Ellen Herrick

Author of The Sparrow Sisters

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William Morrow
(2017-04-04)
400 pages
ISBN: 978-0062499950

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Archives

Safe as Houses

December 9, 2011 by Ellen Herrick

I am lost.  It’s as if I am a sleepwalker woken up in another room.  Even the face of my waker is a stranger to me.  Nothing is where I left it; my books closed and unread, abandoned in piles at my bedside.  This Autumn, a season of such unexpected warmth and sunshine, has left me in darkness.  I am constantly cold.  Some days I leave my coat on until my daughter comes home from school. I tear it off and shove it into the closet when I hear her footstep at the front door.  I bake and I cook but I don’t eat.  While my family swirls in and out of this little house I am left standing at a center that I cannot hold.  But, I am trying, so very hard.  For the first time I am so separate from my children that sometimes I don’t even say goodnight to my daughter, embarrassed that at 8:30 I can’t keep my head up anymore.  She is in her room, chatting, working, singing Christmas carols in a high, sweet soprano, and I am in mine, a single lamp puddling light on a book that won’t be read. I am homesick and I can’t go home.

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Filed Under: Autumn, family, first love, heart break, homesick, melancholy, mother

Spring

April 21, 2011 by Ellen Herrick

James

I am in a state of longing.  Spring is such a near thing and yet, this morning, the little pot of ivy I left out is rimmed in frost.  Frost!  I rub salt into my homesick wound by checking the London weather on my computer dashboard: 75 all week.  I squeeze lemon into my emotional paper cut by watching the Kings Road web cam obsessively.  I can see the school children in their woolly jumpers and tidy lines serpentine along the footpath on their way between playing fields and classrooms.  For a moment I am sure I see my own in that line.  Perhaps it’s because my photographs of that time are so blurry?

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Filed Under: London, mother, mothering, Spring Tagged With: garden, gardening, graduation, lilacs, mother, peony

Catchy Pop Tune of the Descended from a Large Loaf of White Bread Mother

January 19, 2011 by Ellen Herrick

The world (oh, fine, a whole bunch of moms in their own little world) has been aflutter the last week or so over Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, a law professor and generally terrifying individual.  She begins by establishing what her daughters were never allowed to do in her pursuit of the perfect academic record for them both: sleepovers, school plays, help little old ladies across the street.  She then goes on to explain, clearly, pleasantly why A+ grades, concert-worthy piano-playing and throwing little old ladies under a bus if they are between you and your piano are so much more important than macaroni picture frames.

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Filed Under: Dragon Mother, good enough Mom, mother Tagged With: good enough Mom, mothering

Weep No More, My Lady

April 29, 2010 by Ellen Herrick

Here is something you should know about me.  I’m not a crier, not really.  I do not cry about sad/bad things happening in my life.  Ever.  I didn’t cry when my mother died.  I’m not a hard-hearted Hannah, I just don’t cry about the big things.  I do, however, weep copiously when small children sing at school concerts.  I cry when I see a little person lost in the supermarket.  I cry when I see a balloon floating away in the sky.  I have been known to cry at that 1970s ad for some do-good organization that features a kid in group home writing a letter to Santa asking for a puppy.  Does anyone remember that ad?  One kid says “Santa won’t bring you a puppy!”  And then, the do-gooder volunteer/ Secret Santa/postal worker guy reads the letter.  On Christmas morning, the kid finds a puppy waiting for him.  Of course he does.  The look on his face?  Priceless.  The look on the pooh-poohing kid’s face?  Oh, the humanity!!

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Filed Under: children, hope, London, lucky, mother Tagged With: acting, children, crying, grateful

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