Ella's Mother

Reflections on family, trauma, and ghosts, from a reluctant mother. Excerpt: I’m staring at Ella down by the stream. Not quite four, and she scampers about like an elfin who has all the world in her hands. I wonder why and how she can be so resilient. Of course she has no conscious memory of the trauma anymore, but what about her subconscious? Personally, I still can’t recover, even though I hadn’t been there at all. —But I must have lived through it a thousand times in nightmares.