The Father’s Day Timepiece
On Father’s Day, I hold the wristwatch—a stainless steel Bell & Ross—and notice the delayed clicks of the white second hand. My thumb moves in circular motions across the waterproof glass. I’m surprised by its weight. Erik, my 29-year-old husband, pleaded with me for this expensive watch, but I said, “You know we can’t afford that right now.” We were saving money to buy our first house in over-priced Marin County, California. “Hyla, he’s going to give it to me for one-third the cost.” Oh, Erik. “Why do I have to be the one who has to say no?” Erik put me in charge of our finances after he’d accepted that his impetuous spending habits weren’t helping us save. We were newly pregnant with our second...
Defibrillator, Death, and Denial
For three hours, the grasshopper-like chirps call out from the defibrillator. Three hours. This entire time, I continue to write sections of my memoir, Drop Dead Life, trying to pretend the beeping isn’t there. If the beeping is there, that means we really own a defibrillator. That means I actually need to be ready to pull out the child-sized paddles and jump-start my daughters’ hearts. It’s been a rough few weeks. We just visited the pediatric cardiologist at the Oakland Children’s Hospital and this was the first year in which my new husband, Evan, and I were completely honest with Tatiana, 8, and Keira, 6, about their chances of inheriting their birth daddy’s genetic heart...
