Perfectly Useless Concentration

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 turns from my breast to watch evening shadows lengthen on the wall. The click of the fan draws her eye, makes her smile. She glances toward the bathroom, where a light shines. She remembers the new delight of her

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. On the scale and in the mirror, I take stock of these changes, still mostly unnoticeable to anyone besides Adrian and me. But something invisible has also changed, something no one would know but me: I'm a mother n

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 “We’re heading to the hospital!” These were jokes, because your Uncle Adrian had surprised me with a trip to Big Bend the weekend before you were due, and your mom was punishing me for going away so close to yo

As a birthday gift, my mom wanted to take me shopping. So we were in the Nordstrom shoe department and I had one leg deep in a black over-the-knee boot when my phone rang. My mom was still smiling from whatever we'd been talking about before. She took a fraction of a second longer than I did to realize: this could be the call we'd been waiting on for almost a week. The results of my biopsy. * Last year was a year of health scares. It was mammograms and ultrasounds, biopsies a

“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.” —Anne Lamott From clockwise: Nanny and Mom, circa 1970

For almost a week, I've been feeding a stray dog that I'm calling Cleo. I first saw Cleo from the bedroom window. She was standing in the middle of a patchy sunlit clearing, an empty lot beside my parents' condo. White with large brown spots, she reminded me of a skinny, lost calf. She looked around, taking a step first in one direction and then another, as if she wasn't sure how she'd ended up here or where she should go next. Immediately, I slipped on flip flops and went to

Today marks the start of our last week in Maine, and I'm already feeling nostalgic for a trip that hasn't finished. After next week, Maine won't be a dream or a joke or a myth; it'll be a word wrapped tightly around memories of my mom and I building a closeness that we didn't have before--not to this extent, anyway--and building our books at the same time. And for now, at least, it's the books I want to talk about. It feels weird and vulnerable, this public accountability I'm

Maine has a sort of mythology in my family. "You just have to go to Maine!" I can hear my dad saying back when I was in high school, maybe even younger. "I'm telling you. If you go to Maine, you'll write a bestseller." I don't know where he got that idea. I assume he saw a movie once, long forgotten, in which someone holes up in a cabin surrounded by far-reaching pines, perhaps some water, and thoughtfully composes sentences on a typewriter. "You'll get inspired," my dad says

First, if you haven't met Nanny, read this. Year 1: You have to be careful not to drink too much: at the dive bar after workshop, ordering gin and soda; watching Mad Men with glasses of blueberry juice and vodka; sitting around the wooden breakfast table with friends, sharing bottles of wine. Because no matter where you are or who you're with, there's a moment when pain slices unexpectedly through that numbness and laughter swerves into sobs. Grief has transformed you into so

There was a time in college when I told my mother that if I were dead she'd hear about it, so could she please stop calling all my friends--I was fine, it was finals week, I had told her about this! She'd been calling me for days, and I'd been either missing her calls or ignoring them, frantic and caffeine-high and sleepless as I wrote one long-delayed finals paper after another, hoping they sounded coherent. My mom had resorted to calling my high school friends whose numbers