Featured Writers 

Jodi Richardson: My Son is a Bully

Jodi Richardson is a member of the Thursday morning feedback class. She's attended the Memory to Memoir retreat and was an inaugural member of the first yearlong Memory to Memoir Intensive. Jodi is working on a memoir about supporting her best friend through cancer.

Before becoming a parent, Jodi was a junior high teacher for "at risk" kids. She finds being a mother even more challenging.

When she read this piece about her son in a class recently, I asked if I could publish it. I think it's a critical subject and I really admire Jodi's courage in writing it and letting me post it here.

The principal at my son’s school and I are on a first name basis and it’s not because I am the president of the PTA. No, it’s because my son is a bully. I wonder whether other parents, parents of non-bullies have ever given much thought to my position. 

I choose to bravely volunteer at the school, hoping I won’t run into my son sitting in the office, waiting to see the principal. For now it is an unwritten rule that I not help in his class or drive on his field trips. That only makes things worse. But I still volunteer at school. Maybe a part of me being there is to quell any rumors that I don’t care, that I’m not trying. 

Last year, after a volunteer shift, I saw another fourth grade parent in the parking lot. Recently his children had received some of my son’s negative attention. 

“Hey Bill…I’m Timmy’s Mom.”

“I know who you are…” 

Maybe I should have taken the verbal cue and retreated, but running away or ignoring a circumstance offers no solutions. 

Sarah Savasky: Body Work

Sarah Savasky has been a member of the Friday morning feedback class for a number of years. She writes, "I live alone with my husband, two really stupid dogs, one cat and the voices in my head. In my spare time (which I have lots of), I write humorous, poignant essays about living with chronic illness and other amusing subjects. I also love to make things out of vintage fabric, paper, buttons and ribbons. 

Body Work

I have been to so many body “workers” that I’ve lost count. Partly because I live in Santa Cruz, which is the hub for the mind-body connection, touch-feely, new-age type people. But mostly because I am desperate for help. I thought I’d given up on them but somehow recently I let myself get talked into seeing one again. This particular person came highly recommended as a gifted “healer”. I must have been at a weak point. I must have thought I had nothing to lose (besides two hundred dollars).  

Anyway, I ended up on this man’s table waiting to be healed. I’m not exactly sure what type of healer he was. Not exactly an osteopath; definitely not a chiropractor, or a cranial sacral practitioner, or a Shaman. I think he was called Dr. Mark. I know there was a “doctor” in front of his name. I’ve notice that the title “doctor” is used rather loosely in my neck of the woods hence the quotation marks.

At any rate, the very first thing Dr. Mark did was touch my heart. And I don’t mean that in the sweet, gooey way.  I mean he literally touched my heart. Well not literally. He touched my chest. Then just like that he told me my heart was not in the right place. Now I know I’ve made some mistakes in my life. Some very big ones, but I have always felt that my heart was in the right place. I have never deliberately hurt anyone that I can remember. 

Melinda Iuster: Making Ends Meet

It started out so little, just a few computer cards. Just a box or two of used computer punch cards. I guess they were used to program very early computers in 1978. The boxes of used computer cards were stacked on the loading dock of the UC Davis physiology building... building 700. My boyfriend Dave swiped a couple of boxes occasionally as he left his lab, and brought them to a recycling center where he was paid about eight dollars. Eight dollars was a lot of money. If I try to correlate those eight dollars with today's money, it would be about eighty dollars. On those eight dollars we could either go out to dinner, or to a movie. I could afford a movie about twice a year.               

Enid Brock: My Mother's Closet

Enid Brock is a member of the Wednesday morning women's writing practice circle and also attends the Friday feedback class where she regularly produces wry, thoughtful essays on food, parenting, families, and domestic life. Her article, "A Real Life Reality Show" appeared in the Creative Solutions column of FamilyFun Magazine in June, 2009. This is her response to the prompt, "My Mother's Closet."

My Mother's Closet

She wasn’t a clotheshorse, my mother – still isn’t.  When I was a girl, she mostly wore shorts and tee shirts and sandals she had made at the Sawdust Festival in Laguna Beach.  No bra, ever.  She kept her red hair short, refused to pierce her ears, and wore no jewelry at all for many years, except for the silver bangles all the women in our family wear.  She didn’t even wear a wedding ring, because the jade one my father had married her with was broken beyond repair.  At UC Irvine faculty parties, my father -- who was a Physics professor -- always introduced her as his friend, and people who didn’t know better assumed they had an open marriage, which they did not.  But this was the 1960’s, and that is the way things were then, in the academic world.