Distance

Filed Under All Posts, Christie Healey, Family, Relationships | 12 Comments

For Christie Healey, family is chosen and distance is a state of mind.

I have moved many times in my life. Perhaps the most significant was the move from my home village to London in the late Sixties. Looking back it seems that this tearing away from my family and the small world I had known for 17 years set me on the path of the wanderer. The wanderer becomes part of a very different family.

My family is now made up of those I left behind: a sister, two nephews, a great-niece and a great-nephew; a son born in the U.S. and friends I have made over the years. My son has taken up my wandering lifestyle. He now lives in Hawaii. I live in Minnesota.

I have close friends, old and new, in Minnesota, but the rest of my magically selected family live in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, New Mexico and many other places. We come together whenever time and money permit, and sometimes when it doesn’t. Just because I need to see their faces, hear their voices and feel their presence wholly and completely. Read more

Here a Mother, There a Mother, Everywhere a Bit o’Mother

Filed Under All Posts, Family, Melissa Howden | 10 Comments

Melissa Howden finds new ways of acknowledging and remembering mom.

In the days preceding Mother’s Day my girlfriend and I were particularly sensitive to all of the Mother’s Day promotions: Mother’s Day bouquets, special brunches at our favorite restaurant, and numerous grocery store displays. We took to saying to each other half jokingly, “We ain’t got no mothers!” My mother died nine years ago and my girlfriend’s mother died two years ago. So while we were both making some light of our “motherlessness” in the face of an advertising onslaught, there was no denying the presence of our mother memories.

It occurred to me that while I was saying I didn’t have a mother, I in fact did have my mother, in two containers; one in the care of a friend in California and a smaller one here with me in New Mexico. My mother knew she was dying. As such she had time to prepare, paying in advance for her own cremation and for the distribution of her ashes off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. Read more

Once Upon a Childhood…

Filed Under All Posts, Family, Parenting, Prudence Baird | 13 Comments

Prudence Baird is transported back to a time when her boys were small; a time rich with storybooks, morning hugs, inquiry and magic.

Mother’s Day has come and gone—again bringing with it all the reminders that this phase of life soon will pass. Lumpy breakfasts in bed and hand-drawn cards, both lovingly crafted by children eager to please, have been replaced with brunch out and Hallmark cards personalized only as a grumpy teenager can do—with a signature.

And so it is that under a starlit dome outside my bedroom window, as Gemini’s twins arc overhead and the grandfather clock begins to strike midnight, my restless mind mulls over a bittersweet discovery made earlier that day as I trawled through a neglected drawer looking for letter-sized file folders.

My probing hand settled on a smooth plastic stick, a foot long, with rounded ends—a child’s toy; a magic wand mixed in with old pens, highlighters, Post-it notes and rolls of tape. The wand’s cool resin holds inside two liquids—one heavy and cobalt blue, one light and clear. In this embryonic fluid dances a teaspoon or so of silvery sparkling stars and tiny gold crescent moons that float from one end of the wand to the other.

I hold the wand to the light. As the particles swim to and fro, I am transported Read more

Refuge Re-dux

Filed Under All Posts, Family, Melissa Howden, Relationships | 8 Comments

It used to be that every summer afternoon in Santa Fe, New Mexico was cleansed by a monsoon. As a child, I spent many summers in Santa Fe with my grandmother, my Nana. Those summer monsoons came like clockwork—hard rain with thunder and lightening for about an hour—cooling and cleansing everything in the high desert.

Until the storms rolled in, my brother and I would play outside creating forts, running races, building little villages out of sticks and leaves peopled by rocks with painted faces: imagination unfettered. When the rain thundered in we’d head inside for tea and cinnamon toast.

My grandmother’s mother was English, so tea with milk and sugar was a staple in her life. Admittedly the tea my Nana made us was a little milkier and sweeter then, but still it instilled in me the sense of tea and toast as refuge—from the storm. Read more

Mommy Dearest

Filed Under All Posts, Connie Stetson, Family | 8 Comments

Mommy Dearest was a truly crappy movie.  I always want to put it on a double bill with Great Balls of Fire as a tribute to bio flicks gone wrong.  When that movie came out, I started calling my mom, Mommy dearest.  She thought that was hilarious.  Also, anybody seen The Bad Seed?  When that murderous little brat, Patty McCormick, says to her poor, victimized mother, “I have the nicest mother, the sweetest mother…I tell all my friends”.  EEEUUWWWW!!!  She loved it when I’d say that to her.

On this rainy Sunday, and I find myself missing my mommy something awful.  She’s been gone a dozen years now and I miss her all the time.  I miss her when I’m frustrated, thrilled, fat, thin, when I have a cold, but especially on this day: The Oscars.  My mother was a rabid movie fan and she would have been spending this day laying out an array of Goobers and Good and Plentys, Coke with crushed ice in wax cups, popcorn with real butter, Read more

Dog Blog

Filed Under All Posts, Connie Stetson, Family | 9 Comments

“I am the Lord Thy Dog and Thy Dog is a jealous Dog.
Thou shalt have no other Dog before me….”
Izzy Lamb Stetson ?/?/95-8/26/08

We had talked about dog adoption for nearly a year before I wandered into our local “no-kill” shelter. There were six others; snarling, jumping pit bull mixes of varying hue and stripe, though it looked like they all came from the same father. She was alone in a kennel, a lovely, blonde pup Lab-thing, quietly gazing up at me, her pleading eyes begging, “Please MOMMY, take me home.” Which, of course, I did, and Isabella AKA Izzy, Lamb, Bean, Izzybeanie and You Little Shit, became our first dog. Read more

Family Squabbles

Filed Under All Posts, Family, Melissa Howden | 2 Comments

It’s no surprise that 2008’s Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winner for Best New Play was August: Osage County. The play, by Tracy Letts, is about a family engaged in emotional combat—putting the “dys” in function. As a Broadway production it’s entertainment, allowing the audience to be voyeurs into the fictional family’s dramatic horrors. Perhaps some appeal of the play also has to do with the recognition of our own family dynamics under the proscenium arch. Whichever it is, it’s much more satisfying to watch another family go through it than to be doing it oneself, as I am now.

Be it on stage or at home, the question is begged, “Just what does a ‘functional family’ look like, and is that the most fictional family of all?” Read more

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