A conversation with . . . Jennifer?
Find me over at my colleague Denise Schipani’s blog today. The conversation may be with me but you can imagine who we’re talking about!
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On growing up
In September, Jessica announced that she was moving in with her father. I have been her main caretaker since, well, her entire life, so as you can imagine my immediate response was WHAT THE HELL???? She dropped this on me the day I picked her up from school after she’d had her monthly visitation with…
On promises no one made
There is a girl at the coffee shop with her mother. She is ten or eleven, and dressed in the way girls her age dress, with flip-flops on (it is a warm afternoon) and pink polish on her toes. She has a thick book under her arm, held casually in the way that makes…
The nature of remembering
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,…
For Jessica
A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were talking about a study she’d just read, which concluded that people without children were happier than people with children; or, to put it more precisely, despite what conventional wisdom holds, the study found that having children did not increase anyone’s happiness. At which…
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…