to get to her new middle school and then two buses to get back home, and not a...
-
Detention
There is no training for holding your dead father’s hand. There is no training for how warm the hand first feels in your own, and how 40 minutes later when you finally stop keening, his hand has grown cold in yours. The horror of that moment threatened my ability to stay present, which as a Buddhist I had been trained to do. There is...
-
Allowing Our Children to See Us
My daughter and son are running around the house in their usual post-meal frenzy, throwing toys in the air and jumping off our couch. They run to their room, grab a scarf from my daughter’s drawer while yelling lâches at each other, a term they learned from their French father, which means to let go. They like to play this game to see who...
-
There’s Strength in Softness
For my sixteenth birthday, my mother gave me the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling. She pasted small, pink-and-green cutout flowers on the sides making it less plain, placing it inside a plastic five-by-seven box frame. Composure and calm, according to Kipling, are virtues his son and the reader should have in varied situations. My mother signed the bottom and added, “This is just as...
-
A Way Forward
My son Julian departed this dimension at 17 years old when restoration was not possible for his “irreparable injuries.” This was after four days of praying for supernatural intervention. Now, in the absence of what I wanted, I have a standing appointment with acceptance or acknowledging what remains. And even this acceptance can shift from resignation to resolution at times. Yet, as I journey...
-
How the Fuck Did I Get Here
Justice Involved Mothers is a column developed in partnership with Roots. Wounds. Words.: A Literary Arts Revolution. Devoted to real life, authentic narratives of criminalization, Justice Involved Mothers is curated and edited by Nicole Shawan Junior and penned by the Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Brown women who have suffered the white supremacist arm and misogynist fist of law enforcement. Through these creative nonfiction works of...