Perfectly Useless Concentration

One year ago right now, you were still inside me. A machine spat pages to my left—my heartbeat and yours, jagged mountain ranges side by side. I was four hours away from holding you, and I will never forget that moment: how warm you were, how slippery and solid, how su...

 Last night, on the eve of the 10-year anniversary of Nanny's passing, my daughter recognized her name for the first time.

We were lying in bed, and I was trying to feed her, but lately, as she's become more aware of the world, that world fascinates her endlessly. She t...

 Photo by Adrian Collins Photography

Early on, when mornings were still surreal with the idea of you inside me--when you were the size of a poppyseed or even smaller, when my nurse spoke of you with caution, as if you could disappear at any moment, become reabsorbed int...

The first time I heard the phrase "birth plan," I had no idea what it meant. Then I found out, and honestly, I thought it was silly--the idea of planning to a T an experience over which I always assumed you'd have very little control. My birth plan? To get through it,...

Fifteen weeks. I'm 15 weeks pregnant. 

Every morning in bed, I curve my palms around the little hard globe of my lower belly. Good morning, I think, smiling at the strangeness of this new part of me, wondering what else will have changed, grown, stretched overnight...

Every year on September 6, I make tortillas. And every year, they're wrong in a slightly different way.

The first year, they were as hard as tostadas and twice as thick as they should be. They tasted like burned flour. Another year, they were so salty the tongue curled...

Last Friday, I dropped by the HEB after lunch to pick up a few supplies for the weekend. San Antonio was on the outer edges of Hurricane Harvey's path, and weather reports warned that we might get up to 15 inches of rain with high winds and flooding. 

HEB was clotted wi...

From the outside looking in--and sometimes the inside looking in--the road to publishing your first book can seem labyrinthine, fraught with obstacles both seen and unseen. When should you query agents? How should you query agents? What does an effective query letter l...

To those who have never written a book, writing the book probably seems like the hardest part of the process. Guess what? It's not! For those who are interested or who might find this helpful, I thought I'd break down the process so far.

July 2015: Dreaming

This is about...

Dear Charlie,

The night before you were born, I woke up every two hours to check my phone for a text message from your mom. She’d been having contractions since the afternoon before, a Sunday, and making my heart stop since Saturday with texts like, “She’s coming!” and...