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Kathryn Kefauver’s recently completed, unpublished memoir, The Mother of Water, is set in Maryland and Laos, where she worked for two years for the United Nations Development Programme. She lives in Berkeley, California, and her work has appeared in Gettysburg Review and the Christian Science Monitor.
“Don’t worry about taking care of me,” my mother liked to say every year as her birthday approached. “You’ve already trained me not to expect anything.” This because once, right after the divorce, my father had taken my sister and me to the beach on her birthday week.
September 2011I felt a jolt. Since my father had left, no one had said the word sadness. I had heard the words stingy and schmuck, but sadness seemed obscene, even more taboo than the topic of sex. Sadness was like my period, something that came regularly, to be borne in silence.
November 2008Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? We’d love to hear about it.
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