Greg Lippert
Inspiration piece

Mentoring
By Robert Haydon Jones
Response

The three 12-year old Latina girls were holding up matching bracelets and smiling at the camera like they really cared for the person who was taking their picture.

For years, Jimmy had told anyone who would listen that he was the biggest beneficiary of the mentoring program he delivered every Tuesday afternoon to a sixth-grade class at the new school in the bad neighborhood in his city.

Most of these children came from poor, single-parent families. Almost all of them had relatives in jail. Or in gangs. Or both. The girls were ahead of the boys. They were already super wary. The boys were still mostly kids. Some of the boys were already being recruited by gangs, but, even so, they had a year, maybe two years of childhood left. For the girls, childhood was long gone.

When Jimmy first appeared, obstensibly to read stories to the class, the children reacted like he was another grown up enemy. He had enough experience to not take it personally. He just read stories to them for a while. And they liked that. He was a dynamite reader. He had an AFTRA card.

After a few sessions, he started to talk to them a little after he read a story. He talked about his life. He was a writer. He was a former Marine. He had a child in his thirties who was disabled and lived in a group home with his wife who was also disabled.

Jimmy was a high school baseball umpire. At the end of every session, he gave out extra, unused, pearly-white, game-balls two or three at a time. Only three of the 27 kids in the class played baseball, but they all loved the balls.

At the end of each session, two students would walk Jimmy out to the parking lot. He used the time to try to get to know them better. How many brothers and sisters? Did they walk to school? Would they like him to bring a book on something?

By the time June rolled around, Jimmy was tight with most of the class. There were always a few hold-outs, but most of the kids liked Jimmy for the simple reason that he was one of the very few people in the world who had any interest in them. He liked them and they liked him. It felt good.

During each session, Jimmy used his i-Phone to take portraits of the kids. Two or three every week. He carefully selected the photos and put them in a fancy frame. Then after his last session of the year, he would give each child a framed portrait. This year he would also give the three girls extra framed photos of them as a threesome showing off their matching bracelets.

Jimmy’s wife told him she thought the children really appreciated the framed photos. Jimmy hoped she was right – but he suspected that for most of the class, the framed portraits would serve their family over the years as a frame of reference. The photos were easy. The frames cost money.

He looked again at the shot on his i-Phone of the three girls. They were 12, going on 13, going on 25. Jimmy could see the grown woman in each of them. Where would they be in 20 years? If they ever looked at the old photo in the fancy frame, would they remember who had taken it?

He wondered: Does anybody really remember anything?

He had been talking up awareness to the class all year. How you could live your life asleep or awake. Aware or dim. He had cautioned them it wasn’t easy. In this time of hand-held instant reference and myriad digital hideouts, it was harder than ever to focus on anything.

The night before his last session with the class, he looked at their photos again. This time he really looked hard at each portrait. Each child seemed to radiate an inner light – like the portraits of the old masters. At first, he marveled at the excellence of his i-Phone. Then he looked again. Every child had the light – the inner beauty of a masterpiece.

He was shocked. He had been asleep! Dim. He hadn’t really been awake. These children were beautiful. Each child radiated beauty. He was dismayed he hadn’t seen it.

He went from photo to photo to check. They weren’t all happy – but they were all beautiful.

The boys and the girls.

He was stunned and embarrassed. He had preached awareness to these children every week for a full school year and yet, until now, he had never really seen them.

He brought their framed photos (and one of Sally Kelly, their young, first-year teacher) in a carton for distribution at day’s end. Right before he left for the last time, he told them that he had been looking at their photos as he put them in the frame and that he was mighty impressed by how good they looked.

“You look good because you are good,” he said.

The next day the teacher emailed him. She wrote the kids loved their framed photos, as did she. She hoped Jimmy would come next year and work with her new class. Jimmy replied he would.

Looking back, Jimmy was sure he had gotten more out of this year of mentoring than anyone. He still felt a twinge of embarrassment at his blindness. He had preached awareness with his eyes wide shut!

On impulse, he checked his i-Phone for his photo of Ms. Kelly, the teacher. He hadn’t looked at it the day before when he had done the careful review of the shots of the kids that had opened his eyes.

Once again, he was startled. Ms. Kelly radiated beauty just as the children had. The same inner light. Not from a child. From a young woman.

Once again, Jimmy felt a surge of embarrassment. He had been so blind!

Yet all he had to do was to look.

From now on, if he could manage to stay awake, there was a world of beauty to see.

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Taxue
By Daniel David Watkins
Inspiration piece

One morning, quite a while ago, before Hong Kong became what it is, a horse appeared on the beach, just a silhouette small upon the white sand. It stood at the far end near the rocks wild but not free, being hemmed in on the right by the sea and on the left by the bank rising to the fishing village of Deep Wave Bay. The land beyond to Lantau Peak was hidden. Unknowable. I had come down in the early morning from the apartments – themselves, at that time, incongruous. The cold blue grey of dawn made me giddy and I blinked before I stared at the impossible horse thrown up by the sea. I thought I might hunker down where I stood above the beach to watch. Safe.

Wu Fong made wooden puzzles. He would take them to the market in Central for the tourists. He fashioned their intricacies from drift wood but you would never have known, once the grain was polished. The pieces were hard from the salt and bleached white and he left them like that so they felt good in the hand. And the boys would take them apart in their arrogant haste but never could put them back together with their fumbling fingers. All impatience.

In truth, the boys had woken me. Their feet had slapped down the concrete steps outside my door and I wondered at them in my half dream. But they were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they had gone to the village to help with the nets. The thought of them unsettled me and I imagined they would appear suddenly on the low cliffs above the horse to throw stones.

The horse began to walk now close to the water’s edge. It lowered its head before shaking itself away and rising to a trot. Perhaps it had seen me or sensed me watching, and the possibility of a connection between us unnerved me so that, even from my vantage point, I decided to rise to my feet.

Mr Lau would know. He would know how the horse had appeared. He would know what to do. The boys said the horse had been stolen from the stables at Shatin by the Wo Shing Wo but the ransom had not been paid. In desperation the gang had brought it in the night to Lantau on an old dredger. I looked at Mr Lau the following week but he shook his head and said nothing. So I knew it wasn’t true. And the next day a rumour grew that the horse had swum across from Tsing-Yi to escape a cruel owner. I imagined the poor beast’s head bobbing above the waves, its eyes wild, its nostrils gaping red holes as it struggled against the currents and tides between the great container ships towering above. It could not have been like that. These were fumbling tales.

Just as suddenly as it had arrived that winter morning, so it disappeared. The impossible horse vanished after the second week. And they said it had been a ghost.

I met Taxue in the spring. I had been so lonely during the long winter that I wondered if I had created her out of my own imagination, that she had somehow emerged out of the breeze as alienation personified. My kindred spirit.

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Amy Souza
Response

Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You
By Paulette Beete
Inspiration piece

A slow burn of tone
no shoulderwailing or headjerks,
the fight’s tight

tween figners and keys,
which isn’t to say he & the Hammond
are merely slowdancing.

Sometimes he likes to
lay into a particular note,
moan it under the guitar & drums

so his mouth spills music
& he seems a little drunk.
Over his stretched notes

the drummer’s urging the skins toward truth
his mouth hangs open
fingers flash slide & glide
building desire

into something
that’s enough
pushing satisfaction

through elbows
through forearms
through sticks

til rhythm haloes the stage
like neon.
The guitar man’s deep in prayer

brailling questions to his frets.
The wide-hipped guitar’s
seductive:

Touch me, play me, pull me.
He wants to take us with him—
but she’s impatient, jealous—

Break me down like this.
Touch me here.
Use all your fingers.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Jonathan Ottke
“Nothing Happened, Everything Happened”
Inspiration piece

The Grass War
By Jewel Beth Davis
Response

Sarah sat on the grass where it bordered her garden. She threw down her trowel and cultivator. She had just spent more than two hours weeding and cultivating the soil. Sweat ran down between her breasts and soaked through her white cotton tank. It wasn’t hot but the weather was exceedingly humid. She was having trouble seeing as her eyes brimmed with perspiration. Her jeans and sneakers and her arms were dark brown from layers of organic soil. She’d remove her clothing in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. She wasn’t bringing them into the house until she shook them out. It was idiocy to have showered prior to gardening and she’d have to take another after planting her tomato plants.

Every year Sarah tried to weed out the grass that sprouted from the grass seeds and trimmings blown into her garden by the mower. And every year, there was more grass growing in a tangled mixture with her flowers and herbs. She tried repeatedly to pull the grass out by the roots. Instead, the grass broke off just above the soil line and she ended up pulling out plants she’d wanted to keep. She wanted every single sliver of intrusive, unwanted growth removed from her two garden plots, one on either side of her porch stairs. The only success she’d achieved was thinning out the spearmint and the lilies of the valley that spread rampantly throughout her 3 by 7 foot plot to the right of the stairs, as well as the catnip and oregano to the left of the stairs in the 2 by 3 foot section. She replanted the lemon thyme that she’d mistakenly ripped up with two strands of grass and chanted a prayer to the herb to support its transplantation and re-rooting.

“I’m so frustrated. I go through the same thing every year. And every year, there’s more grass growing in my garden.”

Her neighbor and sometime boyfriend, Ben, sat on her porch steps watching all of Sarah’s efforts with great ease. “There’s nothing wrong with your garden or the grass. It’s just a matter of perspective.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sarah’s forehead and brow creased. She was in no mood for a philosophy lecture or self-improvement advice. She was over-heated, sweaty, soiled, and her skin itched from working in the garden.

“I’m just saying that it’s the way you’re looking at the grass and the garden that’s getting in your way.” Ben stood and moved to the edge of the garden. He gestured to the lawn that was full and healthy. It was Kelly green in hue. He pointed to the grass. “Is it okay with you that the grass grows here?”

“Of course,” Sarah said. “It’s the lawn.”

Ben pointed to the grass nearer the garden plot. “What about here? Is that okay?”

“Yes, it’s still part of the lawn.”

He stooped down and touched his fingers to the grass about an inch from the edge of the garden. “And here?”

“Yes.”

Ben moved his hand to the soil just inside the garden’s edge, an inch from where his hand had last touched down. “What about here?”

Sarah bent over, raised the watering can above her head, and poured the entire can over herself. “Ahhh, that’s better.”

Well?” Ben said.

Sarah shook the droplets of water from her body like a dog. She lowered the can and set it by the stairs. “No. Absolutely not.”

“So, you’re telling me, that you expect the grass to grow like a frenzy all the way up to where the soil begins and then stop and go no farther. How’d you feel if your vegetables, herbs and flowers spread all over the lawn?”

“Would hate that.”

“Guess my point is that gardens do what gardens do. They always need weeding every spring before you can start to plant unless you use that black plastic mulch to suffocate it. It’s part of the process. So why don’t you just change your perspective and enjoy the whole process?”

“I don’t see you out there, breaking your back in your yard, pulling weeds and planting flowers.”

“That’s right. I choose not to have a garden. But if I did, I wouldn’t whine and moan about one of the necessary steps to accomplish my goal.”

“Hogwash,” Sarah said. She marched into her house without another word, slamming the door. Ben’s lips crooked up into a slight smile. This was a hallmark of their relationship.

A week later, on her way to her car, Sarah stopped to appraise her garden which was growing enthusiastically. She was grateful that she’d completed all the preparations that had led up to this moment and was filled with a sense of satisfaction. A few stalks of grass intermingled with the chives and miniature strawberries. She didn’t love their being there but she had to admit, she didn’t loathe them as she had previously. Nothing had really changed but somehow, everything had.

Maybe she’d ask Ben to dinner some time this week.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Tora Estep
Inspiration piece

Carnival
By Amy Rogers Nazarov
Response

Down the midway we flew
As if tossed by an unseen hand
We tallied our coins, then spun and stretched and tossed and pulled
The balls through hoops, the sticks over barrels

Our raucous pleasure soaked
In grease from sugar-dusted funnel cakes
Under a penny moon you kissed me
Friends turned away as strangers gaped

Coaster cars clanged into
Barkers’ threat-laced promises
The screams and the laughter of thousands
Underpinned the soundtrack of our flashing neon love

When sunup came, paper napkins skittered by
Rust-flecked Ferris wheel cars swayed, bereft of riders
In the hush I searched my palm for a trace of you
And found one battered dime

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Jonathan Ottke
“Banana and Two Nectarines on a Plate”
Brush Markers on Paper
Response

First Stop
By Jewel Beth Davis
Inspiration piece

Our first tour date is in a tiny town in the middle of England. The theatre is a small gem. About 100 to 150 seats, built in the fifties. A tiny working lighting booth perches in the back. The stage is proscenium and about half the width of a Broadway stage. An old red velvet curtain opens in the middle. It looks worn and well loved with a few threadbare spots. Spacious wings connect to stairs down to a dressing room and green room. The entire place is comfortable and welcoming.

1972. Our touring theatre company, New England College Theatre in England is made up of actors from the theatre departments of both University of New Hampshire and New England College. It is the company’s maiden tour and the future depends on how well we are received in the small towns and large cities of Great Britain, Wales, and Scotland.

Once we’ve settled in, our director, Wheel, asks the actors to move backstage to prepare for a tech rehearsal of three of the American one-acts in our repertoire: It’s Called the Sugar Plum, Cop-Out, and Next. Wheel is balding though he is only twenty-three, with longish wavy hair. He’s also my boyfriend. He is a trained mime, a gifted character actor, and has a mobile face and body. He can sometimes be mercurial but is a sweet, kind man by nature, which makes him a great choice for tour director.

Zeke is running lights and directing the set placement of the minimalist scenery we have transported in the van. As always, he has made the performance all about lights and scenery and is driving Wheel mad with his demands.

“Zeke,” Wheel says, “I understand this is your priority but we have to start running the show. We only have a limited amount of time.”

“Well, it should be your priority too if you don’t want our first performance to look like some kind of schlock community theatre piece,” Zeke says. He is tall and swarthy and the previous summer, he amputated two of his fingers on a band saw in the UNH shop. He barely seemed to notice when it occurred and was back in the shop in twenty-four hours.

The four of us wait backstage. Besides me, there is Bean, who is my best friend and college roommate, Lanny, a handsome teddy bear from Connecticut, and lovable Chip, who makes a habit of getting himself in trouble with his loose cannon mouth and behavior. His father is a big deal purveyor of real estate in NY City and Chip has never had to worry about practical things like rent or food. We’ve set up our props on the prop table; checked out the dressing room and green room; and hung up our costumes downstairs and backstage. We are fast running out of things to do so we listen at the curtain to Wheel and Zeke bickering, with Gustave, the props master, mediating in a half-hearted effort. Gustave does not like conflict. Zeke has the spotlight aimed at center stage and Wheel wants it blacked out so we can begin the rehearsal.

Chip takes a hank of blond hair and tucks it behind his ear. Immediately, it falls back into his face.

“Hey, did I ever tell you about the time my father brought me to his exclusive club for lunch in New York City,” Chip says. “I ordered a tuna sandwich and they brought me a piece of bread, a piece of lettuce, and the entire can of tuna, without the can.”

“Yeah,” Lanny says. “You told us, only about ten times.” Lanny’s family owns a chocolate factory in Connecticut that’s known for its chocolate Easter bunnies.

Chip laughs and his laugh sounds slightly pornographic.

“I have an idea.” Three pairs of brown eyes meet then shift to Chip’s blue eyes. “It’ll break up the monotony,” he says.

“What is it?” Bean says. She is not one for risk-taking without knowing what she’ll be doing and the consequences.

“You’ll see,” Chip says. “It’s funny. When I give you the signal, you and Jewel pull each side of the curtain open so the spotlight hits me.”

“But what is it? I’m not doing it unless you tell me what it is,” insists Bean.

“Okay, okay, I’ll tell you. It’s called fruit salad. Do you know what that is?”

Lanny collapses into paroxysms of belly laughs. Bean and I are flummoxed. We look at each other with scrunched eyebrows and questioning glances.

“No,” I say. “Never heard of it.” Lanny’s laughter is verging on the hysterical.

“But what the hell,” I say. “I am so bored.”

“We’d better not get in trouble for this,” Bean says.

“I’m the only one who could get in trouble but I won’t. You’ll see. It’s just fun,” says Chip.

It is a real sign of our nerves that Bean or I would agree to do something without knowing what it is. But here we are, in a new country at the outset of a great adventure. So we position ourselves on either side of the curtain opening, placing our fingers near the split in preparation. It is now pitch black backstage and we can make out that Chip is moving around between us but we can’t tell what he is doing.

“Quit giggling,” Chip tells Lanny. “You’ll wreck the whole thing.” Lanny shuts up and moves to the side of the stage where he won’t be seen.

“Okay,” Chip whispers. “Now!”

Bean and I move the curtains to the side and then we see. Chip has dropped his jeans and his boxers to the floor and is completely naked from the waist down. He is skewered in the spotlight. His back is to the audience and he has pushed all his male parts through his legs to the back.

“FRUIT SALAD!” he says.

Bean gasps. I am shocked into silence. Lanny is laughing uncontrollably. Both Zeke and Gustave are shouting and laughing. It is very telling that the guys are laughing and the women are not.. Wheel, however, is not laughing. His face resembles the Old Man in the Mountain in New Hampshire, very near to where he’s from. His amber eyes look like they’re burning. He is absolutely still, like a leopard ready to pounce. Then, in an instant, he leaps up onto the stage, spins Chip around, grabs him by his shirt collar with one hand, and shakes him violently.

“Are you out of your effin’ mind?” Shake, shake, shake.

I can’t peel my eyes off the appendages swaying back and forth.

“Do you know what you’ve done?” Shake, shake, shake. “Do you know what would have happened if one of our hosts walked in here right now?” Shake, shake. Chip giggles, from nerves, I think.

“We would have been done before we even started. We would have completely humiliated Rich and Cope.” He is referring to our theatre professors who put the tour together. He continues to shake Chip until I think I can hear marbles in Chip’s brain rolling around and smacking into each other. “If you ever pull something like this again, you’ll be catapulted onto the next plane back to the states. Do you hear me? Now pull up your pants and get backstage, you disgusting piece of sh-t.” Wheel runs his hand through his hair. His face is streaked with angry color.

In all the years I’ve been with Wheel, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him angry like this. I don’t think I’ve seen him angry at all. Chip disappears backstage faster than I thought possible, hopping and jumping in the process of pulling up his pants and boxers. Lanny has also made himself invisible. Then Wheel turns the full force of his anger like a tractor beam onto Bean and me. We are pulled into the force of his eyes boring into us.

“I cannot believe the two of you would sanction such irresponsible behavior. And not only sanction it but take part in this fiasco. I’m really disappointed.”

“But we didn’t know what…” I try to tell him. He holds up one hand, turns his back on us, walks into the audience, and orders Zeke to start the black out. Zeke complies without argument.

We have no words. I feel terribly guilty to the point of nausea. My eyes meet Bean’s and she looks like she will cry at any moment. We move backstage, our heads down. I am so angry at Chip I don’t speak to him for the next twenty-four hours. Wheel had never criticized either Bean or me before. Especially about our work ethic. After this experience, there was a new sense of professionalism in the tour. We fooled around, we had fun, but we never crossed that line again. I wouldn’t say Chip became a model of good behavior; he wouldn’t have been Chip, but he never did anything to jeopardize the tour again. I imagine it took some time for Wheel to regain his trust in us but he never mentioned the occurrence again, which says a lot about him. And the England tour continued on successfully with other troupes for another twenty-five years. No one knew how close we came to failure at the first stop.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

“Untitled” (in progress)
Tora Estep
Oil on canvas
Response

My Post Adoption Depression
By Amy Rogers Nazarov
Inspiration piece

The vision always began the same way: I’d be leaving my house cradling my 9-month-old baby to my chest, his chin on my left shoulder, my right hand supporting his head, my left hand on his fleece-swaddled rump—and then I’d slip on the ice-crusted iron staircase. With the cold metal rushing up at us, a single thought would grip me: How do I protect him?

It had been a month since my husband Ari and I had brought Jake home, since I’d vowed to the governments of South Korea and the United States, as well as social workers in both countries, that I would do anything to keep this child we had adopted in Seoul safe from harm. For weeks, the imaginary accident had played like a film loop in my head; I’d break it down frame by frame, looking for places where I might regain control.

Among my preferred defensive maneuvers: Tuck his head snugly against my neck, leaving a gap for him to breathe into; quickly fashion the low-hanging end of the fleece blanket into a makeshift pillow, buttressing the padding already around him; pivot in midair so I’d land on my side, reducing the chances of crushing him. I might break my arm, but his tiny body would be cushioned by mine at the moment of impact. I’d only been a mom for four weeks, but I believed that this kind of detailed strategizing to defuse all possible threats was what all new mothers did.

Ari and I had first met the baby in his foster family’s apartment in Seoul, where his foster mother, Mrs. Lee, had served us platters of absurdly large strawberries and baram tteok, a treat made of mashed rice cakes filled with a sweetened bean paste. But I couldn’t eat a thing.

I remember his unexpected warmth and heft when Ms. Park, our social worker, carefully placed him in my arms. I smelled his hair and admired his socked foot in the palm of my cupped hand. He regarded me with mild curiosity, gnawing on a blue plastic rabbit that dangled from his neck by a satin ribbon. “Bonding,” the thing I’d stressed about for months prior, as most prospective adoptive parents do, took about 90 seconds. My love for him was instantaneous and complete.

On Friday, we went to our adoption agency to take permanent custody of baby Jake. On Saturday, we boarded a plane to Washington, D.C.

Not 24 hours after crossing the threshold of our home with us, our son grew so listless I became alarmed and called the pediatrician, who hadn’t met him yet. He’d had a mild cold on the day we’d received him in Seoul; still, the on-site doctor deemed him well enough to travel. But when I described his pale complexion and tearless cries to our new pediatrician over the phone, she ordered us to the emergency room, warning that dehydration in babies was extremely dangerous. We’d been diligent about giving him his bottles, but he was indeed dehydrated, and while he came back to himself after receiving intravenous fluids, we were wrung out from fear, from the feeling that we’d missed some obvious sign of his distress.

More health problems stacked up over the next month, a fairly common phenomenon among children newly adopted from another country. Jake came down with bug after bug: gastroenteritis, conjunctivitis, a virus that kicked off a 104-degree fever. His large head alarmed the pediatrician enough that he ordered a sonogram to rule out hydrocephalus. Ari and I slept on the floor near his crib, argued in the dark over whether it was too soon to give him another dose of baby ibuprofen, entertained him with hand shadows as the technician wanded his soft spot looking for brain abnormalities (none were found). With each subsequent illness, I felt my worries compound into something more ominous—a mounting pile of doubts about my ability to parent. If I feel this helpless in the face of germs, how am I going to protect my child from bullies, racists, West Nile virus, climate change?

Around week four, my appetite waned. I started bursting into tears for no reason at all. Not only did I obsess about the icy stairs, but I became preoccupied with how to defend Jake from imaginary carjackers. I started practicing unbuckling him quickly from his carseat. I began missing work deadlines, ignoring calls from friends, wearing the same ratty black pants day after day. Sleep was strangely elusive: Even at the end of an exhausting day caring for this bright-eyed, sweet little man, whose smiles were coming more frequently, I’d lie awake in bed as if my eyelids were screwed into the open position.

Bed began to feel like the only safe place, in fact.

“Amy, I really, really need you to get up,” Ari would say over his shoulder as he carried Jake downstairs to where our gentle new part-time babysitter was waiting. “In a little while,” I’d answer vaguely, wishing I could just disappear beneath the sheets forever. Once or twice I reviewed in my mind’s eye the contents of the knife block in my kitchen, wondering whether a serrated or straight blade would be more effective at slicing open my wrist.

For the first time ever, I was depressed. And as far as I knew, there was no name for the state in which I found myself. I couldn’t, after all, call it postpartum. I hadn’t gone through the hormonal roller coaster of pregnancy and recovery. I hadn’t experienced labor and delivery, nor was I breast-feeding, which some adoptive parents successfully train their bodies to do. Moreover, I’d had a clean bill of mental health as we moved through the adoption process. (In fact, any history of a prospective adoptive parent’s using antidepressants or receiving counseling of any kind, whether or not it’s related to depression, can derail their chances of adopting a child from certain countries, South Korea among them.) Nevertheless, I was in the throes of an adoptive parent’s version of postpartum depression.

It turns out I was not—am not—alone. A March 2012 Purdue University study suggests that between 18 and 26 percent of adoptive mothers struggle with post-adoption depression, brought on by extreme fatigue, unrealistic expectations of parenthood or a lack of community support.

In the course of interviewing some 300 women who’d adopted one or more children in the prior two years, Karen J. Foli, an assistant professor of nursing at Purdue, says that she and her team—including Susan South and Eunjung Lim—began examining societal assumptions about adoptive parents. Among them: the belief that the mother who doesn’t carry a child for nine months or doesn’t go through labor does not require as much help after the child comes home, does not need respite care, or someone to unload the dishwasher, or a few casseroles in the freezer.

I had certainly assumed as much. I didn’t take maternity leave, feeling at some deep level that I neither needed it nor earned it. I kept up with my reporting and writing assignments, underestimating the importance of just rolling around on the floor with our new baby, who likely was grieving the sudden absence of his beloved foster mom.  I didn’t feel that I “deserved” as much help as my friends who’d given birth had received. I found myself questioning my authenticity as Jake’s mother. I’d look at Jake and think: This child came from another woman’s body. Who am I to say I am his mother?

“No matter what, there is time when the [adopted] child has lived apart from his or her adoptive parents,” says Foli, co-author, with Dr. John R. Thompson, of The Post Adoption Blues: Overcoming the Unforeseen Challenges of Adoption. “When he comes home, it adds to society’s impression that the adoptive parents are the ‘winners,’ as compared to the birth parents, who relinquished the child, and the child himself … There is this unspoken message that the adoptive parents are coming out [ahead] of all in the adoption triad, [so] there can be a stigma when you, the adoptive parent, struggle in your new role. This was your life goal, people say to adoptive parents. This was what you wanted.”

In other words, to complain that my new life taking care of this baby was much scarier and much harder than I’d ever thought it would be seemed obscene.

Yet just like some biological mothers, I may not have had a choice in how I felt. Dr. Lisa Catapano, an assistant professor of psychiatry at George Washington University Medical Center, told me that both postpartum depression and post-adoption depression are likely to be triggered by biological, psychological and social factors, and that there is more overlap between moms by adoption and moms by birth than one might first realize.

No matter how the baby arrived, new parents are contending with shifts in their identities and in their relationships with their partners. New parents struggle with feelings of inadequacy. Perhaps they lack relatives nearby to help keep up with food preparation or laundry duties, or find themselves leaning on friends more than they’d like as they adjust to this profound life change. And it’s all but guaranteed that no new parent is getting much sleep.

In addition, love at first sight is not always the norm whether you adopted the child or delivered her. “Just as people fall in love differently,” says Catapano, parents “bond at different rates with their babies.” While I felt strongly attached to our son the minute I first held him, I know other adoptive and biological parents who’ve told me, a little tentatively, that theirs was a more gradual process.

Another potential factor that could contribute to PPD or PAD: infertility. There is no question that the struggle with infertility that may have preceded the arrival home of an adopted child—or a pregnancy, for that matter—leaves its scars. “Some of my patients with fertility problems harbor a secret fear that they were not meant to be parents,” Catapano suggests. “If you came to adoption by way of infertility, the consequences of infertility don’t fully disappear when you have your baby, because there were all these losses that happened to you during a period of infertility. You don’t have a baby in the way you had planned to, or in the time you had planned to.”

While biological mothers’ fluctuating hormone levels are thought to play a part in PPD’s onset, depression after adoption, Dr. Payne found in a 2010 study “was much more likely to be associated with stress and with a perception of how difficult the [adoption] process was rather than a personal or family history of depression.”

How I wish I’d known about Dr. Payne’s and Dr. Foli’s work back when we first brought Jake home. Thankfully I recognized that something was deeply off kilter, that I needed help to get better and to get Ari help to care for our baby. I asked my parents to come stay with us, started Zoloft at my doctor’s suggestion, and got a prescription for sleeping pills to battle the hellish insomnia. Other eyes were on me then, too: I know now that our social worker, whom I’ll call Monica, who had conducted our pre-adoption home study back in 2007 and who had gotten to know both of us well, was closely monitoring our family.

When Monica would visit, I was scared that once she saw how weepy and tired I was, she would remove Jake from our custody. But my fears were unfounded. Though I had no name for what I was feeling at the time, Monica had suspected then that I was depressed, and she suggested I talk to my doctor. Years later, she told me that she never wavered in her belief that Ari and I were taking the right steps to ensure our baby’s well-being and to help me recover.

For the next six months, my therapist helped me explore my greatest fear: that I was not a good enough mom for Jake, who’d had no say about who would raise him and who over time would have his own adoption-related losses to grieve. I realized that my periods of greatest despair were driven by two key fears: that I would not be able to keep him safe, and that I’d be unable to help him make sense of how he came to us.

And then one day that fall, a curtain lifted. It wasn’t an hour or two of feeling like my old self, which I experienced around the sixth or seventh week of taking Zoloft. It was a whole day, and then another, and another, in which I felt prepared to meet Jake’s needs, in which I marveled at the way the autumn light hit the Potomac, in which I thanked the universe for bringing our family into being. The great and unexpected gift of my depression was the ability to appreciate more fully everything I might have lost.

This piece was originally published in Slate. Read the original here.

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Note:  All of the art, writing and music on this site belongs to the person who created it.  Copying or republishing anything you see here without the express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Brian MacDonald
Inspiration Piece

The Bone Coin
By Anne Nowselski
Response

Mida had found the bone coin in a secret slot of the small desk of the room. She should have left it here, and for a while she had been able to ignore it. But as the days went by, her curiosity over took her and she put it in her pocket, pulling it out often to look at.

It was the size of a large silver coin and fit in the palm of her hand. The edges were smooth from age, and there was a small hole at the top for a string. The surface was snowy with an etching in the bone of a kind of cat. When she held it to the light of the window slit, she could see slender scratches for whiskers on its broad face. It had the pointy feline ears, but no tail and the paws seemed especially large.

Most days she leaned over the desk with the bone coin laid out and she stared at it, as if she were reading tarot stones and the story of it would be revealed to her. The cat eyes were thoughtful, as if they too wondered at the blue eyed girl staring at it. Mida knew it was wrong, but she often imagined the person who had owned the bone coin. Who had lived in this same cell as her and during the long lonely days, she would talk to the coin’s owner.

“My horse is brown with one white foot, as if he had dipped it in milk. I call him Milky sometimes because of that,” she had said once. The sound of her own voice surprised her in the quiet of the prison, like a loud echo.  She had thought someone might have heard her, but no one answered. No one ever answered. Distant cries came from beyond the thick cell doors, particularly at night, or a voice might call out in loneliness, but she never heard any other voices.

The guard, Eloi, who had burly thick arms like tree trunks, brought her meals three times a day, but never talked. His heavy foot falls were familiar rhythms, especially if a crying became too disruptive, then she could hear him come and there was a heavy thud, and then silence.

She had seen a wolf once when her father had taken her to market. It had been in a wooden cage that was barely enough room for the grey body to turn around. The fur was matted and flies buzzed around its tired and runny eyes. She had begun to weep for it, telling her father how cruel it was to cage an animal like that. Her father had brought her close and pointed at the string around its neck and the ivory coin attached. “This is a Mudanci,” he had explained even as she tried to squirm away, “It is not an animal.”

Her cell felt like that creature’s cage, and her mind would drift back to the image of the Mudanci. If she had allowed herself, she could have just sagged into a corner and waited for whatever fate awaited. But she had not wanted to give up, not like that creature had. Every day she walked in the tight circle of her cell, calmly, as if she were strolling through the house gardens. She plucked the straw from her hair after she had slept and stuffed them back into the corner for her pallet. She watched the sky change colors through the narrow window that a squirrel could not have gotten through, counting the days that went by.

And she spoke to the bone coin for company. Imagining the girl who had owned it, for she thought with confidence, the strange cat had a dainty feminine look in its eyes. If she concentrated well enough, Mida could distract herself for hours thinking of this other life. She got comfort from knowing someone else had been here, even if it had been a Mudanci.

The sun was spilling pink rays in her window when she heard Eloi’s heavy foot falls echoing down the hall. It was too early for the evening supper, she thought as she listened sitting on her stool. As she waited, she heard another sound, a light whisper, like the rustling of leaves across cobblestones. Then the noises stopped right by her door, and there was a metallic clank.

Abruptly, Mida stood, smoothing down her aged and stained riding dress. A visitor had never come and her heart fluttered at the hope of who it might be. Her father to take her home perhaps? Or the Sagen to—

The door opened and Eloi’s scarred face squinted into the darkness of her cell. She recoiled, as he always made her nervous. He never spoke, only watched with great wide eyes as if he were expecting something. But then a tall elegant woman pushed her way into the tiny cell, gently shoving Eloi to the side with a dark hand. Her dress was a pale blue, like the sky and with a dark velvet pouch hanging from her belt. Her dark hair was piled neatly on her head. Mida could smell a whiff of fresh lavender when the woman came in.

“Lady Mida,” the woman nodded as she sniffed her nose and squinted her eyes.

Mida was now very conscious of how she must look. Her face must be smudged beyond recognition, and her hair must be a wild mess. The dress was practically new when she was brought, but now the pale green fabric was soiled and stiff. Her hands, she saw with dismay, were caked with grime, so she hid them behind her back.

“I am Sagen Govinda. And you have been here quite awhile now, I think. I also understand that your name was given by the apothecary, what was his name?” She asked as she glanced at Eloi, then back at Mida.

Neither of them spoke, though Mida was thinking of that tiny shop and the sweet musky smell that permeated the air like a cloud of pollen. Even now, so far away and many months later, she could still smell it.

“Well, it hardly matters,” she shrugged, “You’ve been accused of buying a  constancy draught that helps the Mudanci hide from us. But there is a way to clear your name—“

With a gasp, Mida felt the breath she had been holding escape her lips that had begun to tremble.  She could be free. The thought was too much and she felt her eyes watering with tears.

The Sagen flashed a beautiful smile, “It will all be over soon, my dear. Your family has written to us and—“ her dark eyes flickered to the desk and squinted as though reading something unpleasant. “What is that?” She snapped, and then her long dark fingers were reaching out and picked the bone coin on the desk where Mida had left it.

The blood rushed to Mida’s cheeks as she held herself back from lunging and trying to snatch it out of the woman’s hands. Her eyes darted, and she felt Eloi’s stare on her as she tried to think quickly of what to say. “Oh,” she whispered “Oh, my, that was here when I came.” She tried to shrug, but felt awkward and stiff.

Eloi was silent but the Sagen’s smile faded into a serious frown. “These things are very dangerous,” she cautioned, “They are evil medallions for the Mudanci. To aid in their transformation.” She turned the coin over, “A lynx,” she whispered as she passed it over to Eloi.

“I’m not a shape changer,” Mida yelped.

Sagen Govinda nodded solemnly, “We’ll see.” And then she opened the velvet pouch and pulled out a dark rough stone.

A renewed flush of dread silenced Mida, but she forced herself not to wince.

“You have nothing to fear from the Truthstone,” the Sagen assured her, but then added with a grin, “Unless you are a liar or a Mudanci.”

Just hearing the name of the stone made her tremble. A Truthstone was the surest way to find Mudanci, as it forced them to shift into their animal form when they touched it. The stones were rare, though, and Sagen Govinda must have paid dearly to have it brought here.

As the Sagen held out the stone which was about as big as her hand, Mida tried not to shrink away. Months ago, the apothecary had offered her a small vial of dark liquid, thrusting it into her hand, even as she protested. His eyes had been kind and understanding. “It’s free,” he had whispered, “Come back any time.” The Sagen before her now had a face that was nearing a snarl as she pressed the Truthstone forward.

Mida longed to hold the cool black stone in her hand and speak the words, “I am not a Mudanci!” It was a beautiful and bright image like a spark in her mind. But just as these thoughts formed, a darkness would descend, like a candle that was nearing the end of its wick. Deep inside, she knew she could never say those words.

Thrusting the stone, the Sagen touched her skin by her collar bone. Immediately, Mida felt the familiar tingle crawl up her spine like a cold panic seeping into her body.  She stumbled backwards, trying to curl into herself as the room became strange and hazy. The sweaty dress became loose on her thin frame and she watched her horror mirrored by the Sagen who was quickly becoming larger.

She slipped into the darkness of her clothes and she wanted to imagine she was merely dreaming back at home. But she could still feel the soft fur along her small arms and the odd teeth inside her mouth. And then there was a twitching behind her, and she knew the long tail with the black tip was there. She wanted to weep.

“Get rid of it,” Mida heard the Sagen hiss.

Her tiny heart was pounding and she quickly fought her way with tiny claws into the light of the dim cell. She looked up at both people who towered over her now. Eloi reached down as if to pluck her up by the neck, like a disobedient puppy. Without thought, she jumped up with powerful hind legs, clearing over him to the little slit window.

“Stop it from escaping!” the Sagen cried and Eloi lurched upwards.

Mida scraped through the narrow opening. Her golden body emerged into the red dusk and for the first time in weeks she breathed in fresh cool air. She could see a long way off over the grassy plains that were gold red in the setting sun. She might never be able to go home, not now that they knew what she was, but maybe she could be free in the plains where many of the springhares roamed.

Her thoughts went back to the bone coin, and the Mudanci who had most likely died in the prison. As she stared down at the ground, it seemed very far away and she felt dizzy. She regretted not being able to get the bone coin from Eloi. She would have to leave it though she felt as if she were abandoning her. Mida turned back to the setting sun and leapt.

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Note:  All of the art, writing and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without the express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Jay Young Gerard

Breathing Lessons

Response

Lisa Nielsen

Dropping Back

Inspiration Piece

That rare expanse of city landscape offered
a concrete welcome mat.
You use the room to stretch your feet and
stare at commuters on their hurried trek.
You look for clues in quickness and frowns, sashaying and smiles.

Where are they hurrying?
Home? To be knocked over by a golden retriever, ignored by a teenager, greeted by a meal left in a stainless steel sink?
A date?
An empty barstool waiting, a hand over yours like a paw, like a claim

You miss that you don’t miss that attention
but fawning conceals disinterest,

So you finally unraveled
the strangling sheets, and stopped
opening doors to debris

My heart has lost its range of motion,
I snuggle in
these moments of transcendence,
where games of musical chairs and tag are obsolete.

I’d once been taxidermied and placed on a shelf, but

today I am an expanse of sidewalk
playing solitaire on a streetside table,
using the second chair as a footrest,
staring through dark shades
observing the rush.

Today the world is my home

Jay Young Gerard

Shadows Cool

Inspiration Piece

Lisa Nielsen

The air we breathe

Response

The air we breathe calculates wind patterns
While the dust of twilight and
the remains of sunrise
coexist between the slats

i worry over ruin

Trees shove sidewalks
and the road hesitates.
Avoidance becomes the cornerstone
of a carefully tuned universe.

Shadows can conceal loneliness for only so long
before a slap punctuates a heated debate,
stealing away the silence of a mother’s miserly offering.

let that settle in, let that be the memory that haunts you