Nancy Stephan's Blog, page 2

Insider Magic (4)

I knew my father loved me. That bit of knowledge sustained me while I turned my attention to building my own life and caring for my daughter. In the early 2000s with new technology at my disposal, I made one last attempt to find my father. I was in my early 30s by this time and had taken to the notion that our reunion would happen if it was meant to.

I put the name Bonnie gave my aunt into an online database and made a list of candidates. I wrote a short note explaining that I was searching ...

Insider Magic (3)

After my 18th birthday, I bought my first a car. One of the first things I did was go back to the city where my mother and I had lived to talk to another of her closest friends. This woman, whom I referred to as Aunt Katie, was old enough to be my mother’s mother. Katie was a neighbor to whom my mother would turn when she and my grandmother were fighting. As such, Katie was no friend to my grandmother, but my mother adored her all the same. As a child, I spent more time at Aunt Katie’s house tha...

Insider Magic (2)

I woke up one morning in late December 2017 and decided not to get out of bed. I was on vacation for the holidays and had no plans to do anything but relax and binge watch Netflix. Before I turned on the TV, I caught up on some reading. Then I closed my book, put it on the night stand, and decided quite arbitrarily to order a DNA test. I went online right then and began researching which test to buy and decided to order both an Ancestry DNA for my ethnicity and a 23 And Me to learn my mother’s H...

Insider Magic (I)

Friends ask me, “Have you written about it yet? Well, it’s coming upon three years, and I’m writing about it now for the first time. It’s taken this long for me to absorb it, I suppose, to make sure it was really true and not a big fat, “Sorry, there’s been a mistake.” I had gotten my hopes up about 20 years ago when the Internet was becoming mainstream, but that endeavor left me not quite empty handed but forlorn nonetheless. I vowed, for my own peace of mind, not to take it up again. And I did...

Marginalia 901

What’s small is only small in perspective. The Burj Khalifa is the tallest building on the planet, but when you fly over it in an airplane, it is but a tiny speck even though the building itself has not changed. Change your position, change your perspective.

Likewise, if you change your physical position for a nonphysical one, your perspective on reality will change. Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star being tapped out with one finger on the piano becomes a 100-piece Beethoven symphony. Believe me;...

Who Are You?

Halloween 1997. I began planning my costume in August.  I would be a flower child, a good old-fashioned hippie. My goal was authenticity. I did not want to look like I was wearing a costume; I wanted to embody my inner hippie. I purchased a Bohemian dress from a thrift shop and accessorized it with peace jewelry, hippie sandals, and of course, a flower headband. When I arrived to work, a coworker had also dressed as a hippie. She wore a tie-dyed t-shirt, a beaded headband, a ratty wig, and a pai...

Mother Toe

I don’t know why the memory of Mother Toe is sitting with me these days. In light of current events, perhaps I’m thinking about trauma and mental health, or perhaps it’s just a stroll down memory lane for no other reason than to memorialize a woman who was a part of my childhood. Whatever the reasons, I’m taking this opportunity to share Mother Toe with you.

Mother Toe was an older member of our church. The name Toe is a loving spin on her last name. Her peers called her Mae or Toe, and accor...

Dream Recall

When I talk to people about the plum-pleasing pleasure of mastering their dreams, a few things I almost always hear are:

I don’t dream.I don’t remember my dreams.My dreams are incoherent and chaotic.I only remember fragments.

I can talk in great detail about each of these, but it’s the last point I’d like to toss around a bit. Have you ever woken up and known that you’ve had a dream, but you can’t remember enough of it to do anything with it? If so, I hope what I offer here is of some bene...

Turbulence

The following excerpts are from a dream I had in the early hours of March 6, 2020. At the time, nothing was happening in waking life that provided context for the dream or matched its intensity. But that changed exactly one week later.

On March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black EMT in Louisville, KY, is murdered in her home by police in plain-clothes serving a no-knock warrant in the middle of the night. Her boyfriend opens fire on the unannounced intruders who ram through the fro...

Practical Magic

The first time a white woman called the police on me was when I threatened to kill her 14-year-old daughter. I made the threat only after the girl first threatened to kill me. After all, if you kill me, aren’t I within my rights to turn around and kill you? When the police showed up at my door, I threatened to kill him, too, as he was being quite nasty to me for no apparent reason. He asked me if I wanted to go to jail.  I knew he was bluffing. Who’s ever heard of taking a seven-year-old to jail...