This issue of MER is themed "Ages/Stages." The works in this issue shift perspectives. Mothers interpret, complicate, celebrate, and ameliorate children's milestones: a first day of school in "Red Boots" by Donna Shanley, a son's first heartbreak in Carrie Vittitoe's "A First," a pivotal event in Cheryl Fish's "A Seven-Year-Old Left Alone Shivering." Our children's stages recall our own pasts to us. Our elders' stages anticipate our future.

Mothers experience their own changes, both within the role and otherwise. Mandira Pattnaik and Amy Marques recount bodies changed by birth. Francesca Bell details the hours of absorption in the child's care. "I wondered if the river carrying my hours away went anywhere. If I had squandered the one battered coin of my life when I chose to spend it on you." As Cheliss Thayer's speaker says in "Co-Sleeper," "[I]t's exhausting..."

As children change with age, so does the mother. Frustration with the repetition and tedium of child-rearing can give way to nostalgia for those phases, as in Katie Manning's "Empty Toilet Paper Rolls Make Me Anxious." In later stages, the mother, no longer called upon to perform as many tasks for others, is returned to a sole self. Prudence Baird notes in "Just for Now," "[T]here is no task, no obligation, no duty coming from outside of this body of mine, filling the space between me and the rest of my life."

The works in this issue show that ages and stages aren't universal, but infinitely varied; not discrete steps, but flowing, continuous. What we experience as a stage may be an awakening to changes that have already been taking place. Ages and stages are bodies moving through time, stopping now and again to notice and reflect.

Time expands and contracts in Jessie Wittman's "All the Moments Exhale." Lydia Gwyn's mother and children, search for morels in "Bluegrass," providing a fitting metaphor for the closely observed work in this issue: "[L]ooking closely at soil or sand or gravel, trying to find the break in the pattern, the black triangle in the tide, the spiral in the static of the sand."