Posts Tagged Under Anjie Reynolds
Emergency
My daughter’s second trip to the Emergency Room turned into a three-day stay in the hospital’s pediatric unit. She suffered a painful kidney condition and doctors suspected something else was wrong, too.
After multiple I.V. insertions into her little arm, and numerous tests, ranging from urine and blood samples to ultrasounds and CAT scans, doctors were finally able to get her symptoms under control and make a diagnosis.
Throughout all this, the doctors and nurses were so thorough— treating her symptoms carefully and listening to her every word— that despite my daughter’s pain and fear, I had confidence in her care. So, I felt calm and strong.
By Anjie ReynoldsA Loving Act
Gramps is dying. My mom called last night to give me the most recent news. After months of dramatic decline, her father is back in the hospital and it now looks as if he’ll never return to the life he once knew.
My Gram, after 65 years of marriage, has had to make a heartbreaking decision: “I hope you’re not going to hate me,” she whispers to my mom on the phone. Gramps is back in the hospital with a lung infection after his food has been going down the wrong passageway, and, given the other complications of his health, the only way to sustain him now would be to use a feeding tube. “I’ve decided he should not have the tube,” she says, her voice breaking.
My mother’s been thinking about Gramps’ suffering for months now. “This is a loving act, Mom,” she chokes out. “You’re honoring his life.”
By Anjie ReynoldsLoaded
Every night for the past week, my seven-year-olds been shooting his plastic and foam bow-and-arrow set in the backyard.
He’ll shoot, and then watch in awe as it soars across the lawn or collides with a tree trunk. After that, he runs as fast as he can to pick the arrow up from wherever it’s landed to do it all over again another fifty times.
Watching him, I reflect on how there’s something primal about aiming, firing and witnessing contact. We have no weapons in our home, but I’ve felt that satisfaction in my bones myself, whether it’s involved an arrow and a target, a rock and a pond, a baseball and a mitt, or even a peach pit and a trash can.
By Anjie ReynoldsTree
When you get the perfect perch in a tree, you’re cradled.
You straddle a thick branch while the coarseness of the bark works like Velcro or the sticky backside of a postage stamp.
There, you can lean back against the upstretched limb behind you, or you can lean forward to the branch reaching sideways in front of you. If you’ve got your notebook with you, you can rest it on that side-reaching limb: nature’s desk.
From the vantage point of the tree, you can see the horizon further than you could on the ground.
By Anjie ReynoldsMasked
In kindergarten my mom sewed me a crazy outfit, a combination of dots and florals, pastels and primaries, sheets and drapes. She patched me together as a billowy one-piece suit of sleeves and long skirt.
I was a clown—a clapping, jumping, spinning, laughing clown. But the best part was my mask. We bought it at the B&I all the way across town and no other kids had anything like it. My peach plastic face with red cheeks and bulbous nose beneath a waxy strand of curl in the middle of my forehead created a mask that people noticed.
On Halloween day I walked through the hallway to class with my peers (Batmans, Holly Hobbies, witches) and encountered the school principal. She honed in on me.
By Anjie ReynoldsRevved Up
It’s Eddie Vedder’s voice and the kick of that drum and each pull on that bass guitar’s strings.
With slitted eyes, I move my head in slow scoops, my shoulders in slow motion shrugs. One hand traces the arc of the steering wheel, the other palms the sticky grittiness of the gear shift knob. I hit fifty accelerating onto the freeway before I see I’m still in second gear, the RPM dial way too far into the orange.
Quick shift into fourth and who cares who passes me in my Vanagon. I’ve got two empty car seats in back and the stereo loud and the night to myself.
By Anjie ReynoldsSix Years Ago
Six years ago, hijacked planes were flown into the Twin Towers in New York, the Pentagon in Virginia, and into a quiet field in rural Pennsylvania.
I was in Washington state, pregnant with my daughter, and my son wasn’t even a year old. I remember crying throughout the day and listening to NPR round the clock, wide awake through the dark and long hours of the night.
I couldn’t stop thinking about those voices in the rubble, silenced to a concrete and fiery death. I couldn’t stop thinking about the victim’s families: how they were thinking about the violent deaths of their loved ones, how they dared to hope for rescue, and how they all had to consider what the years ahead had to hold for them without that loved one.
By Anjie ReynoldsIn Context
I’ve found that my kids can handle doing something they don’t want to do, or not getting their own way, if I can explain things to them. I still use the occasional,, “Because I told you to” but sometimes that feels a little inconsiderate.
Take yesterday, for instance, I was tempted to tell my kids to get out of the house at 8:15 on Labor Day morning and go out and play in the back yard simply because I told them to. But they were being sweet – if not just a tad too loud and busy for a holiday morning– and I didn’t want to ruin that mood with a grumpy argument.
So, instead, I told them the truth: “Look, you’re being too loud for our neighbors downstairs. It’s great that you’re bouncy and singing, but you can’t do that in our apartment because we live on the third floor and it’s loud right above our neighbors’ heads.”
By Anjie ReynoldsThat’s My Body
My 5-year-old daughter loves my body – and sometimes she’s curious about it in the most disarming ways.
At the grocery store once when she was three, she crept under my skirt at the checkout line and yelled, “Hey Mommy! Why aren’t you wearing any panties?” as she reached up to run those delicate little fingers of hers across my buns.
I clenched, winced, put on a brave smile for the guy behind me with bearded stubble and a 12-pack, and gently guided her down – and out – of there, asking her to simply stand beside me please. I was not about to explain the subtle nuances of underwear at Safeway to a three-year-old; I was not about to tell her and our neighbor in line that indeed I did have underwear on, it’s just that I was wearing what we call a thong.
By Anjie ReynoldsMusic in the Fish Tank, or What Mom Thinks About When the Kids are Gone for a Week
The bubbles rise. Water drips down. The fish swims low. He skims his belly against layers of pink rocks, all the same size as his eyes. He weaves his way through his plant, shimmying between the plastic stems, listening out of his fish ears – wherever and whatever those are – to the rhythmic trickle above him. Nosing his way along the edges, his fins and tail wipe at the glass. This fish swims a pattern known only to him – and, of course, to his friend, the ceramic carp blowing on the sax. For all his days, he’s under the same tones, the same melody, of that pleasant little trickle above.
See you soon, kids.
By Anjie Reynolds
By Anjie Reynolds
