Amanda Millard

Portfolio of Writing

  • Northern Lights Out

    Christmas Eve was almost over when the power suddenly went out. This was a frequent occurrence so far from civilization, but it put a real kink in Mrs. Claus’s plans this time. She was really counting on the coffee to sober her up, and the coffee maker just shut off as it was beginning to drip. Lovely, she thought. If the Fat Ass comes home and sees me this sauced, he’s going to make the elves watch me next year.

    This was her one night alone each year, her one chance to let loose.  Not that she had anyone to let loose with, as the nearest neighbors were hundreds of miles south in any direction.  But she managed to stash a bottle of mint schnapps for the occasion and started pre-gaming while Fatty was carbo-loading the deer.  

    Who wouldn’t need a tiny break from her husband’s endless cheerfulness, his insistence that everything is jolliness and joy, his denial that they could have built any better life together?  But this life was never the plan, really.  After all, who the hell would plan to move to the literal ends of the earth, surrounded by tiny freak-gnomes, and work endlessly for the pleasure of other people’s increasingly entitled little brats?

    No, the brats should have been theirs, and he knew it.  It was the implied contract in their marriage vows, her reason for agreeing to marry him in the first place.  If she hadn’t wanted a family, she would have stayed with her college girlfriend, the Tooth Fairy.  They were in love, but that Fairy was a wild one, not one to settle down.  So Mrs. Claus decided the whole thing had been a phase, and she settled for this near-sighted, morbidly obese nerd with rosacea.  But he loved kids, he wanted a family, and he was stable.  Or so she thought.

    As it turned out, he was never quite ready.  “Next year” was always the perfect time for them to start a family. After he finished his screenplay. After he ran that 5K. After he got John Cena to follow him on Instagram.

    But none of that ever happened.

    And then, inevitably, her biological clock ran out of time.  One day, many days too late, her chubby hubby suddenly wanted kids immediately.  But you know what, my dude?  Lady junk goes bad. They tried a dozen doctors and treatments, all for nothing. Their miracle never came.

    Once they gave up hope, they heard that the current Santa Claus was retiring, and they were shocked to be asked to take over the position at the North Pole. It felt like an honor they didn’t deserve. At the time, she didn’t realize that the position was vacant simply because no one else wanted it.

    Still, she couldn’t deny that her husband was a natural at it. He jumped into the role with all the holly-jolly enthusiasm that she had hoped he would save for their own kids. He said that they were parenting the whole world, in a way. He insisted that this life was even better than having a family. After all, no psychiatrist ever needed to help a patient unpack any trauma caused by Santa. Wasn’t it better to be loved by all?

    Well…no, actually.  Not for her.  And if he were brutally honest with himself, it wasn’t enough for him either.  But this was the fate they were going to live.  And usually, she could deal with it, even enjoy it.  It was hard to stay bitter when literally everything she owned smelled like strudel.

    But this one night a year, she allowed herself to wallow in what could have been.  If her husband was going to get a free trip around the world every Christmas Eve, she decided that the least she deserved was a private night to grieve her lost dream.

    And so, here she sat to welcome Christmas, blitzed and sick on sugar cookies, surrounded by frozen darkness at the top of the world.  She stared at the fireplace, the only light left.  The shadows made it easier to imagine her mantle hung with little stockings that would never exist, and a Santa coming down the chimney to leave gifts, rather than just take them away.

  • Suicide Squirrel

    Dear Silas the Squirrel,

    Hello, old frenemy.  I am writing to ask you for the last time to please give up your quest to die by my hand.  Let’s consider this your reverse suicide note, your final chance to save yourself.  I doubt that I can talk you out of it for your own sake, but I hope that this plea helps you to understand what your suicide would mean for me.

    Honestly, I don’t really oppose you ending your own life; I consider that to be a human right, so I guess it should be a squirrel right as well.  But considering how you dart in front of my car every damn time I go around that corner by my house, and you stop smack in the middle of the road, you seem to want me to be your executioner.  It is unclear to me why you can’t just climb up to the top of that big tree across the street and jump out. 

    Help me to understand, Silas.

    Why do you want to put this on me, man?  What about me makes you think that I want that on my conscience?  Do you think that you smell blood on my hands?  Because I can assure you that smell is coming from my bleeding heart.  I am a classic liberal sucker, I promise.  I’ve never met a one-eyed kitten or gimpy puppy that couldn’t weasel its way into my heart and home.  An actual weasel might even pull it off.  If it weren’t for my more restrained husband, I’d have an army of downtrodden creatures convalescing in my foyer. 

    It’s not that I do not understand your suffering. On the contrary, I know that we are kindred.  The depressed pain that I see in your beady little eyes is all too familiar to me.  (Perhaps that is why you have chosen me, because you hope I can commiserate?)  On my worst days, my own eyes have been as empty as your own, and the endless monotony of life seems too grim to bear.  You’re just lucky you can’t keep up with current events, ‘cause shit is bleak, Silas.  Real bleak.

    I don’t know what the answer is for either of us.  Therapy?  Mindfulness?  Journaling?  I’m willing to try an awful lot of solutions at this point, and I hope you are too.  At least in my own experience, there always seems to be someone there in the end, a person or people who seem worth struggling for one more day, worth trying one more strategy.  I don’t have the answers, but I know that you don’t stand a chance out there if you don’t find your squirrel tribe.

    But in the end, if you still choose to end it all, I need you to at least choose a less fragile killer – one who won’t crumble under the memory of having squashed you into a meat pancake with a poofy tail. 

    And just remember that squirrels cannot sign Do Not Resuscitate orders, which means that if I hit you, but you don’t die instantly, I will do everything in my power to keep your little broken body alive.  It’s just my way.  Before you know it, I will have created a fully operational squirrel assisted-living facility in my garage.  All while my husband is at work, of course.  

    Kindest regards,

    Amanda

    Addendum:

    After writing this letter, I saw a little squirrel body smooshed on the road by Silas’s favorite corner.  At first, I consoled myself with the thought that I didn’t know for sure if it was actually Silas, since all squirrels look the same to me. 

    Then I realized that maybe it was Silas, and he ran out in front of some stranger’s car because he thought it is was me — because to him, all people look the same.   And so the last person to see him was someone sensible and emotionally stable, someone who wouldn’t risk their own life swerving like crazy to avoid him.

    Someone who just didn’t understand.

  • Wormhole

    This week I got an unfortunate email from my kids’ school letting me know that there was an outbreak of pinworms and that I needed to check my own children for them.  And so began the most disgusting research I’ve had to do thus far in my parenting journey.

    As I dug into a weird corner of the Internet, I learned some interesting things about pinworms, which, unlike some other worms, reproduce sexually (requiring both a male and female worm to create babies).  Daddy goes out in a blaze of violent sexual glory after forcing himself on the female in what is called “traumatic insemination,” which leaves the mother injured and pregnant, a bazillion times over.

    This leaves poor Mama Pinworm with a challenging responsibility, since her babies cannot live their lives in the base of the human gut, where everything is moving the wrong way.  No, they need to get back to the start, our mouths, to get their chance at living their lives to the fullest, riding the coaster that is our digestive tract.

    And so, this bad-ass single mom has to rely on the only tool at her disposal – her smarts.  Over millions of years of delicate co-evolution, female pinworms have really cracked the code of their human hosts.  They hang out near the exit door and wait patiently. They sense when we are sleeping, and they take the opportunity to wiggle their way out, making their human host itch in a most unfortunate spot.  As humans do, we scratch, and the microscopic eggs get stuck to our hands.  Since we’re at least half-asleep, we don’t wash our hands again before, some time later, they find their way to our mouths.  And presto!  Mama pinworm has done her duty: her babies have made their way back to the start.  She has given them their chance at a full, disgusting life.

    My own job as a mama seems nearly as gross – apparently, I’m supposed to sneak into my kids’ beds at night, point a flashlight at their naked ass holes, and wait for something to wiggle out.  Seriously.  That’s the method for diagnosing pinworms. 

    Let’s just say that I’m gonna let Mama Pinworm win this one.  She just wants it way more than I do. 

  • The Waiting Room

    I waited two and a half years to become a mother. My husband and I waited through hours of adoption trainings and invasive social worker interviews. We waited through a devastating failed adoption.  And then finally (miraculously) a beautiful young mother gave us the honor of raising her equally beautiful son. The moment she placed him my arms, he looked at me and smiled, and I knew that the wait had been worth it. 

    But in the next moment, his huge, dark eyes rolled back in his head, as his heart beat erratically. My own heart stopped as I waited for him to breathe again…waited…waited…until he gasped like a fish out of water. 

    We soon learned that this was a normal breathing pattern for a baby born in heart failure. And while I got used to his gasping and panting, I never got used to the blinding terror of it. It burned my insides like dry ice and tasted like metal.

    Nine years later, I am awaiting for my son again, as I look out over the vast steely-blue of the St. John’s River. The hospital’s architects gave this room floor-to-ceiling windows, the gorgeous view surely meant to distract parents while they wait for updates on their sick children. But the view stopped impressing me long ago. I’ve lost count of the number of hours I’ve spent in this room, staring at that endless water, waiting.

    Today is my son’s third heart surgery to correct the heart defects he was born with. Since then, we have adopted three more children, and their various special needs have led me back into this room over and over, for countless scans and tests.  And this is only one of many similar rooms I wait in. I wait for psychologists, nutritionists, therapists. I wait while hearing aids are fitted. I wait for special education programs to open space for us. I wait for my youngest son’s full-time therapist to arrive so that I can try to squeeze in a quick shower — before I have to rush another kid off to another appointment.

    Because this is the reality of adoption when women have little or no prenatal care. Or when babies are born prematurely due to drug exposure. Or when a mother is homeless. Or when she tries to induce an abortion on her own, only to find out weeks later that it didn’t work.

    The reality of adoption is that it was the right choice for me, and I hope it was the right choice for my (loved, adored, wanted) children and their amazing birth mothers. But when anti-abortion activists think of adoption as some magic cure-all, I want to show them my reality. They talk about how many hopeful adoptive parents are waiting right now — but the majority are not waiting for this. They are waiting for healthy, white newborns and birth families who won’t complicate their lives. If adoption was all they wanted, then they would adopt one of the 117,000 waiting children in the US foster care system who are legally available for adoption right now.

    And even if they did want to adopt a special-needs child, that doesn’t mean that they have the support to raise one well. It doesn’t mean that they’re willing to love or honor birth families. It doesn’t mean that they can help to reverse the long history of shame and exploitation surrounding adoption.  It doesn’t mean that they can deal with trauma (which can occur even from birth).  It doesn’t mean that they are capable of endless parental training or advocacy. It doesn’t mean that they can give up their careers, their savings, or their other commitments. 

    And even if they are blessed to be able to make these sacrifices (as I have been so blessed), they just might not want to. And that’s absolutely valid. Because I consider myself to be the world’s luckiest mother, and yet, I wonder daily if I’m up to the task, if I’m the parent my children need, if I’m failing.  The days I’ve spent in this waiting room have been my greatest tests, and I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t always passed. I look out over that dark river, and I feel like I’m drowning in it. And part of me wants to be dragged under, because at least then the brackish water would mute that metallic terror.

    From my vantage point, it certainly doesn’t look like anti-abortion advocates really want to save anyone at all. Because there are already so many foster parents, social workers, teachers, mothers, and children begging for help. They need more. Hell, even I need more. But help just never seems to come, no matter how long we wait.

  • Olive’s Fire

    A year after adopting my baby daughter, Olive, I took her to visit my hometown and the many relatives eager to meet her. Amid the chaos, I wanted just one thing: a photo of my daughter and her mother, with my mother and her mother. But I knew that creating this heirloom would mean wrangling two of the most willful women in my life: my resistant, camera-averse grandmother and my equally resistant, squirmy daughter.

    Olive and her great-grandmother are not biologically related, and they have very different ethnic backgrounds and features. But when I first saw the photo, I was struck by their sameness—by the way their ferocity seemed to light them both from within. This makes them stunning in a fearsome way, and it can make loving them a fretful, exhausting job.

    Yet they are biologically related, as we all are. We are all descended from a single woman, often known as Mitochondrial Eve, who lived relatively recently in human history. We can all be traced, through this unbroken mother-daughter chain, right back to her. In her day, there would have been nothing remarkable about her. But she had the luck, or perhaps the grit, or maybe the smarts, to survive in a very grim world. And she raised daughters who could survive in it, who raised more survivor-daughters.

    I cannot help but imagine Eve as my grandmother, standing at that desperate moment in human history—bitching her way right through that volcanic eruption or plague or asteroid, not really caring if she ticked off the cavemen. Because that same inner fire that makes her tough to love also makes her tough.

    Though Grandma has not faced near-extinction, she has faced a life that many people would not have survived. The poverty and abuse that characterized her early life have made her who she is. She has weathered adversity and raised her two daughters through it.

    Science tells us that adversity changes not just our minds, but our very DNA. Our experiences express our genes, and we pass on this epigenetic legacy to the next generation. Women are particularly vulnerable when it comes to inheriting big challenges—depression, anxiety, and related health problems. But I also think we are the carriers of the fire that keeps people surviving through dark feelings and the world’s darkest days.

    Olive’s fiery will may seem too large for her tiny self or for the little life she has lived thus far. But not when I consider the countless generations of struggle and hurt that have been passed on to her, flowing from mother to daughter, crashing down on her. To raise her, I can offer the burdens and joys of my own family’s legacy: my great-great-grandmother’s endless grief for the baby who died crossing to the New World, the instinctive midwifery skills my great-grandmother used to deliver my aunt unexpectedly, my grandmother’s rape, my years-long search for a daughter to call my own, that first failed adoption of a daughter I mothered only in my heart.

    To that, we must add a whole birth family’s history—the parts we know and the bigger part that Olive’s birth mother will share with her only when they’re both old enough.

    Finally, there is her own adversity. On her first day in this world, Olive said goodbye to her first mother and was given to a new stranger-mother. No one asked her permission. She was the most important member of this delicate, monumental family merger, and she never got a vote.

    But Olive, like the women before her, is a survivor. Whether from her genes or from her family, she has inherited an old, deep power. I fear what our turbulent modern world holds for her and for all of us. It would be easy to allow this fear to consume me. But standing at this desperate moment in human history, Olive’s fire gives me hope and makes me strong.