- Presentation of self

Once in a while, if someone knows or notices that I wear an insulin pump, that person says to me, “Don’t you love it?”, gushing on the word love.
This happened to me recently, during my annual check-up. I was sitting on the table with a paper gown wrapped around me and talking to my doctor, [...]

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- Words that cannot be said

When I was a child, there were words forbidden in our household.
The following were the big three. Really, these are the words I recall my mother itemizing, after she announced: “There are three words I don’t want to hear.”
I am about to write them, which is a kind of saying.
Stupid
Hate
Kill
My parents had five children. While [...]

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- Convalescence

Lydia came into the bedroom at 7pm last night and said, “Mom, I can tell you kept yourself busy this morning.”
“You can?” It was so sweet of her to know how I operate.
“Yeah,” she replied. “You never fold my clothes.”
She was right. Yesterday morning I busily and methodically went through the house, making beds, folding [...]

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- Reading comprehension: the joy and the pain

It’s MCAS season, and all three of our children — a 3rd grader, a 7th grader, and a high school sophomore — are taking them. They seem unbothered by a few days of testing: Lydia announced, “They don’t matter,” and Grace said, “No homework this week!” Eli is his usual cool and collected self and [...]

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- A huge disconnect

There is much beauty in the world and its people.
(Dear Reader, I beg your patience. In this post I’m going to attempt to start at beauty and end up at crisis. At this moment of beginning, I’m not sure I’ll find the path.)
There is much beauty in the world and its people. That is what [...]

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- Lice removal machine

Jimmy found some archival videos from an earlier time in our children’s lives when lice seemed to be visiting in regular waves. I hosted them on my head, too, more than once. I itched, and the girls diagnosed me. Here’s one of those lost moments:

Incidentally, the video captures a scene in [...]

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- Only the rain has such small hands.

Althea Crome Merback knitted Coraline’s sweater. She knitted these gloves, too.

In this short video on her work, Merback calls herself, as far as she knows, the “only person in the world who knits conceptual sweaters and garments on such a small scale.”
Seeing these gloves for no hands reminds me of a conversation I had last [...]

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- I surrender.

An ultrasound technician called me “laid-back” yesterday. This seemed, at the moment, not unlike other things people have called me, like “calm” or “safe.”
I could turn this into a boast, I suppose, but I’m not here to write about compliments. It does seem interesting to write about what it feels like, to me, to be [...]

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- All facts

I am a slow eater. Or, perhaps I live with fast ones.
At dinner, I said to the kids, “Slow down, slow down.”
I added, “I just read that people who eat fast are two times more likely to be overweight than people who don’t.”
Lydia: “You read that? Where?”
Jane: “Yes. In my Diabetes Forecast.”
Lydia: “So, it’s a [...]

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- Dear Ms. Morin

Jan Morin
Leicester High School (1979-1983)
Winslow Ave.
Leicester, MA 01524
Dear Ms. Morin,
My friend Rosemary, writing about her relationship to exercise over her lifetime, looks back on high school gym classes, where “being active meant being an athlete.” It made me think of high school gym class, and that made me think of you.
Ms. Morin, I was never [...]

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