Cedar Burnett is a Seattle-based freelance writer and journalist. She’s written for the Associated Press, Salon.com, Fodor’s Travel Guides, ParentMap, Seattle Weekly, Alaska Airlines magazine and The Seattle InfoGuide. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, msnbc.com, yahoo.com, Huffington Post Canada and ABCNews.com, among others.

In Sickness

The first time I saw John leaning over the car seat, scrubbing up my “accident” with a bottle of Febreeze and a roll of paper towels, I felt a mixture of shame and gratitude as pronounced as an ice pick to the head. I was 26-years-old and crapping my pants was just part of the deal he’d never quite made.

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Pauline Gaines is the pseudonym of a blogger who writes about divorce, adoption, challenging children, and social issues. Her work has been featured on Salon, Babble, OffBeat Mama, BlogHer, Good Men Project, and the Huffington Post, where she is a regular contributor to the Divorce section. Follow her on Twitter @divorcedpauline.

The Patient I Fell in Love With

I met with J every Tuesday at 2 pm.  This was several years ago, when I was a Marriage and Family Therapy intern and he was a junkie a few months into recovery. Recently separated from my husband of nine years, I had shed my former glittery existence -– globe-trotting, thrice-weekly yoga classes, hosting martini parties at my elegant hillside manse with the Mediterranean-tiled pool –- for a new life as a frazzled single mother and writer-turned-therapist living in an ugly rental tract home in the humdrum flats of the city. J was fresh out of rehab, mourning the death of his music career. He emerged from his single apartment only for AA meetings and therapy. It was hard to tell which one of us was the bigger train wreck.

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Jennifer Schmidt is a 48-year-old freelance journalist and editor. For many years she worked as a public radio reporter and editor first in Seattle and then in Boston. She now lives with her husband and two beautiful sons in Mexico City. In her free time, she writes a blog about the street dogs of Mexico.

An Illness Stronger than Love

I was on a week-long field workshop for environmental journalists when I met Jonathan. It was summer and we were deep in the Montana Rockies. Our group had stopped for lunch next to a sapphire blue lake and our guide pointed out that there was a good hiking trail up to a lookout if we were interested. Only Jonathan and I took up the offer. That was fine with me. I’d noticed him already. He was lean and tall and quick to smile.

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Emily Rich is a 47-year-old mother of three. She has taught English-as-a-Second-Language at Northern Virginia Community College. She is taking time off to work on a memoir entitled The Paw of the Family Beast about trying to make peace with her family during the months both her and her mother were going through cancer treatment.

A Monitored Heart

About two years after I finished chemotherapy I had to be fitted with a portable heart monitor. It was temporary, to determine if tamoxifen, the drug I was taking post-breast cancer, was giving me heart palpitations.

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