Bread and Bread

You never told me I was anything but beautiful so this feeling—that maybe I'm made of oil instead of breast milk— is a betrayal of what you gave me. I've been obsessing over the contents of the diaper of the second grandchild you never met: the shit, the lack of it, the holding back of something ugly. Was that slick brown thread mucous, a red flag according to the nice lady on the nurse line? Was it me, a sort of gollum, a mirror in a diaper, a monster, but tiny and powerless? Photo by Mahdi Bafande on Unsplash The second child in our family— my first family, I mean, of origin, as they say— is the only person who holds a mirror up to your ghost, the only person who could say "Oh honey" the way you did. Her curly hair, her kindness. But I hated her at first.  Another firstborn might declare the baby to be the monster, the interloper, but I stepped into that role myself just like I stepped into the baby sweater  I'd long outgrown. The yellow acrylic yarn was itchy,...

1. acceptance. speeches. I’ve been thinking about humility, and not just because we’re at the tail end of awards season, a time when people make tearful speeches about how humbled they are. I really liked Common and John Legend’s acceptance speech for the Selma song. They were humble not just in the way that is the opposite of bragging, which is how I’ve thought about humility in the past, but in a way that acknowledges they didn’t get there alone. They are part of a continuing history of struggle. They are part of a community, and they’re holding a statue because others have taken punches or even bullets.** What I’m trying to say is, I think humility is knowing you’re just a character in a story. Humility is arriving at a chapter in that story a different person than you were on page one, and the values you had back then almost feel irrelevant, or at least foreign. What I’m trying to say is, on Oscar night? Here is how I watched. Relax. 2. santa barbara In De...

The days leading up to our New Zealand trip were kind of a triathlon of adulthood: I spent the last Friday in May getting four grants and reports ready to submit, packing for an international red-eye flight and texting with the expectant mother of twins. Twin bunnies! The latter, whom I will call Zoey, emailed us late Wednesday night. In the adoption world, twins almost always = scam. If Zoey was running a scam, though, it fell into the really convincing, non-financial genre. I talked to her Thursday night, and it was like talking to an old friend: She was funny, straight-forward and down-to-earth. She was baffled by the behavior of her roomie at the hospital where she was on bed rest, who’d fractured her pelvis while jet-skiing at twenty weeks. “Who jet skis when they’re twenty weeks pregnant?” Zoey said. I agreed. I didn’t add that there are lots of birthmoms who do hard drugs while pregnant (although there are many more who don’t). Zoey was refreshingly responsible,...

1. sea glass and glendora I’m just now getting around to posting the entry I wrote about last weekend, which tells you what my week was like. Let’s just say I spent most of it working on a federal grant, and by the end of the day yesterday, I was having Republican-ish thoughts about government bureaucracies. (If you work for the Department of Labor and are reading this, that was just a little joke! I totally voted for Obama! ) But it’s Good Friday, and I’m determined to have a good Friday. I worked a half day, went to Shoshana’s yoga class—my favorite—this morning, bought some berries at the Eagle Rock farmers market and did a little bit of writing, even though I neglected my YA novel yet again. I’m feeling refreshed-adjacent, and I have the berries to prove it. So, anyway, last weekend: AK and I had planned to go to Catalina with Pedro and Stephen on Sunday, but when we found out it was $35 each way, not round trip, we all cheaped out and ended up in San Pedro instead. W...