Before my cousin Bobby died in his garage in Arizona, he had stayed with me in Washington, DC for one brief period when we were in our twenties. Before Bobby showed up for treatment at DC’s Walter Reed Hospital with a shattered arm from falling off a tank during his deployment to Bosnia, we were children in the summer at our grandparents’ house in Grand Island, NY. The road my grandparents lived on was flat, crossing the island right down the middle. The house was white. In the yard, there was

TURNPIKE by Cindy House This is the road you take twice a week to pick up your son. These are the traffic lights you stop for or rush through, depending on the minutes glowing at you from your dashboard clock. There is the dinosaur miniature golf …

When my eleven-year-old son was an infant, I joined a group of mothers who’d all had babies within a few weeks of each other. One of the moms often began sentences with, “If I were you, I would do my research.” She once said this to me when I mentioned that my son liked avocados. If you questioned her, pushed for an explanation, she’d say, “Just look into it. That’s all I’m saying.” I don’t think she had any specific information warning against avocados or pacifiers or toys made in China; she ju

In 1983, when I was a sixteen-year-old sophomore in high school, two teenagers in my town hit a tree head on at a high rate of speed, resulting in their deaths. It was one o’clock in the morning on a Friday in early June. The sound shredded the sleep of the residents in the closest neighborhoods. It was all anyone talked about for the last two weeks of school that year. I went to the funeral for one of the boys, the one I knew. It felt like the whole school walked out that day to attend the ser

We want to protect our children from everything, even sometimes ourselves.

Vodka Vodka Vodka Cindy House "My fourth grader smart-asses his way through his homework," I say. "This week, he had to write a paragraph from the prompt, 'My friend and I have so much in common,' and his first line was, 'We both still have our lives.'" My therapist smiles, sitting across from me in her armchair. I cross my legs in my usual spot on the tweed love seat in the flesh-colored room that is her home office. "On the way home from school today, he said to me, 'Mom, when you

Every time he left, I would feel all of my muscles shake out of a tense grip, as if I’d been holding on to the edge of a cliff to save my life. The summer I was sixteen, I filled out job applications. The job every teenager in my small town wanted back then was the salesperson position at the high end sporting goods store. I don’t even know why I applied for it; I was someone who had never played a team sport, someone who spent gym class in the outfield, daydreaming and praying the ball would