MOTHERS and OTHERSA Story Collection by Kimbeth Wehrli Judge

These eight stories share a theme of families living their lives as well as they can, who value their days as educational and often humorous works-in-progress.


The Five L's of Living Well is told by a middle-aged daughter, who attempts to protect her aging, self-absorbed, independent and quirky mother from herself. Flashbacks allow a glimpse of their lovingly difficult relationship as conclusions are drawn one insightful day.


The Car Ride is a story about two young mothers coping with an eight-hour drive with their two seven-year-olds to visit a mutual best friend. The difference in parenting becomes clear and continues to be problematic as events unfold inside the car.


Graduation Day is fondly told by Helen Clark's husband of 32 years, Steven, who recalls their flirtatiously platonic, purposefully abstinent, yearlong courtship climaxing with lustful sexuality and their decision to spend the rest of their lives together.


Target Practice is told by the much younger daughter of a family of six. She recalls the day when she was twelve and her older married sister was baptized. She gives the reactions of her protective big brother, their pessimistic father, a lapsed Catholic, and their optimistic mother, concerned about religious hypocrisy. She tells how the kids, who were raised with loving honesty but without organized religion, gradually chose their own, and how her other sister brought those ideals to a dramatic head on that celebratory eve.


Me and My POM is told by the adult godchild of a cantankerous 86-year-old female Marine whom she is trying to guide through the depression of being moved to an old people's home followed by the hysteria of her car privileges being taken away. She nicknames her godmother POM, for 'Pissed Off Marine'.


How I Spent My Summer is a first person account of a mid-life female addicted to a pain killer wrongfully prescribed by her physician, who checks her into a local rehabilitation center, but then is called away because of a family emergency. Left on her own, with no personal doctor to manage her case, she describes the center's mismanagement in all its irony, using sarcasm to get through the ordeal that culminates with the heartbreak of her last assigned roommate.


These Things Happen is told by the wife of a couple who decide to avoid going into a rest home in their later years by preemptively hiring an interior designer to set up their condominium for the safe simplicity of old age. Charles turns out to be less and more than they expected or ever would have chosen as they slog through over two years of unforeseen expense and upheaval in their buttoned down lives.


Way To Go is a description of a utopian mansion carefully developed and maintained to house sixty healthy 80-year-old-and-older citizens in a pleasing and stimulating atmosphere, run by playfully pragmatic eccentrics.