A Good Neighborhood

by Therese Anne Fowler

As all single parents know, dating while raising a child or children is no simple endeavor.

Juniper wasn’t in the room during this conversation, but when Belinda related the exchange to a few of us in the next room afterward, we wondered whether Juniper thought pledging her virginity to her stepfather in a ritualistic ceremony did in fact make things easier on her.

Some of us thought, Why should having sex be regarded as an act of impurity? What did impure even mean? What was pure, and why was it so desirable for a girl to be that, while boys could be however they liked?

“As I tell my students, nothing is too much unless you decide it is. And you can’t make an informed decision if you don’t try first.”

As so many family holiday gatherings are, this one, which was now concluding, had been pleasant in some aspects, an ordeal in others.

Dostoyevsky said, What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love. Unable, meaning being denied, being thwarted. Those of us who’ve had love denied—real love, not a passing lusty whim, not a false infatuation based on some imagined connection that in most cases is unrequited—we fellow travelers through hell know Dostoyevsky told it true.

Valerie understood that while her son did and always would hold her heart in his hands, the fact of being a parent was that her son’s heart was and must be reserved for someone else.

Young men who are innocent of the crime for which they’re sent to prison are an especially cursed subset. They’re too young to be jaded and toughened by life. They have no skills for survival inside, where their prison mates are actual criminals. They lose their faith in authority figures. They lose their faith. They have been bludgeoned by unfairness and are left cowed by the beating. They get no respect from the hardened men, who want them to stop whining about their innocence, who disrespect them for not being man enough to have done the thing they didn’t do. So, then, if you’re going to go to prison, go for a reason.

(We might assert here that in this country only white men have even a shot at worry-free lives,

Start here, please, in communion with one another despite our differences, recognizing that without start there is no end.