Kyra Moon

"Mom, who is she?" I asked about ten years ago. "She's my step-cousin. She sang at Susan's funeral, remember?" I did. I had never interacted with her in real life, but that's not what Facebook is about. So I added her. And she liked everything I did on Facebook. She liked everything my siblings did on Facebook. It felt a little strange being liked so thoroughly by someone I didn't even know, but I got used to it. She had opinions. She might have been the first person I knew to post favorably about liberal politics on Facebook. When the rest of us were bemoaning the Supreme Court holding up the Affordable Care Act in court in 2012, she posted how wonderful it was. She talked about how hard her mother, Susan, had worked for this. She loved Obama. She loved all the memes. Hidden among the memes came snatches of her life story. She was in and out of the hospital as long as I could remember. Ever since she was born without tear ducts life had been one sur...

 Prodromal It's not that we want things to get worse. It's that we want them to get better. We'll put up with all the earthquakes, plagues, and wars thrown at us if it means No more heart attacks No more chemo treatments No more hungry kids. So we see the signs We sense the thief in the night And we start timing contractions. They are regular, they are overlapping, And then they stop. They are regular, they spread from the abdomen into the back, And then they stop. False alarm. The due date is past. There have been enough world wars, enough fires, Even enough locusts. But those don't mean we've reached the end. Not all pain is active labor. And, when it finally comes, however slowly it might be, It won't be what we expect. A birth plan is not a birth prophecy. Still, we can reassure ourselves of this-- No woman has been pregnant forever.