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Unscripted
Tin – Still it Shines. “… Like the tree-clock of tin cansThe tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.” ~ Seamus Heaney I filled out the online dating profile the way I once filled out my patient history forms during breast cancer treatment – carefully, not entirely convinced it was really about me. Age. Location. Gender. The beginning of a version of myself I could scroll past. Each field waited with bureaucratic calm, as if life had always been this sortable. Widow. I paused there longer than I expected to. There was a dropdown menu for everything that could be reduced to…
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All around, mama.
I used to think the hardest part would be balancing everything. It wasn’t. It was the leaving. For years, women like me were encouraged to “have it all,” which in my experience looked like learning how to walk away from what I loved every morning and do it convincingly. A new mother, I was not yet fluent in that language, holding a career together with one hand, my child with the other, and the rest of you braced against the nearest wall in a daycare parking lot, practicing a show of strength that mostly involved not crying until you were safely back in the car. When it was time for…
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A Mother’s Gift.
A Mother’s Day reflection on books, memory, and the quiet ways love expands a life On Wednesdays — or whenever the mobile library came — my mother took my brother and me around the corner where a grey van full of books waited. We treated it with the seriousness of people who had somewhere important to be. An industrial grey van, it lumbered into our housing estate on the Dublin Road without ceremony, its sides emblazoned with the scarlet lettering of the North Eastern Education and Library Board. To me, it was an Aladdin’s cave of unexpected treasures. It was possibility on wheels. And my mother knew it. Long before…
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Credit to a Newsman: Letters After His Name
From a Derry girl, more or less. Once upon a time, before everything became urgent and push-notified and accompanied by a breaking-news chime, we waited. Not just for the news – but for someone we trusted to tell it to us. There was a posture to it. A kind of quiet ceremony. You sat up. You paid attention. And in my case, you learned. This week, Teacher Appreciation Week, I’ve been thinking about that kind of authority. Not the loud kind. Not the viral kind. The quieter, steadier version. The one that doesn’t announce itself as important, but becomes so over time. The kind that walks into a classroom, sits…
