Ona Gritz's Blog

It was nearly a year and a half ago that Dave told me he was probably dying. I sat on the porch swing on my terrace, phone pressed to my ear, the leaves on the one visible tree in the courtyard below me trembling in the breeze. As Dan's brother—my not-quite-legal brother-in-law, my good friend—talked evenly and scientifically about his neurons separating from his muscles, I felt, strangely as though I knew what he would say milliseconds before he said it. This let me take in the news with a calm that matched the way he told it. I listened, asked questions, and didn't cry.[Read more...]

Ethan knew the day our moving truck was coming. Friday, September 5, exactly two weeks after his own move to Penn State. We spoke that morning around 6 a.m. He called, not to talk about the momentous fact that, in a matter of hours, his childhood home would no longer belong to us, but to gripe about having to be up so early for crew practice.[Read more...]

When it came time to help Ethan through the college selection process, my ex and I took a divide-and-conquer approach. I flew with our boy to Ann Arbor for a tour of The University of Michigan. Richard drove him to Charlottesville to check out the University of Virginia. On a rainy summer afternoon Ethan and I slogged around the sprawling grounds of Fordham's Bronx campus. And, finally, decision nearly made, Richard drove him to University Park for Penn State's Accepted Students' Day.[Read more...]

In recent weeks, I've organized our photographs and cleaned out files, jewelry boxes, and the tool chest my dad dipped into whenever he did odd jobs around my apartment. I've donated huge trash bags filled with clothes to the thrift shop and cartloads of novels to the used bookstore. The reward is that, as I excavate, I find riches. My grandfather's citizenship papers dated 1914. A baby blanket my mom crocheted the year I was pregnant. A cassette tape of seven-year-old Ethan reading [booklink isbn="9780394896953" title="The Bravest Dog Ever"] aloud in his sweet, raspy voice.[Read more...]

Like many moms, I spent countless hours of my son's second and third year hunched before a snaking train track, acting out various conversations and conflicts between Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends, Percy, Henry, Gordon, Annie, and Clarabel. A few years later I found myself sliding into a seat in a crowded movie theater to watch a feature-length version of what was essentially an infomercial for Yu-Gi-Oh cards. Ah, love. Sometimes it means putting aside something you'd love to do on a given afternoon to sit through something so dull you could weep. It flowed both ways, of course. [Read more...]

"I made my first solo drive," Ethan tells me on the phone.

It's evening and he's at Richard's apartment. Hours earlier, the two of them went to the DMV where Ethan took and passed his driving test. That's a good thing, right? I'd asked my Facebook friends, and the twenty-seven nearly instantaneous responses to the post were as varied and conflicted as my own thoughts on the matter.[Read more...]

For Ethan's second birthday we hung large sheets of black paper all through our large kitchen and provided our guests with buckets of chalk. We did this so none of them would notice that we'd closed Ethan's toys off in his bedroom because he didn't want anyone touching them. On his fifth birthday, his friends all came in their Halloween costumes, though it was still early in October. On his ninth, groups of boys sat around the kitchen table glancing at their splayed Yu-Gi-Oh cards with the seriousness of poker players. When Ethan turned twelve, he and I stared with the wonder of first-time parents as our new puppy gingerly sniffed her way through each room. Recently, a few months past my boy's seventeenth birthday, he came home to the gift of a fat packet from Penn State and nearly leapt with joy.

This last, of course, means he's leaving, come September.[Read more...]

"What fourteen-year-old doesn't want to have dinner with her mother?" A woman named Lola bellows this in the teen area of the library where I work. "Do you see what she's doing to me?" she adds, turning to the kids …[Read more...]

Now that Ethan and I have all of one year together before he leaves for college, I'm grief-stricken once again over the brevity of this one-way trip. I'm also angry at myself for the many times my mind took me somewhere else. The times my boy chatted with me and my attention went to an argument his dad and I were in the midst of. Or to an email I owed an editor. Or to the buzz of the dryer where our clothes were beginning to wrinkle in their cramped heap.[Read more...]

It's the night of Ethan's junior prom and, weeks earlier, he'd volunteered me to sign the paperwork for the after-hours joyride he and ten of his friends have arranged for. Other than one battle over the fact that I insisted on hearing from the other kids' parents giving their permission—Really Mom? That's so embarrassing!—he made the job easy. He and his buddies searched online and found the company with the best reviews and prices. Ethan then collected the money and kept track of who owed what. It proved to be a testament to how resourceful and responsible my kid can be.[Read more...]