Ann Hutton

I told my children, “You picked me.” I introduced this concept when they were each young, when their malleable, trusting curiosities could still be bent to accept such a notion matter-of-factly. Certainly, I had not ever consciously chosen to become pregnant—although I did choose to stay pregnant after much soul-searching now and then.

There were boys in the neighborhood that would occasionally come around to play with a girl. They wore tee shirts with horizontal stripes and scruffy leather shoes and sometimes sneakers, which were just coming into the fashion scene—not as fashion, rather as practical footwear for kids. I wasn’t enthralled with these boys, not like I was with a dark-haired, dreamy-eyed Italian kid named Mike who lived on a corner around the block.

As the gentle and compassionate teacher of Buddhism, Pema Chodron, has said: the path of cultivating human bravery and kindheartedness is to let the quality of what we’re feeling and the energy of the emotion pierce us to the heart. We should not indulge in the feeling, rather be it completely. As I sat on [...]