My 7-month-old baby has had COVID, flu, and RSV.
The holidays were our Superbowl. We went in with game plans. Fox was our football, but he wouldn’t be passed around. We stood like two offensive linemen reciting “COVID times” whenever someone asked to hold him. Unfortunately, our older children were defensive lines, and they outnumbered us. They raced to see Fox after school to tell him about their days — which is aggressively adorable if you’ve never seen small children talk to a baby about math and art projects in detail. The gates came down; the viral load crept up.
The second pandemic that awaits Covid-19 first responders
The men and women working in hospitals, ambulances, and treating covid patients will be expected to resume their jobs, too — re-enter the site of their most traumatic professional moments — where patients young and old, without a single family member allowed by their side, died in acute respiratory failure. The endless phone calls they made to families on the death of their loved one will rob them of sleep long after a vaccine neutralizes our collective fear. As a society, when the immediate threat is over, we will still expect responders to continue saving people who enter the emergency room doors. But who will care for them or their families when the pandemic ends? If we’ve learned anything in the past few weeks, our economy is only as successful as the health of the people who work to uphold it.
My father—a former sergeant in the Emergency Service Unit, the most elite branch of the NYPD—was never comfortable with the word hero. He certainly didn’t feel heroic when he scanned for flesh, or a uniform, or any indication of human life as a crane shook through debris for hours on end. He didn’t feel heroic when he arrived home to his kids, enraged and exhausted after a grueling day. He didn’t feel heroic when all he could hand over to a cop’s grieving family was a desk photo, a wedding band, or a revolver. And he wasn’t treated like a hero on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, when then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg failed to invite responders to the memorial ceremony because of “space constraints.”
There’s No Host For An Ectopic Pregnancy
Women are not ‘hosts for a baby,’ in the same way that men aren’t hosts to their sperm count. Unless we’re going to stop men from doing everyday activities that lower sperm production, like drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes, we must allow women agency over their own bodies and reproductive systems.
Dust samples collected on September 16th and 17th had a reddish tint the first few days, what a scientist, Dr. Paul J. Lioy, attributed to the amount of human remains and blood contained within them. According to Lioy, the dust was “about as caustic as drain cleaner.” The rescue workers who claimed they were “breathing in dead people” technically were. Out of the twenty-three policemen who died in the collapse, my father was a friend to seventeen. Fourteen of them were members of ESU. And of those seventeen, a handful was very close to him. My father told me that one of the bodies he found was in good shape, a rare occurrence that coroners attributed to the amalgam of chemicals in the dust. Out of the fourteen ESU cops who died, only five bodies were recovered. Overall, only 291 bodies were found intact, and about 21,744 remains were found in total. Over 1,700 families were left with nothing to bury and approximately 3,051 children lost a parent.
“I saw him before he rushed to get there, just briefly – my last look at him, the man who was my father before he left to join the rescue effort.”
An Island of Support For New York’s Police
“In order to understand the mind-set of those who plant these signs, I often go back to Sept. 11 and its aftermath, when our hometown surrendered its fathers, wives, brothers, cousins and neighbors to the city to aid in the rescue and recovery efforts at ground zero. More than 270 people from our island didn’t return that night. The first responders who survived came back, nine months later when the site closed, like my father did — full of rage, chronically exhausted and sick.”
Pop Culture and American Politics Continue to Obscure Working Moms’ Realities
“The whole scenario felt right out of a sitcom, as my son tried his darndest to escape the small pad separating his bare bottom from the restroom tile — except I rarely see TV shows that capture the gritty truth of a working mother’s experience.”
She Was Fired On Maternity Leave
“He once lived inside her and that’s how it felt when he wasn’t near — that she was missing a vital part of her herself, like leaving your right arm at home when you need it out in the world.”
Being A Nanny Didn’t Prepare Me For Motherhood
“I figured mothering would be easier than nannying—after all, I’d be the one making the decisions and the rules. What I’d yet to realize was that, when I was getting paid to do housework and negotiate tantrums, I had a ready and renewable source of patience. When my back ached from carrying a toddler who refused to walk, I got to go home, sit on my kid-free couch and watch television with a beer or, better yet, meet my friends for happy hour.”
My mom’s one sports rule? No quitting
“When I felt backed against the wall wanting to quit soccer, or travel basketball, or varsity cross country, I often challenged my mother on what she knew about the hard work involved and my reasons for wanting to walk away. How could she possibly understand when she was the one waiting for me in the car, not running sprints in the rain or juggling conflicting sport schedules with SAT prep? Looking back as a parent myself, I now understand exactly what my mother knew about hard work, shuttling teenagers to late-night practices, toting toddlers to gymnasiums and windy fields on weekends, packing bags with cleats, sneakers and snacks and washing countless uniforms, towels and gear for the next day.”
Sweating Through My First Year of Parenting
“My end goal in working out wasn’t fitting into my pre-pregnancy jeans (though that was a perk), but finding out who I was now that I was my son’s 24/7 diaper-changer, bather, entertainer, nurse and partial food source.”
“As far as Staten Island’s residents were concerned, it was just as well we were excluded and discarded by Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. We considered our hometown the city’s best-kept secret; they certainly didn’t want us and we didn’t care for them to ruin our peace and quiet. (The borough is still the least populated, with fewer than 500,000 people living there). Furthering our seclusion, we were the only borough without a subway system, and there are still only two routes to get to Staten Island from Manhattan: to drive across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge or board a ferryboat.”
A Bug Phobia Controlled My Life, and In The End, Only One Remedy Worked
“His hands travelled higher up my thigh. Soon, they would part my butt cheeks and have me wishing that I’d splurged for a Brazilian wax, the kind that leaves your sensitive parts numb. I wasn’t the type to shut the blinds or pull the curtains when I undressed. There was something about the idea of a voyeur that I found amusing. If a neighbor’s prying eye happened upon my bare ass, it would be within his right to stare.”
“The first, and only time, I was locked in a cell was at the hands of my father. I was just a child and he held the keys. With a swift turn of his wrist, he put me away. If you asked now, he’d say it was a joke—nothing more. For him, it was but a quick unmemorable instant. For me, it was another of many times my father felt like the kaleidoscope I loved; each turn different, magical, and sometimes blurry and out of focus.”
“I tried to capture her like a still frame torn from a reel of film—ten years old, my age, a newly minted fifth grader sitting in the car next to her father as he drove down the Belt Parkway just like Dad and I were.
“Head came off in the glove box,” Dad said.”
A Review of Staten Island Noir
“In this collection, fourteen stories traverse various Staten Island neighborhoods from the Ferry terminal, to the wealthy inhabitants of mansions on Todt Hill, to the “Fly-Ass-Puerto-Rican-Girl-from-The-Stapleton-Projects,” and of course the infamous visible-from-space-with-the-naked-eye Fresh Kills Landfill.”
A Review of Maria Venegas’ Bulletproof Vest
“If you don’t believe in magic or fate, Maria Venegas’ debut memoir, Bulletproof Vest, might change your mind. The narrative reads like a novel and is written in a similar fashion to the corrido, a traditional farewell ballad for peasants and infamous outlaws. And an outlaw her father was, with enough shootouts, run-ins with the drug cartel, and lay of the land knowledge to fill countless storybooks. Venegas’ precise creative license seamlessly weaves the different threads of her life: an emigration from Mexico to the Chicago suburbs where she was raised with her mother and six siblings, ultimately making a home in Brooklyn, to her father’s epic life story emanating from the inherited property where they were both born: “La Peña” (the rock) in Zacatecas, Mexico.”
A Review of Lacy Crawford’s Early Decision
“Lacy Crawford spent 15 years privately tutoring high school teenagers in the art of perfecting the college essay. Since the 1960s, college application rates have skyrocketed, competition has become fiercer, and parents now stop at nothing to get their children into their top choices for college. Many of these students hailed from privileged, affluent households. Crawford has the unique perspective needed to capture the mania associated with the process in her debut novel, Early Decision.”
Samantha K Smith 