I came into this life stuttering. My mother had three false alarms on three consecutive days. On the fourth trip to the hospital, my father said he wasn’t going back home again. Once admitted to the maternity ward, she was in labor for 36 hours. My starts and stops exhausted her. My mother was 40 years old. By the time…
With all the warnings about hot flashes, wrinkles, decreased libido, age spots, and so on and so on, nobody ever tells you about the possible fringe benefits of menopause. I don’t recall reading anywhere about the sudden transformation that I experienced when my ovaries halted production. I’d been painfully shy my whole life—I always had a few close friends, but…
The goal seemed completely ridiculous. Though an avid and dedicated Girl Scout in my youth, able to light fires and pilot my own canoe, I had been queried in my twenties concerning an upcoming camping trip, “What are you going to wear, a cocktail dress?” I was not an athlete, to put it mildly—more comfortable at poetry readings and pubs…
On May 9, 2002, I was on vacation in Florida with my best friend. It was great to have a break from work and just relax. I considered not taking any calls, but decided I would receive calls only from family. During that vacation, I got one of the worst calls of my life. My brother, John, had been in…
I grew up in a house where Friday nights consisted of Dad drunk on the floor shouting, “I love you, Diane!” My mother’s name is Gail. His consistent abuse of me, both verbally and physically, left me in a state of depression. As a child, I was filled with despair and hopelessness. At school, my mind kept wandering off into…
