Last year, I read Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance the week it came out. In it, Shapiro finds out through DNA testing that her father was not her biological father, and that she was conceived via artificial insemination using a sperm donor. The book deals with the fallout, as she grapples with issues of identity, truth, and the ethics and implications for donor-conceived children. Shapiro has been one of my favorite writers since I read Still Writing the previous year and loved her take on the …
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Finding a New Way In
At a family party on a sheer, cloudless day, I’m crawling around my mom’s patio combing my way through the mossy pavers. What I’m looking for is an earring, a small opal stud. It used to be mine but, just an hour earlier, my mom handed the pair down to my daughter who left the earrings loose on the table and subsequently dropped one. We moved the heavy, wrought iron chairs out of the way and I’m on my knees tracing stones and moss, hopeful I can find the earring. I’ve been reading Mary Karr’s …
On Hope
It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon, and I’m home alone for the first time in two weeks, quietly reading Amy Peterson’s Where Goodness Still Grows. I’m right near the end, in the chapter about hope, where she writes about her ongoing, winter-related depression and how purchasing a handful of chicks brightened her. It had been a dream of hers to raise chickens and it’s been a dream of mine too, which might be a cliché but I’m okay with it. On a whim the other day, I looked up local real estate, …
Wanting to Be Transformed
I had two dreams last night. In one of them, I was visiting the only house where my mother, father, brother, and I lived together before my parents divorced. I walked down a hallway, turned to the right, and found myself in a room I didn’t recognize. It looked like an old office or maybe a newsroom with old wooden desks and swivel chairs. I don’t remember this, I thought in the dream. But I kept going. In the next room was a recording studio, all warm wood paneling and glass. A blond woman …
You Do Not Have to Be Good: A Permission Slip
When I think about myself a year ago, I think about the opening lines of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”: You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your kneesFor a hundred miles through the desert repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your bodyLove what it loves. I wish I had committed this poem to memory, like the poems I memorized in graduate school that still swim in my head. My poetry teacher made us memorize two poems per semester and I only remember fragments. …