Posts Tagged Under Kimberley Kwok
Left Behind
It was 1972 in Mobile, Alabama, when a different meaning of war took hold in my second grade world.
On this hot, sticky evening, our neighborhood foursome was in my friend Becky’s bedroom belting out “I Am Woman” and hatching plans for our own rock band. When the song ended, we stepped out of her room to get a drink. Becky’s older sister, Sheila, was home from college. I didn’t know how old that made her, except that she drove a car and she could kiss boys, which is what she was doing on the front porch with the door wide open.
Sheila was sobbing loudly — the wet, full, uninhibited kind that made me feel bad I was watching. I barely recognized her boyfriend, Jason, standing with her. He’d cut his long, wavy hair to the barest fuzz and replaced his denim look with a formal, tan uniform that looked so straight it would break at the crease. He was stroking Sheila’s long black hair, looking ahead without smiling.
Becky’s grandma caught me staring. “He’s leaving for Vietnam tonight.”
By adminThe Am I Fat Website Tells Me I’m Not
I consult this expert advice to settle the question in the mirror once and for all.
With that encouragement, I decide to test the limits of its cheery “keep it up, great work!” message by plugging in my mid-day weight. It’s not so sure anymore: “Hmmm…on the edge – get more exercise,” it tells me.
I enter my lowest possible goal – my driver’s license weight — and wait for the verdict, hoping it will tell me to “eat more, you’re way too thin.” Instead it repeats the first “great work” mantra, and I switch out of this section to take the hip/waist ratio section of the quiz. As I struggle to find the minimum point beneath my ribs, I squeeze in my abdominals and grab enough dough from my middle for a two-pound loaf. There is nothing natural about this waist and no way to escape the “it’s time for a change” warning from my virtual expert. I click out of the site, vowing never to return.
My image in the store window the next week is a harsher critic. As I flounce my rarely coiffed hair down Stockton Street, feeling hip and un-Mom like, I turn for a celebratory glimpse and stop flat in my tracks at the reflected version of me: the extra girth, the heft, the jowliness that I swear wasn’t there when I left the house this very morning.
By adminYoung Moms
My youngest daughter, Cameron, started preschool this fall, my third child to enter the Montessori Oak Room. My fellow preschool parents are in full family creation mode, and every month I notice more and more bellies blooming wide with second and third children.
It’s no wonder Cameron urges me to have another baby, stating her case for “just one more, since one of yours died.”
She’s still trying to fill in the place for her missing “little” brother (because he was a baby), not realizing she’s the one I didn’t think I’d be having. “Have another baby, please, please,” she says, getting on her knees and folding her hands in full supplication.
By adminDogs
My ten-year old daughter wants a dog when her little sister turns four.
At first I was thankful for the two-year reprieve. Now I’m annoyed by her hypothetical dog. With its hypothetical name. And with the hypothetical questions she feels warrant discussion.
Or worse — answers.
Should it be an Irish coat or an American coat? Can we move Cameron’s toy kitchen and have it sleep there? Should we paper train or outside train? Go to a breeder or adopt?
By adminSubsequents
Subsequents was a term I learned from my online searches the week after Aaron died.
I guess it was an easier way of saying “having another child after losing a child.” But there was something about this clinical-sounding label that lent a controversial tone to the chat rooms in the various bereaved parent sites.
I never weighed in on any of these conversations. I’m not the online chatting kind of person, frankly, which makes this site a bit ironic for me. The issue of subsequents had a long response chain, with parents, mostly mothers, offering their perspectives on how they were preparing for (and worrying about) their next child, and on their process behind considering the “right amount of time” after their child’s death.
There were also practical considerations: what to do with their baby’s clothes, the crib, their fears, the statistics of having it happen again in the same family. And then there were the naysayers. The ones who interrupted these discussions with haughty, holier than thou (can you hear my bias?) diatribes against their decision against having a “replacement child.”
By adminLoss Counselor
Loss Counselor
Yesterday, our former babysitter called to tell me that her boyfriend had died in a car accident in London. She was looking for guidance and trying to make sense out of his untimely death. Even with my credentials as a mother who lost a child, I felt my blood pressure rising and my self-critic kicked in.
How should I know what to say? What if I offended her Catholic faith? I reminded myself that the worst thing you can say to someone who is grieving is to say nothing, so I took a deep breath and searched for the right words.
“Let the thoughts come to you, and try to notice little messages. They come in all forms — a song on the radio, a stranger’s words that remind you of Robert, or a warm feeling surrounding you. But don’t worry, there’s no right or wrong here. No one can tell you how to feel and I don’t want to do that either.”
By admin
