Erin hadn’t expected that Maria would come looking for her. Her college roommate had been working across campus for years, but Erin had thought that they’d finally reached a sort of détente where they didn’t see each other for many months at a time, and then only fleetingly in an aisle at the grocery store, […]
Author: elisabethel
I'm a single Quaker mother of two young people with strong opinions and quick wit. One of the two - I'll call him Martin here - has been diagnosed with bipolar I and what has been called Asperger's. His younger sibling - alias Pete - has anxiety and depression. I also suffer from anxiety and depression, though much less so with medication. This blog is about family life shot through with Quaker values, quirky humor, and mental illness.
I have written two semi-fictional books about my travels through life with my own, and later my own and my children's issues with mental health, and I am getting ready to publish them. This "blog," which has always been pretty light on blogging, will become more like an author website at that point, though I may continue to post from time to time.
overseas
I’ve been out of the country on vacation for a couple of weeks, and it’s a bit of a shock to the system to return home and have to take up where I left off. After not having been abroad since my sons were born, I felt so happy to be surrounded by the kind […]
Spike (M&P #5)
One night after dinner, while Erin was washing the dishes, David came into the kitchen with a couple of computer disks in his hand. “Erin, I told Gabe that I would get these to him tonight, but I have a project for class that’s going to take me all night. Is there any way that […]
demi-memi: a word on what I’m up to
Dear Reader, Since I’ve just sort of plunged into uploading chapters of the draft of my novel, I thought I’d take one moment here and talk about what I think my reader and I might be doing here. If you’ve looked at any of my other blog posts, you’ll notice that there are some remarkable […]
valentine’s (m & p 4)
Driving with Martin and Pete 4 Erin bought a very provocative pair of panties for Valentine’s Day. There was lace, but not a lot of it, and a couple of ribbons. She’d decided that she had not been putting enough effort into her relationship with David, and she really did want to try to make […]
Driving with Martin and Pete 3
Note: I thought I’d better stop with the Roman numeral chapter headings or we’d soon be heading into the big math challenge…. Elisabeth Meeting Gabe (1993) The first time Erin saw Gabe, she was looking up from a novel she was reading to see her boyfriend David opening the front door of their apartment and […]
Driving with Martin and Pete II
What I’d really like to hear here and in the next chapter is whether you feel like the shifts in time are too extreme or whether they work for you. If they’re confusing, please let me know that. I don’t keep doing this throughout, but at the beginning I have this sequence of a happier […]
Driving with Martin and Pete I
This is the first chapter of my novel about a single mom raising two boys, one with bipolar and one with anxiety. I want the novel to show how mental health issues often aren’t limited to one generation but are linked, one generation to the next. If this sounds like my bio, that’s because this […]
transitions
One of the wonderful things about raising exceptional children is that you don’t know what sorts of challenges you’re going to face until you come right up to them. I read somewhere when Martin was very young that there’s no use planning for your child’s future more than six months in advance, because the entire […]
The Holiday Letter, 2018
the letter that I can’t send
Elisabeth Levien 