For the past nearly two months I’ve been working towards some sort of new normal as I recover from and work with my doctors to figure out how to live with the illness I never dreamed would turn our family life so utterly on its head. Since then we’ve been taking one day at a time, each day assessing whether I need to spend extra time in bed on pain killers to get over a bad migraine and ...

Last week when I should have been using my daughter’s pre-school time to put together a blog, I was instead recovering in the ER of our local hospital. My husband and I arrived by ambulance at 3:45 AM after I’d suddenly woken up with numb arms, legs and chin, and unable to speak coherently. We all thought I was having a stroke, and the paramedics kept saying, “Don’t worry — you’re ...

A flood has forced me to reckon with my past. As floods go it was minor and certainly no major properties or lives were at stake. Except my academic life, which lives in boxes stored in my husband’s lab space. Sometime over the four-day Easter weekend a water purifier located on the floor above my husband’s lab malfunctioned. No one was around, and the flooding in my husband’s lab wasn’t ...

I remember the day it became painfully obvious to me that I was different from the other kids in school. I was 10 years old and in fifth grade. In a break from our academic activities, our teacher Mrs. Heaton suggested we play the “telephone” (or “pass it on”) game, where one person comes up with a word or phrase and whispers it to the next person, who whispers it to the next, and so on, ...

Like many parents of young children, my husband and I make limited use of the TV babysitter so that we can get chores done or have a shower. When my son was a toddler I got pretty good at putting finishing touches on lectures during one showing of an “educational” baby video (including the promotional blurb at the end of the 20 minute show, just to give me an extra few minutes). I felt ...

Recently I received a phone call out of the blue from a long-time family friend, a graduate student my parents befriended when my sister and I were just 8 or 9 years old. Although he’s in regular contact with my parents, it had been more than twenty years since he and I had had any direct communication (I’m terrible at staying in touch with friends and family). Our conversation was pleasant ...

Last fall I broke my pinkie toe. Already running late, I had rushed back into the house to grab a warm jacket for my daughter when I tripped over the luggage our houseguests had conveniently placed by the door in preparation for their departure. It wasn’t anyone’s fault—our guests weren’t expecting me to come racing back into the house at top speed. But the painful days afterwards (a ...

It’s something every parent has experienced … the mournful cries of a sick child in the middle of the night. In our family aching knees — my daughter’s growing pains — are the usual culprits, and my husband and I take turns sitting up with her and rubbing her sore legs until she slips back into sleep. In January, and now into February, it’s been nighttime coughing that keeps us up. ...

Last Tuesday my 7-year-old came home from school and proudly showed off his new library book about a super-hero who wears nothing but a cape and tighty-whitey underwear (I won’t mention the name lest it be quoted as an endorsement. Just ask any 7-year-old or parent of elementary-aged children if you’re not sure what I mean. A clue: he’s addressed as “Captain.”). The books in this ...

The first days of a new year always fill me with a numbing sense of dread that is deeply rooted and hard to shake. It has nothing to do with the farewell to an old year or to the holiday festivities; it has everything to do with farewell to family and loved ones. The days after New Year celebrations were for several years the time when my husband and I said good-bye to one another after ...