Buzzfeed helpfully offered a quiz this morning to help me figure out which psychological complex I have. The results were not exactly earthshaking. I have a Guilt Complex which includes “feelings of unworthiness” and a tendency to “put others needs before my own.” I need to develop self-compassion and prioritize my well-being, etc., etc. Okay,… Continue reading Bumpers
Tag: depression
Backwards Day
My parents sent my brother and me to a summer day camp for several years during the 1970’s that stood out to me as more and more unusual in my memories while I was raising Sarah. Camp Elbanobscot was run by liberal Jews like my parents, and it was religiously and racially integrated, but evenmore… Continue reading Backwards Day
I-Village
Yesterday turned into a beast of a day. I was emotional after doing my writing, and stirred up by its angry undertone and my recounting of the “ableist” responses to Sarah’s death. Anger is a hard emotion for me to wrestle with. Then later on yesterday I found a big cache of old photos and… Continue reading I-Village
The Ferryman
I loved logic puzzles and games when I was growing up. I liked to figure out how to get everyone from one side of the river bank to the other safely, or which of five friends must have been wearing the purple hat and red shoes, and so forth. I especially liked when there was… Continue reading The Ferryman
Kindred
When I was in my first year of high school, the movie Carrie opened and my parents forbid my teen brother and me from seeing it. This was pretty rare for our parents; they were laissez faire about most things and did not have a lot of rules, and we had seen The Omen and… Continue reading Kindred
Comfort Inn
When Sarah was six years old and younger, our area experienced regular power outages during storms, especially winter snowstorms. Washington D.C. isn’t exactly known for its rugged response to the weather. The government and the schools here have traditionally closed at the drop of a hat, sometimes even pre-emptively closing or announcing a delayed start… Continue reading Comfort Inn
Raisin Bagel
Yesterday I found myself craving and eating a lot of carby food in the middle of the day. A big bowl of popcorn. A raisin bagel. Pretzels. Not sure why. It was a deviation from my “healthful way of eating” that I’ve been on since January (although I did take a break during our trip… Continue reading Raisin Bagel
Superheroes
I’ve been looking through more of Sarah’s writing recently and really enjoying it. Sarah featured Max and me in a lot of her stories and non-fiction pieces. Emily, her tutor, mentioned to us at the Shiva that Sarah would usually present us as superheroes in her stories. We were high status for her. Sarah wrote… Continue reading Superheroes
George Washington Bridge
My Dad is coming to visit us again in a couple of weeks. He’s thinking much more seriously about moving into a particular assisted living community, one fairly close to Max and me. So far Dad and I have been on two rounds of tours of such facilities, one in August in New York near… Continue reading George Washington Bridge
Doorknocking
Last summer, before Sarah died (B.S.D.), I was surfing the net catching up with various people in my life in my nosy way, and I Googled my law school ex-boyfriend. He was a dual JD/MD degree candidate and very serious about medical school, and I knew he ended up in the Midwest (at the most… Continue reading Doorknocking
The First Year Without Sarah 