Posts Tagged Under Jessica O’Dwyer
The True Spirit of Community at Squaw
Jessica O’Dwyer was one of the first women I met when I joined the Writing Mamas. She introduced herself, asked me about my family and my writing and helped me feel I was in the right place. Her insecurities around the quality of her writing were weirdly reassuring to me.
We both applied for admission to the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley in 2006. Jessica was accepted. I was not. She had a tough and wonderful week and came back so overwhelmed she could not write for a short period. But Jessica had a story to tell, the story of adopting her beautiful daughter Olivia from Guatemala, and she got back to work, returning to Squaw in 2007 as a stronger writer who had found her voice.
Jessica kept moving forward, improving her writing through classes and workshops. She wrote and rewrote, searching for the story arc that would grab and hold readers. She had two young children and a husband with a demanding job. Sometimes she could only write at night in cafes or at the library after her husband got home at night and dinner had been cooked. It would have been easy to put off the book, to wait until the children got older, until there was more time to write. Continue… »
By Marianne LonsdaleBaby, It’s Sunny Outside
With a last name like “O’Dwyer,” it’s no surprise that I’m a very pale person with skin that blisters and peels. I don’t step outside the house without sunglasses and a hat. Long sleeves? I wear ‘em, even when it’s a hundred degrees. Driving gloves, too, as soon as I buckle my seatbelt. Not because I fancy myself a superb driver, but because on the rare occasions when I don’t, half-a-dozen new freckles appear on the backs of my hands.
May is Skin Cancer Awareness Month, a joint venture of the American Academy of Dermatology and the American Cancer Society. New research suggests that up to 3 million Americans will be diagnosed with skin cancer this year. The most serious form, malignant melanoma, will kill about 8,420 people. Fortunately, malignant melanoma, like most skin cancers, can be cured if detected early.
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All Babies Come With A “Backstory”
Most days, Mateo takes the bus to kindergarten, but sometimes we drive so we can read together in the classroom for 15 minutes before school begins. I chat with the other mothers on the playground as we watch our kids jump and run, their little bodies radiating energy and happiness. At the sound of the bell, the teacher, Ms. S, emerges from the classroom and the kids fall into an orderly line. Ms. S has been teaching kindergarten for more than 20 years. She knows how to set a tone.
This morning, the excitement is especially high. Ms. S’s oldest daughter, a married woman who lives back East, is pregnant, due to deliver any minute. I know this because all week Mateo has been telling me, “Ms. S is about to become a grandma!”
As the kids file into the classroom and Ms. S is telling us about her daughter’s long and seemingly endless labor, her cell phone rings. “Oh, oh, oh!” Ms. S spins in a circle as she flips open her phone. “It might be news!”
Another false alarm. Continue… »
By Jessica O'DwyerWhen Will People See?
Recently, I was at Home Depot when a white man came up to me in the aisle and jerked his chin in the direction of my shopping cart where my two children, ages 7 and 4, sat chomping on hot pretzels.
“Where are they from?” the man asked. “Mexico?”
“Guatemala,” I said uncertain where the conversation was headed.
“Well,” said the man, folding his arms. “Let’s hope they bring something good to this country, instead of just taking everything.”
When I told this story to a friend in my neighborhood, another adoptive mom with a daughter from Guatemala in addition to two blonde-haired biological kids, she nodded.
“I was at Walgreen’s with the girls, and Maria wandered down the aisle with a candy bar in her hand. A man came up to her and said ‘You know you have to pay for that, missy.’” My friend shook her head. “Mind you, Maria’s two blonde-haired sisters were walking around with candy bars in their hands, too, but he didn’t say a word to them. Only to Maria.”
By Jessica O'DwyerToo Damn Cold!
The way other people hate food poisoning or a bad case of the flu, I hate being cold.
I can’t function cold, at all, and by cold I mean any temperature that dips below fifty degrees. My teeth chatter, my lips turn blue and my toes go numb. All I want to do is wrap myself in a wool blanket, huddle in front of a roaring fire and eat large amounts of high-fat carbohydrates. My husband sleeps in shorts and a T-shirt under a cotton bedspread we brought home from Guatemala; beside him, I sleep in flannel pajamas and a fleece sweatshirt under a layer of comforters so thick he calls it the “iron lung.”
Cold is the reason I moved to California, so that I wouldn’t have to be. Like Scarlett O’Hara raising her fist to defy hunger at the end of the first reel of Gone With the Wind, I vowed, growing up in a one-hundred year old house in New Jersey that lacked insulation, that as soon as I had a choice, I would never be cold again.
By Jessica O'DwyerA Boy Can be Anything He Wants! — Even a Rockette?!?
My son, Mateo, wants to be a Rockette.
Time Change
We have twelve clocks in our house and each one says a different time.
The big, round one that hangs on the wall in the kitchen reads 8:02. But the one on the microwave, directly across from it, claims it’s 8:13. The clocks on the coffeemaker and the oven hover around 7:56. A few feet away, in the garage, the timer on the automatic watering system says 9:07.
My husband sets the digital clock beside our bed 20 minutes earlier than something, but I don’t know what. When I open one eye to look at in the morning, I wonder: Have I overslept? Why is it so dark outside?
Olivia’s clock has stopped completely. Mateo’s ticks under his bed. My travel alarm is set to Guatemala time — two hours before us when it’s Standard Time, one hour before us when it’s not. I synchronize it with the clock that tolls in the church tower on Fifth Avenida in Antigua. One of the reasons I love Guatemala so much is nobody cares if I’m late.
By Jessica O'DwyerCrust
Five minutes before we dash out the door to catch the school bus to kindergarten, my daughter, Olivia, announces that she wants me to stop eating crust.
“Grandma said crust makes your hair curly,” she says.
“If only it were that simple,” I say, scavenging through the pile of shoes at the back door for her left sneaker. “I would stop eating crust this instant.” My curly, frizzy, untamed mop for a hairdo has been the bane of my existence my entire life.
By Jessica O'DwyerA Baby in My Tummy
Mateo walks into the kitchen as I’m unloading the dishwasher wearing his red pajamas with the fire engines on them. He turns to the side so I can see his profile, and from that angle he looks like an extremely short, three-year-old Jackie Gleason: all stomach.
“Look, Mommy,” he says. “I have a baby in my tummy.”
He lifts up his fire engine top and there, tucked inside his undershirt, is his stuffed green sea turtle, Tortuga.
By Jessica O'DwyerCar Line
It wouldn’t be so bad if Olivia wasn’t enrolled in a kindergarten with a Car Line policy. That is, you drive up, unlock the minivan door, and a parent volunteer unbuckles the child’s car seat and off she runs.
And it wouldn’t be so terrible if it were the same parent volunteer each day.
But the volunteer position rotates among the parents of students in the three primary grades, twice a day, morning and afternoon.
By Jessica O'Dwyer
