Kelly Burch

Just like kids who kick the seat in front of them and middle-aged women who get drunk and chatty on long flights, crying babies are a fact of life.

In order to connect with other men and women living with a terminal diagnosis, LoRe founded Hope and Friendship Metastatic Breast Cancer Foundation, which provides a support group in northern Massachusetts, where she lives. Through the support group LoRe has seen the devastating effects of breast cancer, which too often go unnoticed amid early detection and awareness campaigns.

Parenting my daughter through toddlerhood is sometimes amazingly rewarding. Her personality is emerging and I see the conversation and friendship that will hopefully fill our lives when she says things like, “I’m really proud of you, Mommy,” or “You’re my best friend.” Other times, when she blatantly refuses to obey, I seethe.

While I would like to think that I paused for a minute or two to think about what it means to be American, I was mostly focused on looking forward to the fireworks show.
But all of that changed for me last year. Three weeks before the Fourth of July, my husband became a citizen of the United States.

My husband brought home his first gun while I was at work. When I came in he pointed to it proudly, while I stood firmly on the other side of the room, looking at the firearm like it was an unpredictable animal that could spring up to bite me at any moment.

Our culture is so preoccupied with The Other, and the obsession with falling in love with a foreigner is just another manifestation of that. But I quickly found out that falling in love with someone from another country is not all fun and glory.

No having a community rally in support, like it is supposed to during a crisis, can make a family in mental health crisis feel shamed and stigmatized.