Tag: motherhood
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Neurodivergent
So, guess what? This girl right here? She has ADD. Officially, as of this week, I’ve got a dx and an Rx and FRIENDS, can I tell you — it took me FORTY YEARS to realize that there is a neurological reason my brain works the way it does. This is earth shattering. So many…
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co-breathing
The one thing they told me at the hospital, more important than “breast is best,” was that I should never, under any circumstances, co-sleep with my child. I was a new mother in a state-of-the-art hospital in the Pacific Northwest, attended by midwives and nurses of the crunchy variety. The veracity with which the nurses…
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Shadow Puppets
I leave the door open because I know it is only a matter of seconds before I’ll hear the pitter patter of his tiny feet on the tile. “Mama!” Henry calls out. He rounds the corner, spots me, and exclaims, “Oh! Poop!” he claps his hands, overjoyed to witness the magic of the toilet, which…
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Growing Hope
The afternoon before Jacob is born, I trudge up the stairs to my bedroom to lay myself down. September sun filters through the window, casting shadows from the orange leaves of the tree onto my bed. As I crawl under the covers, I think, this is what hope feels like, and I exhale. I’ve been…
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Cosmopolitan
This is a poem I wrote years ago and recently found in one of the many boxes of paperwork I’ve lugged around from house to house in various moves. There was a dive bar near my college called the Tropicana, and as I drove past, I often wondered what the people were like inside. (Incidentally,…
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Blue
His eyes are like oceans, playful and joyous and deep. His daddy smiles at me through the blue.
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Splinter
Jacob ran out the front screen door, exclaiming, “Christmas wreath!” in his two-year-old toddlerese. It was early December in Hawaii and the wreath I had picked up at the local Target was our lone Christmas decoration. With a deployed husband, two small children, and an upcoming holiday trip to my parents’ house on the mainland,…
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Friendship For All Seasons
I walked through the chilly evening dark and got into the car without a diaper bag. I turned on music that I like – which at this point is anything that’s not songs from Sesame Street – and I headed out to visit a friend and watch The Bachelor. As the pregnant mom of a…
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I Want to Forgive
The sonographer sat my chair upright and told me we were finished. The doctor would be right in to discuss the pictures she had just taken during the twenty-week anatomy scan of our second child, another baby boy. As she turned to leave, she paused. “Wait.” She studied the scans she held in her hands and…
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I Roared My Little Lion Out
I crouched in the hospital bathtub, wearing nothing but my sports bra. I’ve always been the girl who would rather contort herself in a bathroom stall than go bare in the women’s locker room, but my nakedness was nothing compared to the pain. The idea of laboring in the tub with my loving husband nearby…
Erin Curlett 