I don’t know how my daughter’s memory works. She doesn’t remember much about the winter she was seven, which experience has been scarred into my soul (“How can you not remember that!” is how it feels to me). She doesn’t remember the day camp teacher who saw her every day of every summer for four years,…
Category: Stories about Jessica
Talking to strangers
I wrote this essay about five years ago, and reading it today, realized how much it still captures who Jessica is and what my life with her is like. I hope you enjoy — My eight-year-old daughter Jessica is a friendly soul. From the time she was tiny, she would march right up to strangers…
Story time at the library
Every other Thursday evening, I bring Jessica to the library so we can listen to the storyteller. Miss Linda is a gentle woman of late middle age, with the quietly expressive voice of an experienced kindergarten teacher. Though all of the other children who come to listen are much younger, Jessica doesn’t seem to notice or…
Jessica’s Story
I wrote this essay five years ago, when I first discovered the story that Jessica tells herself about her life–apropos of last week’s post on the most important story you’ll ever tell. *** “Where is your scar, Mama?” Jessica asks as she brushes her short brown hair. We’re in the bathroom. I elbow her out…
A promise
Last week I was accused of being incapable of sustained seriousness, which is, as they say, a true fact. I have always felt that life is fundamentally absurd, and I like to have a good laugh at it. (Not that I don’t have deep thoughts. Just that usually they go away after a while.)…
A life in dragons
“I will try to like dragons,” Jessica says. We are standing in the China Pavilion at Epcot, because despite my deep aversion to the Disneyfication of the world, Jessica loves Disney. Specifically, the Walt Disney World Resort. So we go every now and then, and I always enjoy it because someone else…