I met my husband for the first time on April Fool’s Day twelve years ago. Living several states apart, we were introduced by mutual friends and spent three months corresponding by email and phone. When it was finally feasible for us to meet face-to-face, I planned and worried for weeks, feeling tense with emotional preparation.…

When I was a child, I had a Band-Aid phobia. According to my mom, this fear reached its pinnacle when I stubbornly refused to keep the Band-Aid on that she’d applied to the oozing blisters on my feet, caused by those infernal plastic jelly shoes from the 1980s. She didn’t understand why I would rather…