It's funny, and I can say this now because I'm on the flip side most of the time, but my biggest fears in those days were about judgment. The worst courtroom moments were when untrue and unflattering things were said about me; I knew the words were untrue but I feared that people would believe them and think less of me as a mother. I knew myself to be a nurturing mother who put her children first, and I wanted people to see that in me because I so strongly identified with the motherhood image I was holding. Now, only a few years later, I'm in a situation that a lot of people find objectionable or at least uncomfortable. I'm okay with their discomfort. It doesn't come from what people know about me but, rather, from the way they feel when they think the symbol of motherhood -- so sacrosanct -- has been threatened.
Read More...

Having housemates reminds me of the times that we've opened our home in the past -- various friends, a few relatives (niece and cousin), and once an entire extended family from Nicaragua who stayed during the time when our children were the smallest. It reminds me that we seem to thrive when we open our doors like this, and the more the better. We are all at our best when we're mingling with others.
Read More...

I have savored his precocious malapropisms, confusing "eclectic" for "electric," "cousin" for "cuisine," and once, when I told him how handsome he looked, he said, "good enough to be on the cover of Vague."
Read More...

Are there foibles from your past that have become family legends? Have they sprouted exaggerated details like leafy tree branches, or do they remain anchored in family lore as a parable for future generations?
Read More...

So there we were, my husband David and I, on a road trip with our thirteen-year-old late last July, and I hadn't a thing to wear. And when I say road trip, you have to understand that I'm being somewhat disingenuous here -- kind of like Ishmael saying he had signed up to go on a little fishing trip with a slightly wild-eyed one-legged captain named Ahab. If you think it's easy to pick the right outfit to see an experiential program in the Northern California wilderness, one you hope will take your high-functioning autistic thirteen year-old with a temper like an IED, trust me, it's not. I didn't want to look like a dolled-up tart, someone who would ditch their child in the wilderness and bolt for the nearest mall, but I didn't want to look serious and severe, like a buttoned-up stiff and tweedy schoolmarm incapable of raising a child with special needs, either.
Read More...

Last time, Vi picked out a husband on the train ride. She got him out of an ancient copy of Time, an article about the one hundred biggest foreign policy blunders of the twentieth century. Today, when she boards her favorite car -- third from the front -- and counts her way to her customary window, she finds the current issue of Parenting waiting for her on the seat. A gift surely, a little something from that other universe where all her plans are made for her. Its meaning is plain. Vi needs a child to go with her husband.
Read More...

here is your spring-sprung shout-out,
Read More...

Cristina Henriquez quickly rose from emerging writer declared one of "Fiction's New Luminaries" by the Virginia Quarterly Review, to author of the much-lauded short story collection Come Together, Fall Apart, to novelist of the debut The World in Half. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic as well as many other publications and anthologies. Literary Mama's former Multi-Culti Mami columnist Violeta Garcia-Mendoza chats with Henriquez about her cultural and literary origins, her craft, whether it is easier to name a child or a character, and how motherhood is shaping her writing life.
Read More...

Full disclosure: I did not want to read Cancer Is a Bitch (Or, I'd Rather Be Having a Midlife Crisis). I suffer from what Henry James evocatively called "an imagination of disaster" and a marked tendency to catastrophize, not to mention a healthy strain of hypochondria. I have done misguided Google searches of vague ailments and symptoms and have diagnosed myself with various illnesses -- including cancer. It's always cancer that scares me the most: the idea that my body could betray me at the most basic, cellular level, the inconceivable thought that at any given time clumps of rogue cells could take up residence in vital organs and multiply, multiply, multiply, until there is no more self left, just the diagnosis and the disease.
Read More...