Home Posts tagged "family"

Tag: family

Family Status: It’s Complicated

Surprise! You get me this week. Who will you get next week? Who knows? We’ll figure that out later. Anyway. Due to circumstances, I’ve been thinking a lot about my family this week, so I’ve been pondering the fact that there’s a reason I love to write and read books about found family. My family is actually pretty easy to explain–I found me some. My roommate is my dear friend. We met online, then met in person, then took up residence together first because she needed a place to stay, and then because we got on really well, and two incomes are (good lork, are they ever) better than one. I’m old enough to be her mom, so sometimes just to make things easier, I say I am. Sometimes I call her my “internet daughter.” Sometimes, when I want to make bio kid yelp, I call her “my good daughter.” My second kid, of course, I found by the side of the road after a rainbow fire tornado tore through and demolished–kidding! I actually birthed her. I have the scars to prove it. On the other hand, my son is not biologically my son. He and my child have been best friends since they were 16-ish, and at a point he needed a place to stay, and he’s been here off and on since. Mostly on. It does make it difficult sometimes to talk about my family–last week I was talking to a coworker who has known me for years,…

Continue reading

COVID Christmas, Year 2

Things are a bit different than they were last year. For one, we’ve gotten vaccines and boosters, whereas last year we did not. We’d had a full lockdown in March, and this year, we didn’t. Masks are not required now in Michigan but are “recommended.” And yet, COVID-19, the “virus in Seattle” from December 2019, is still very much with us. We’re on our, what, twelth variant now (second Variant of Concern) with omicron? There was a tweet the other day from a doctor about not wanting to learn the entire Greek alphabet due to the virus. I don’t mind that. I find it kind of interesting; kind of like the tropical storm/hurricane naming. I just want it gone. Last year, my family made the heartbreaking decision to not see my in-laws for the holidays. They’re elderly, and we were concerned about them catching the virus. We did a FaceTime thing on Christmas Day to open gifts and that was okay…and we made the best of it….but let’s be real. It just wasn’t the same. They were missed. Terribly. This year, we’re all vaccinated and boostered, so we’re going for it. We’re seeing them both days, actually. It is great to go back to some measure of normalcy, although the specter of this thing is still hanging in the background, always there. Siri Paulson, my fellow Turtleducker, posted on Facebook a meme about in the future, how we’ll be going through old stuff and run across a mask and it’ll…

Continue reading

Still Fixing My Car

My grandfather gave me my first car. It was 1990, and the car was a 1970 Ford Custom 500 Galaxie. It was seventeen feet long, and it had fins. It had over 200,000 miles on it. It was in pretty much perfect condition. That was my grandfather. When you spend money on things, he believed, you take care of them. He had a truck that was older than my car. His car, the one he preferred to drive, was their “last new car” when my grandparents bought it in the eighties. It still looked in great shape when I parked in his driveway last month, paying what would be my last visit to a 94-year-old man. My grandfather stormed the beach at Normandy. I can’t tell you much about that–I am learning now, as I knew I would one day but I was always meaning to do something about it “soon,” that I did not pay enough attention. Grandpa worked at the Joy manufacturing plant in my hometown, building huge orange mining machines until he retired. He and Grammy ran a farm too, and raised four kids. Grammy worked sometimes, when it was convenient, so she would be able to get Social Security too. Then they moved from Pennsylvania to Arizona, and ran a four-trailer mobile home park in their retirement. Historians call them “the Greatest Generation.” For my family at least, I know they certainly rose to the challenges of their lives. I was there when my grandparents celebrated…

Continue reading

Fourteen Years, In Memoriam

The other night I dreamed that my dad was taking one of my siblings and me for a drive on the West Coast (British Columbia, for you non-Canadians). The timing was contemporary, for we had modern cell phones and we felt like our current adult selves, in that way you know things in dreams. I didn’t remember until an instant after I woke up that my dad has been dead since 2003. I don’t think about him often anymore, except right around this time of year. He died in March, late in a bitterly cold prairie winter. The day he was buried, there was a thaw and, finally, everything began to melt. Ever since then, I’ve found late winter difficult to bear. Some years are harder than others; this one has been easier so far, probably because it’s been so unseasonably warm here. Bittersweet for sure. He feels now like part of another life, one I don’t remember as well as I would wish to. He did get to meet the man who would later become my husband. For that I will always be grateful. But since his death, the two of us have moved across the country, joined or made new communities, established our careers, bought a house, assumed adult responsibilities within our families, traveled to seven countries (eight as you’re reading this!). He didn’t live to see Turtleduck Press or all the writing I’ve done here, or to hold my first novel in his hands. And my two…

Continue reading