She expects my body to shun the food of my ancestors, because my mind shuns other aspects of their traditions — like the resignation expected of an unhappy wife.

Making orange juice from concentrate was, the way my mother did it, an overwhelmingly complicated task.

The thought comes from nowhere with absolute clarity: she is scared of him, scared for him. She is simply and completely terrified.

They all believed it, everyone but Rita, who saw the addition for what it was—a mirage, something that her mother and father had invented to keep them all from cracking, the way the house itself was cracking at the seams.

Dani stills herself and loosens the tension in her shoulders. She places a yellow block on top of the fifth yellow block in a column of six. She has already created a column of six red blocks and a column of six orange standing beside each other with the red column first. She is obviously organizing a rainbow in the mathematical way Dani sees everything. Ellie knows better than to interrupt such projects; Dani’s reactions can be violent and loud, but after hearing Mel complain for ten minutes, Ellie needs this moment.

“That’s it, Dani. Mommy just wants to see your pretty face.”

When I charged myself to meditate on literature appropriate to Mother’s Day, the first book that popped into my head was Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel The Awakening.

Now 35 years old, Room Magazine is Canada’s oldest literary journal by and about women. Based in Vancouver, Room publishes a quarterly print magazine of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry and art. Literary Mama reviews editor Katherine J. Barrett spoke with …

Being a senior mama, I’ve stuffed decades of family memories into my cluttered brain. Most are vague, like old, uncaptioned photos in a shoebox, nameless and slowly fading. A few remain vivid, charged with remembered detail by the intensity of …

Once. On a dare. In a Powder Puff Derby.
She stayed in the car, finished the race. Never
cried.

As I embraced a lovely moment of creativity with my family, a deep empathy bubbled up from my stomach as I thought: Emily Rapp will never have a moment like this with her son. She will never build stages and act out plays with him because he won’t live to be three.