motherwellmag.com

Walk into my daughter’s room and there’s an obvious message. Above her bed hangs a sign that reads, “Though she be but little, she is fierce

My fourteen-year-old son Tim moves away this weekend. He is going to Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, where he will live in a dorm with other blind, physically disabled students

We were both decent math students, but nothing like Sam, who participates in high stakes math competitions and spends most of his spare time doing or thinking about math. The problems he works on now don’t even look like math to me: I sometimes joke that if you locked me in a room with one of them and told me I couldn’t come out until I’d solved it, I’d most certainly die in there. Sam’s done pretty well considering his parents aren’t math people. So I told him what I often tell myself: “Even if you can’t spend the whole day doing math, you can touch the work every day, even if it’s for just 15 minutes.

I designed curriculum around children’s novels that reflected her experiences as a biracial kid adopted from the state and struggling with ADHD and depression. At 14, I stood in the shower at dawn battling depression as I pictured the day’s classes and yearbook meetings and rehearsals and track practices and hours of homework. Adults who read Dreaming of Antigone or Ghost or similar novels get a crash course in what symptoms to look for in a struggling young person, along with a sense of how serious untreated mental illness can be. These days, I love suggesting the perfect novel to my daughter, her peers, and other young people who might be dealing with a particular issue.