What Does it Mean to be a Mother and Who Decides?

Credit: John Beske

My mother passed away after a long, excruciating decline ten years ago and I still avoid sidewalk cracks as if my life depended on it, because for a time, it sure felt like it did.

“Step on a crack and you break your mother’s back” was a childhood rhyme we taunted one another with old-timey style and it directly formed the basis of my lifelong avoidance of not just sidewalk…