Most days I feel like I’m barely keeping my head above water. The time between when we all get home in the evenings and is only a few hours (at most) but it sometimes feels like an eternity. Our evening routine is a blur of dinner, baths, stories and bedtime mixed in with fighting, yelling and crying (it’s equal chances whether it’s a
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I have not been myself lately. By lately, I mean the last two years since my daughter was born. When I sat down with my journal a few months back, I didn’t even know what to write. I used to fill pages with opinions, thoughts, dreams, aspirations! But as I sat in bed with the Moleskine, I barely had anything
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I have been breast-conscious my entire life. Puberty came to me around age 12 when I started menstruating, my breasts started to develop, and my body was morphing into something unrecognizable to me, I was not prepared for the changes that were happening. My mother, who was kind and loving, parented with what I call benign neglect. I knew she
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Last Thursday I boarded a plane headed for Atlanta where two of my college friends picked me up so we could make the drive to Nashville. There we met up with two more college friends and spent five days eating, drinking, talking, eating some more, and not tending to the needs of small people.1 It was great. It really was.
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We’ve had kind of a rough summer so far. I’ve always said three-and-a-half is the hardest age. Magda Pecsenye of the blog Ask Moxie put it best, in my opinion: I say often that age 3.5 is the nadir of humanity, and I’m not actually joking. This age is demoralizing and confusing to the parent, because the child just can’t
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Day 1 So this little nugget arrived in the wee hours of the morning. I try not to call things “the best” because I feel like it minimizes old memories and sets you up to never surpass new ones. But I’m totally fine calling last night the best Saturday night of my life. Honestly. It was perfect and simple. I
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I remember the moment a few years ago, as one of my daughters was going through a health crisis, when I felt like I was falling apart. Harsh words coursed repetitively through my head… I am not cut out to be a mother! I am not cut out for this job! As I heard myself screaming this, I had a
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June 17th was supposed to be our son’s last day of school. But instead of spending the day having extra recess and signing yearbooks, most of the kids in our local public school systems stayed home. A crazy storm blasted through Central Virginia the night before, uprooting trees, knocking out power, and setting our city and the surrounding areas into
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When I was very young, I heard that when workers finished painting the Golden Gate Bridge it was time to begin painting it again–that it was a never-ending task. That fact boggled my mind. I remember having a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea that there was no actual completion of the job; it went on forever. And
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“Why is that flag only halfway up?” I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw my seven-year-old son tapping on the glass and pointing at a flag pole outside the retirement community near our house. “That’s called ‘half-staff,’” I said. “They do that when something sad has happened.” He stayed quiet for a few beats, leaving me thinking that maybe
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