Category Archives: mom

Alone for the Holidays

mom, personal 2020.11.16 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Americans plan Thanksgiving gatherings despite health official warnings (NBC via Yahoo! News) One of the smaller details I remember from the day Mom passed away is that I’d actually bought a ticket to a Halloween party that one of my friends was putting on that evening. I’d had misgivings about that party before I’d even bought a ticket, even though I was sure that if Mom had been able to articulate anything at that point, she would have encouraged me to go. I’d basically gone…

Something for the Occasion

mom, personal 2020.07.27 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

Today would have been Mom’s seventy-fifth birthday. Part of me wants to use the present-tense “is” in that sentence, since I still feel Mom’s presence in my life every day. (Today is not a good day to get me started on the vicissitudes of verb tense standards in different cultural situations.) In a way, it feels like that choice makes me focus on what might have been in our lives here if things had turned out differently, instead of what there is right now. Maybe,…

Scrabble-Rouser

mom, personal, videogames 2020.05.18 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

I was worried enough about the pandemic in the days leading up to our campus closing that I could feel my mind going to a very worrying place. For all the challenges I’ve faced after Mom’s passing, I could at least formulate some vague notion of the advice she’d give me if she were here in the flesh, even if they were challenges she never faced herself. A global pandemic that shuts so much of daily life down is something that neither she, nor even…

Holiday Pain

food, mom, personal 2019.11.25 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

As wonderful as Mom was, she wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. She made chili every few weeks, and I never did like it, to the point where I wound up staying away from vegetarian chili recipes for most of my life. After I got here to Wisconsin, though, I knew that I needed to start making good warm-me-up meals I could take to campus with me for lunch and heat up in the microwave, so I bit the bullet and tried making…

Settling In

mom, personal 2019.10.28 Sean Shannon Leave a comment

This Tuesday will be the third anniversary of Mom’s passing, and in some ways it’s felt like the hardest anniversary I’ve had to deal with so far. I’ve been thinking about the anniversary in the days leading up to it more than I have the others, and I’ve taken the day off work. (The first anniversary fell on a Sunday, so there weren’t any issues there, but the second was on a Monday when I did teach a class at eight in the morning, but…