Bread and Bread

At Thanksgiving, my uncle asked how I was doing. I said not much was new, and that I was old enough to understand how that was a good thing. He agreed. He’s going through treatment for prostate cancer (fortunately he has a good prognosis), and his stepson died suddenly in October. I want to be hopeful and creative and ambitious, but in 2024, I was grateful for a quiet year. If I weren’t so superstitious, I would say that I did some healing from the tumult of 2020-2023 (pandemic, adoption fails, new baby, job loss, new job). Meanwhile, it was a devastating year–yet another one of those–globally.  And in my personal quiet, I read 60+ books. I watched and listened to some things too, albeit less rigorously. I finally discovered what the fuss is all about re: The Great British Baking Show (it’s so charming! Perhaps you’ve heard?). So here is my annual roundup, with my annual caveat that a lot of these recommendations aren’t new, just new to me.  Books I’m grouping my top three bo...

Photo by George Kedenburg III on Unsplash I am trying to find a new way of being in the world, but I keep worrying about my lymph nodes. For years, the wisest people—Fr. Greg Boyle, my therapists, my Instagram Explore page (okay, it is not the wisest or a person)—have preached Living In The Moment. Or rather, they have talked about it, but they haven't preached, because I don't like preachers.  Fr. Greg said, This—this here is heaven.  I thought, I will try to live in the moment in the future. The Future seemed like a kind of heaven. If I earned it, through good works and the right kind of disordered eating, I could live there unencumbered. The future would hold promises of More Future. But first I needed to be granted a pass, and that pass would look like normal-range lab results all down the page.  Maybe I've told this story before (I worry that retelling stories is a sign of brain metastasis, but it might also be proof that I need to tell myself the same stories over ...

Photo by Fredrik Öhlander on Unsplash If you were a snowflake— your mother a glacier, your arms branched and reaching— the photos would melt you.  The blast-orange light revealing a thrown-back head, flames marching along an IV tube, blaze branched, arm reaching. You would throw your cold body on the fire, turn to steam. You would mourn the loss, condemn the evil. But you are a fist of coal— not hard enough to become a diamond,  you are disappointment in the toe  of a bad child's Christmas stocking. And so you file the photos between Guilt and Luck in your dewey decimal mind.  Your mother was a librarian, your father an engineer. Their shared currency was worry. So when you wonder if you are dying, if your CBC is tea leaves, if animals can smell cancer,  is this self-love or -hatred?  Ego is a red herring, a lavender menace. And when you thought, But they're probably not even sick, they were probably in the hospital because of the war,  you crowned th...

I don't think anyone has ever heard about the Hart family without being horrified. But if the story hasn't faded into the True Crime file folder in your mind since it happened in 2018—if it has instead stayed fresh and insidious—maybe you are an adoptive parent. Maybe you are a foster parent. Maybe your children are a different race from you. Maybe you are a parent whose children were taken into foster care under the guise of safety, only to encounter its opposite. Maybe you survived foster care yourself.  If you don't remember: Two white lesbians adopted six Black children (two sibling sets) from foster care. They were the picture of social media love-makes-a-family perfection. A photo of their son Devonte hugging a white cop went viral for its "Black AND Blue Lives Matter!" vibes, presumably. Jennifer and Sarah Hart moved around a lot, leaving a trail of abuse accusations and open CPS cases behind them, but white savior narratives and the failures of inter-agen...