Parents

Posts tagged Parents deal with my mother and father: what they taught me, what I had to unlearn, and the long work of understanding the people who raised me. Family is where most of our first assumptions get installed, and a good deal of my writing circles back to that beginning.

My parents handed me real things and difficult things in equal measure. There were fears and prejudices I absorbed simply by being in the house, and there were also the ordinary failures and kindnesses that every family carries. I write about all of it as honestly as I can, without softening the parts that were hard.

Understanding where you came from is part of understanding who you became. These are the posts where I do that work in the open, looking back at the people who shaped me before I had any say in it.