Becoming

soon seemed that anyone who had the means to go was now going. Much of the time, the departures went unan ...

see, there were no big trees like the giant oak that sat outside my bedroom window at ...

just carried on. This thing with the car was no different. If there was some way to fight it, if ther ...

S 3 omewhere along the way, my normally laid-back brother started to sprout worries. I can’t ...

recently, in a tragedy almost too giant for my young mind to take in, one of my fifth-grade classmates—a ...

Should things get scary, we realized, our rescue wouldn’t unfold the way rescues did in the tidy aft ...

S approvingly at pictures of cute grandkids, patiently endured gossip and long litanies of health woes, ...

My mother was one of seven children in her family. My father was the oldest of five. My mom ...

around, a cigar-puffing patriarch who’d sit in his recliner with a newspaper open on his lap and the evening ...

and the oldest of what would be ten children in his family. A quick-witted and intelligent kid, he’d bee ...

I become their bosses. And it bred within each of them at least a basic level of resentment an ...

gave me a sideways look and said, just a touch hotly, “How come you talk like a white girl?” ...

Everyone seemed to fit in, except for me. I look back on the discomfort of that moment now and recogn ...

A 4 t school, we were given an hour-long break for lunch each day. Because my mother didn’t work and o ...

only grew blacker and poorer with each year. There was, for a time, a citywide integration movement ...

I she could. At Bryn Mawr, she became one of the most active members of the PTA, helping raise ...

when I showed up at home, there’d be food in the fridge, not just for me, but for my friends. I knew ...

My mother maintained the sort of parental mind-set that I now recognize as brilliant and nearly impossibl ...

B It was another small push out into the world. I’m sure that in her heart my mother knew already that ...

this expectancy, even as I was unsure of what it all meant. Everywhere I looked, bodies were changing. ...