From Issue 27 of The Mockingbird magazine.
1. How the sidewalk around hospitals always smells like cigarettes. It reeks of grandmothers and determination.
2. The way you thought your children would arrive as clay to be shaped and instead are demanding little rocks who lay on your body to shape you.
3. How true friendship in middle age means sharing low-carb recipes via text but eating loads of garlic bread when you see each other in person.
4. The way old dogs are the best listeners for the kindergartner who has had a hard day.
5. The way a corridor in a children’s hospital, or a seat in an AA meeting, or the Waffle House at 2 a.m. all offer the same uncanny hope.
Illustrations by Aubrey Swanson Dockery.
6. How heartache feels awful and wonderful because it’s all you have left of someone.
7. The way a church says they welcome everyone but actually mean you are welcome to join our outreach committee and put up with our nonsense, but then you do join and it turns out you love nonsense.
8. How children’s birthday parties in trampoline parks are actually not fun for anyone except for the sibling of the birthday child. All of the joy but none of the pressure.
9. The way a jazzercise class in the church gymnasium looks like a room full of elderly women in an aerobics class, and it is actually a room full of 12-year-old girls feeling like hot stuff as they shake a tail feather to Whitney Houston.
10. How your one relative who served in prison is preferable to all of your other relatives. He takes the kids on walks in the woods every Thanksgiving. Because he knows what it’s like to not have trees around.
11. The way your 14-year-old smiles and he still looks 6 and it takes your breath away.
12. How control gets ripped away and it comes as relief.
For more, subscribe to The Mockingbird. Illustration by Aubrey Dockery.
#2 and #6…amen to them both…
Great wisdom here, in pithy sentences, along with a light touch. Well-done!