Selected for the Best American Essays, 2016
1.
She was not a planned birth.
She was purely coincidental, accidental. A gift.
Born on June 16, 1956. My eighteenth birthday.
“Help us name your baby sister, Joyce.”
We were thrilled, but we were also frightened.
Though my brother, Robin, and I had known for months that our mother was pregnant, somehow we had not quite wished to realize that our mother would be having a baby.
In the sense in which having a baby means a new presence in the household, an entirely new center of gravity. As if a radioactive substance had come to rest in our midst, deceptively small, even miniature, but casting off a powerful light.
At times, a blinding light.
And if light can be deafening, a deafening light.
“Help us name your baby sister, Joyce.”
