My son has a job as a lifeguard this summer, and today I drive him to work. Though he now has his driver’s license, he does not yet have his own car and so for the time being, we must share mine and he is being a good sport about it. I drive slowly; neither of us has an agenda and there are no external distractions. We are simply mother and son, each fully present, as we so often were when he was young; before I became preoccupied with the passing of time and midlife reinvention, and before…

I received an unexpected gift this Mothers Day. It was delivered from my past and came wrapped in a twenty year old quilted lavender bedspread. It was packed up in the back of our storage closet, propped up between the wooden crib where my babies slept and the plastic crates that my daughter recently brought home…