Wild Violet Featured Works: Week of Oct. 14 (Parenting)
Parenting leads to both challenging and rewarding experiences that most people could never have anticipated beforehand. This week, our contributors examine different aspects of parenting: In Yasmin Tong’s essay, “Learning How to Love and Let Go,” she shares the rewards and challenges of trying to adopt through the foster care system. In David Linebarger’s poem, “SAT Scores,” dedicated to his daughter, he contemplates the meanings behind a big life event. In Thais Derich’s essay, “The Magic of Eating a Banana,” she delves into the...
Read MoreSpeaking in Tongues
The author’s daughter and mother-in-law This week, I’m living in a tri-lingual household — English, Portuguese and baby. It’s an interesting dynamic, because not one of us understands fully all three languages. My husband’s mother does not understand English but is fairly fluent in baby. My husband speaks both English and Portuguese, but I translate baby into English for him for the most part. And me? My rudimentary Spanish brings me no closer to understanding the Portuguese language than it brings me to understanding a Nirvana song. Cheerfully, if...
Read MoreThe Magic of Eating a Banana
Nate is six months old when his pediatrician tells me that I can start feeding him solids. I am so excited to offer him something besides rice cereal that I run down to the store with him to buy a couple of baby-food jars. He bounces close to my body in the baby carrier. As I peruse the “kid food” aisle, everything comes from a box or a bag or even—yogurt—from a tube. When I get home, I crack open a jar and enjoy the pop sound of the air releasing. With Nate in the high chair and my heat-indicator spoon in hand, I give him his first bite. He sticks out his tongue over and over like a...
Read MoreSAT Scores
(for my daughter) Love is SAT scores, my neighbor says, they have so much to do with who meets who on a college campus, love now waiting in line with suprising legions of seventh-grade students, your decision, not mine, to take the early SAT, this country’s fingerprint, the marks you make whirl-whorl weak and perhaps weeded-out, or good, better, best, ancient potency of phallus, your girl-boy mind wielding #2 pencil, love somewhere inside you as I am inside you through life and death we will enter together the doors of others, and some lucky one will open your door, find you waiting...
Read MoreLearning How to Love and Let Go
I was 42 and recently divorced when I decided I wanted to adopt a child out of the foster care system. I could have found an anonymous sperm donor or a gay friend to help me become a mother, but parenting interested me more than pregnancy. My passage into motherhood began with an interview with a social worker, a home inspection, and an eight-week foster parent training. When I invited my family to attend my graduation from the training program, my younger brothers boarded a flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles with their toddler children, and my mother drove four hours from Fresno to...
Read MoreWild Violet Featured Works: Week of Oct. 7 (Cats)
My cat, Luke, protects our house When we put out a call for works involving pets, all that came were cats. Perhaps it’s because cats look so mysterious: they allow us to project onto them all our emotions. Or perhaps there really is something ineffably marvelous about cats. You be the judge. In Margaret Karmazin’s science-fiction story, “Brodsky,” a woman begins to suspect that her cat may be keeping secrets. The poem by Pamela Hill Epps, “At My Feet,” explores the relationship between humans and cats. In Barbara Kussow’s poem,...
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