Independence Day
Last month Tony, our adult son with autism, eloped again. Eloped: in the autism world that word doesn't refer to an over-eager love bond resulting in instant marriage. No, it's a technical term that...
View ArticlePublic Secrets
For the past several months we've been trying out a new church, Lutheran this time. Nobody there is mean or rude. They're nice people, even welcoming. The church is in a suburb of Phoenix that is...
View ArticleLosing Touch
Next week is our son Lee's birthday. He will be 41. We're planning some of his favorite foods for the occasion: Chinese chicken, stir-fried vegetables and brown rice, with lemon cake and cookie-dough...
View ArticleLife Matters
Tony's heart is broken. Literally. Maybe that shouldn't surprise us, since when we adopted him as an infant he was suffering from congestive heart failure, a complication of his premature birth. But...
View ArticleHealing Arts
I left Peñasco and returned to my classes, fell in love, married, moved away, but never quite forgot the women of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, who passed their healing secrets from generation to...
View ArticleWrite Now: Why You Really Can’t Wait Any Longer
Having written the Senior Mama column here for the past two years, I've decided to take advantage of my position as Wise Older Woman to offer some writing encouragement for those of you still in the...
View ArticleHow I Got to be Old
The phone call heralding my old age came shortly before my 56th birthday. My husband Bob was out running errands with the kids when the surgeon called. She'd want to tell me about my biopsy report, but...
View ArticleTouched
I awaken in a dimly lit room. Not for a moment do I wonder where I am or what I'm doing here, or even why there are plastic tubes in my nostrils pumping frigid air into my lungs. But my mind scrambles...
View ArticleSomething Else to Think About
I picked my moments carefully and delivered bits of treatment trivia with a deliberate air of nonchalance. "This is good medicine," I told them regarding the twelve weeks of chemotherapy facing us. We...
View ArticleLooking for Tony
Tony, who is 31 years old, doesn't occupy time and space in the same way we do. In his world, there is only now, which is both a place and a state of being. What he was thinking in yesterday's now we...
View ArticleThe Invisible Dog
I have never been a dog person. I like the idea of them well enough, but in the course of raising nine kids I'd never before made time in my life to know one well. We had plenty of pets, several dogs...
View ArticleBelonging
Being a senior mama, I qualify for all those dubious privileges of advancing age that our society offers. Senior coffee at McDonalds. Senior Discount Day at the grocery store on the first Wednesday of...
View ArticleGood Friday
For Lent this year I'm giving up sleep. This was not a deliberate choice. It was thrust upon me last month—upon all of us—by the sudden death of Sally, our daughter Dara's diabetes-alert service dog....
View ArticleHow We Got Here
Being a senior mama, I've stuffed decades of family memories into my cluttered brain. Most are vague, like old, uncaptioned photos in a shoebox, nameless and slowly fading. A few remain vivid, charged...
View ArticleNever Let Me Go
Letting our kids go is a process that begins the moment they emerge from the womb, suddenly loose in the world. Or, whenever we adopt, it begins in that golden moment we first hear their name, run...
View ArticleOverlooked
Bob and I worry about the worth of things. Dara and Tony, our youngest daughter and son, never give it a thought. They're tender, both of them, perpetually on the brink of adulthood, with all the...
View ArticleBaggage
My daughter is going to war. She is barely five feet tall and finds it amusing that with her small frame she will be lugging four seabags and an M-16. "Can you picture that?" Shanna says, and there's...
View ArticleDesert Bells
Something has set Tony off. Dude knows it, and he sticks to Tony's side, but even his persistent nudging doesn't distract Tony from his glowering mood. We cancel our plans to visit the mineral museum...
View ArticleThe Hare and I
Maybe Aesop had it wrong. Or maybe he's just 2,600 years out of date. That's how long ago he first told his moralistic tales, and they've been repeated ever since. "The Hare and the Tortoise" is the...
View ArticleMy Fat Arms
This ballooning is called lymphedema. I will learn ways to control it, but the damage is permanent. I'll need to ignore the stares and questions, manage the pain of swollen body parts and develop new...
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