Rachel Collins
Stories (4/0)
The High Wire
It was my second year teaching fifth grade. I had two classes with around 30 students in each. In one of my classes, there was a small, ten-year-old girl named Jessie. She had shoulder-length twists, sometimes with beads, catlike slanted eyes, a cupid’s-bow mouth, and rectangular glasses. She was always perfectly maintained – not in the desperate, showy way of parents who get the child every new trend in an attempt to demonstrate their dedication – but in the loving manner of a mom who cared for each perfectly arranged hair on her daughter’s head, each perfectly ironed uniform item, each pore of her skin, neatly vaselined all winter long.
By Rachel Collinsabout a year ago in Humans
What it Really Meant to Grow Up. Top Story - August 2022.
When I was born, it was about ten years after my parents had been in a house fire that very nearly destroyed my entire family. My parents, who had both come from large families, had envisioned having five or six children themselves, but until this point, had the one-- my older brother. I can’t imagine it was easy for him, nearly 12 years old, to suddenly go from hitting all his developmental milestones as an only child, but, there you go, it was September, 1984, and I made my debut, into a weird little family that had been waiting for another baby for a long, long time.
By Rachel Collins2 years ago in Families