Love Means Showing Up
I’m not an easy person to watch football with. I have a lot of questions. None of them are about the game. I ask about why the players wear certain uniforms. I’m interested in the coaches’ previous jobs and ask about their families. I pray aloud for the kicker’s mom when they send him out
Our daughter Elizabeth played rec soccer last spring. I’m pretty sure she was in it for the shoes, but we decided to give it a try. It turns out that she’s pretty fast and soccer was actually a good fit. There was a slight issue, though, with some of the soccer parents. One dad regularly
I couldn’t help but overhear the woman talking loudly in the restaurant about panties. I was out to dinner with my family when I heard a woman say, “Pops, we have big news! We’re wearing panties!!” I leaned to look around the corner, hoping her use of the “royal we” involved a young child. Sure
I was getting on my own nerves, with all the worrying and stewing. I’d recently asked my husband multiple times, “Is it all going to be okay?” He’d respond that it would indeed all be fine and would even give reasonable examples for how he knew this. Then, I’d respond with, “I just don’t think
I felt bad for the car salesman. He was so new to the dealership that he didn’t even have business cards yet and I was sitting across from him having a full-blown identity crisis. He definitely wasn’t trained for what I was experiencing. The day had started very differently. We have a new driver in
There’s a practice in the theater world called “giving notes” that even those of us who are never on stage could benefit from. “Giving notes,” as I understand it, involves sitting around in a circle after a performance and hearing about the ways you can improve. As a sensitive person who doesn’t exactly crave “feedback,”
“They loved their children just as much as we love our children.” I was taking notes during an anthropology class in college when my professor said this. I looked up from writing because something about this statement brought me up short. The class was on Native Americans. Every time the professor would introduce a new
When our tour guide said, “Trust the rock, NOT the stone,” I had a few clarifying questions. Since English wasn’t his first language and we were crossing a part of the trail called “Hell’s Abyss”or some other terrifying name, I wanted to be sure I understood. My husband and I were part of a hiking
I couldn’t figure out what was happening on the beach. I saw adults of varied ages and kids watching two young women building a sandcastle. The young women had on matching t-shirts and assorted buckets around them with sandcastle logos. One was saying, “You pat the bucket to make the sand compacted,” and the group
If I could change anything about my high school years, it wouldn’t have anything to do with grades or classes. I wouldn’t add more activities or strive for more recognition. I wish I’d been kinder. I wish I’d been kinder to my friends, to new kids, to my family, to the guys that I dated,