afraid Archives - THE AWKWARD MOM

Tag: afraid

Afraid in the Dark: Observations from the Dead of Night

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Do mothers have a sixth sense? I don’t know. I remember padding into my parents’ bedroom in the wee hours, and no matter how softly I laid my feet on the carpet or tried not to breathe–it turning into a challenge at some point–my mom would gasp awake. Everything okay?

Maybe she passed it on to me. A couple of nights ago, my eyes opened with a deep breath. I listened to the silence of a house asleep, the sounds of my sons breathing in the next room. And then, the sheets moving. Was my son groaning? I don’t remember.

It was a baby tooth of his, the one I’d haul him to the dentist for the next day. “I can’t get comfortable,” my son sleep-garbled. I offered him pain reliever, lay down beside him with my hand on his back, on those new muscles from school sports. (He used to fit inside my body.) He tossed some more, breathed deeply, then regularly. read more

The stories He writes

February 9, 2016 / Janel Breitenstein / 2 Comments

Reading Time: 3 minutes

It’s strange being back here, in this place.

I can still see the Nile directly out the window, though my husband and I actually stayed in the banda next door that night. They still leave in triplicate the same brand of packaged soap in the bathroom. I remember how the Nile had stretched before us in the morning, pink sunlight pooling on its surface while men fished from canoes hollowed from logs. On the banks, monkeys leapt like kamikazes from limb to limb. The scene is the same four years later. I remember crying, weeping, actually, from this very porch that night after dark under a spangled sky. I had been so very excited; so very afraid.