My daughter just turned sixteen months old and I’ve left her at home and I’m in a library typing this:

I’m almost 39 and there is a thirty-inch tall drooling human with ten sharp teeth hanging onto my legs and

I became a writer at six, toiling away on stories in my bedroom, an only child with time on her hands. Thirty-odd years later I mother an only child, conjured from wishes, dreams, cells. I’m a writer and for the first time in my life I’m writing more than I’ve ever written.

I knew I had officially become a parent when my subscription to The New Yorker disappeared and Brain, Child took its place.

My twins were seventeen weeks old.

In the days leading up to talent night at my daughter’s middle school, Emily would only share that she had a short moment on stage. She had been keeping more of her personal and school life to herself; signs of teenagerhood even before reaching her teens. Since she spent most of her after-school hours in theatre workshops, my husband and I expected that she had a small part in a scene from a musical or one-act play and wanted to surprise us.

The psychic is down-to-earth and expensive. My husband, Richard, is young. He lives in London, and has not yet moved to the US, where he will meet me, or to Canada, where he will marry me. She tells him she …

After the nine-hour drive home, with a few tears along the way, I anticipated a relaxing Labor Day weekend on my own — my younger son and husband were out of town. But when I opened my eyes the next morning, the atmosphere felt heavy. I missed Edmund.

When did I make the connection that my love of books was about more than the release they offered from the confines of each day’s logistical concerns? The troubles of the flesh?