Tag: family

“I’m amazed at our human capacity to adapt to the unbearable. Almost anything can seem normal if it’s inflicted on us long enough.”

A family confronts its racial past along the Appalachian Trail.

The music emanating from a storefront church in Brooklyn was a death knell: Once my grandmother heard it, her childhood was over.

How a journalist found her voice as her mother lost hers.

“I got angry, my mother cried, the addicts got high. That became a holiday theme for years to come.”

Children Of QAnon believers are desperately trying to deradicalize their parents.

Blake Butler writes movingly about his late wife, poet Molly Brodak.

A hidden diary, a love story, and a mystery.

“Far from our barrios, mountains, and islands, we cook, so that we may practice swallowing our undesirable truths, acidic and blood-heavy.”

In the wake of their parents’ deaths, three siblings struggle to get through the day-to-day.

Ditching the Midwest for Southern California on the heels of a crushing divorce, the last thing Cheryl Jarvis wants is her 26-year old son for a roomie.

Robin Antalek considers the legacy of the man who abandoned her for another family and never looked back.

Adam Kuhlmann was outmatched at the 1993 Little League World Series. His 11-year-old nephew helps him to learn from his errors.

Naz Riahi recalls her vibrant childhood in a suburb of Tehran, and considers how the harsh realities imposed by the still new Islamic Republic seeped into her family’s life.

If you are the family breadwinner, how do you calculate the value of time with your children?

Rita Strand, age 58, posed as a health inspector and got unrestricted access to South Dakota prison.

Jillian Dunham traveled thousands of miles from home to get away from her grief. It found her anyway, in a stranger’s Bangkok apartment.

Wendy McClure recounts how an old audio tape of holiday music becomes a record of family history, unspoken rituals, and grief.

While caring for her mother post-surgery and her grandmother during her final days, Megan Stielstra wonders who’s really taking care of who.

Hannah Howard considers tradition, identity, and love as she navigates the decision whether to keep her name after her wedding.

“But poetry…has helped me to find new meaning within and across linguistic boundaries.”

Andrea J. Buchanan contemplates the way illness and pain can freeze a sufferer in time, as if encased in glass.

Robert Lopez examines what it means to be an assimilated American from Puerto Rico, and what was gained and lost in the process.

After Jay Deitcher sits silent as his wife is verbally assaulted by his father’s racist friend, he grapples with the ways his family has been muted by trauma.

In her debut memoir, Sarah Broom builds her “obsession” with her family home — destroyed in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina — into a story of how families decide who they are, how they got here, and how they reconstruct themselves over and over again.

Can an American family learn to become outdoorsy in New Zealand, where the natural world is part of the national DNA? Sort of.

Years after her cousin was killed, Lilly Dancyger is haunted by images of murdered women in the news.

Twins have bonds that exist beyond words, and they fill the gaps left by what cannot be said.

From straightening her teeth to finding her true love, Summer Block has reached the milestones in her life later than most.

Beatrix M. Rooney discovers a tragic secret that may explain her brother’s descent into cruelty and violence.