motherhood

two

By Kate / March 5, 2010 /

It’s my little Zoë’s birthday today. How can she already be two years old? I remember the day she was born, the thick wet snowflakes falling outside as I tried not to think about being sliced open. I remember the terrible cold I had that day (as I do now). I remember that Donny took…

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on friday

By Kate / February 2, 2010 /

Zoë woke at 1:30 am with a fever. She’d had a cold for a week, but this was the first sign of a fever. She was inconsolable, so I brought her into our bed. “Cuddle me, mama,” she said, wrapping her arms around my neck. We had a fitful night of sleep, and in the…

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buying time

By Kate / January 7, 2010 /

I finally realized that I can’t juggle everything—teaching and editing and writing and child care and house maintenance—without more time. So starting next week, Stella will be in an extended-day program the three mornings a week that Zoë is in preschool. This essentially means that I’m buying back six of the ten work hours I…

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2010!

By Kate / January 1, 2010 /

I don’t usually spend much time reflecting on the past year as I switch over the calendar. I don’t make resolutions. Last night was the first time in years that I even stayed up until midnight. But even though I did stay up, I was kind of a Scrooge about it. We were watching the…

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working, living, and a note about structuring chapters

By Kate / December 8, 2009 /

I thought I should check in about how my writing is going since the serious truncation of my work time. It’s, um, not going. I was on page 156 two weeks ago and I’m still on page 156. It’s clear I’m not going to make my December 31st deadline. I go to the coffee shop…

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respecting differences

By Kate / November 27, 2009 /

I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving holiday and didn’t eat beyond capacity, something I seemed to do. Two meals, spaced five hours apart = too much food. I’m sure many of you have read Lynn Harris’ Salon article “Everybody Hates Mommy,” in which Harris tries to unpack why there is so much anger…

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fight for preemies

By Kate / November 17, 2009 /

I am half-way through my revision of Ready for Air, which is both exciting and daunting—exciting because retyping it has forced me to cut unnecessary paragraphs, to put pressure on my prose, and to never let the narrative threads slip too far from sight; daunting, of course, because I still have 150 pages to go,…

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porous

By Kate / October 15, 2009 /

Last week I was reading Elizabeth Alexander’s The Antebellum Dream Book, a stunning collection of poems about race and gender and identity and motherhood. Alexander is really brilliant—she’s brilliant in her poetry, but she’s also clearly brilliant in person, in interviews. (You can visit her website if you’re interested in reading some of them.) On…

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six

By Kate / September 13, 2009 /

Maybe it is the weather, which is hot and humid, so much like the weather six years ago when she was born. Maybe it is because I am thick in the revision now, typing as fast as I can, absorbed in the narrative of our own lives. Or maybe I will always do this on…

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heavy

By Kate / September 9, 2009 /

Beware: I’m a downer today. I’ve been feeling low the last few days—sensitive. The kind of sensitive that makes my feelings easily hurt, the kind of sensitive that makes it difficult to fall back to sleep if I wake up in the middle of the night. The kind of sensitive that makes me read too…

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