Love Means Showing Up
I’ve been intentional lately about making myself tell real, live people that I’m writing a book about parenting. Last month, a random mom at a yoga event asked me what my job was and I told her about my book and said that it was about how being a mom is basically impossible and that
I knew that I was completely over-reacting; my disappointment was disproportional to the actual events that were unfolding. I was absolutely convinced that our summer was ruined. In June, most of my family got COVID, which meant that we couldn’t go visit our son in Michigan. For months, I’d been looking forward to seeing him
In college, I had a literature professor who shared something very important with our class. After a discussion about a short story, she leaned against her desk and said, “I want to tell you something that took me countless hours and thousands of dollars to learn in therapy. Here it is: I am not my
Last October, I sent out a Bat-Signal, asking for help. I was in a stuck place emotionally where I could only see the things that were broken. Some of my kids were having a hard time, the election was looming and life felt heavy. I knew I had so much to be thankful for, but
A few weeks ago, I visited my son Caleb in Ann Arbor for the first time. He’s a freshman in college and I wanted to see what his new life looked like. The town was enchanting and I loved spending a few days with him. The whole experience was reassuring and wonderful, until I drove
I love calendars and goal setting and the hope of a brand new year. A few days ago, my husband Bryan and I sat down and looked over the goals we’d set for 2018. As I looked back over the year, I noticed that some things that had been priorities just disappeared. We’d had to
“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
I hesitated to write about this because I would do just about anything to take away my own depression and don’t like that it is part of my life. I have learned, though, that not making eye contact with this illness doesn’t make it go away. I know that February can be a hard month
Strangers regularly point to my twin daughters and ask me, “Where are they from?” An airport shuttle driver asked my husband Bryan a few years ago, “Did you get them from Haiti?” My husband responded, “No” and kept moving. I was a little embarrassed. Bryan answered the question, I suppose, but he wasn’t exactly
As a spiritual practice and an act of intentional denial, I hardly ever weigh myself. I’ve found that weighing myself makes me kind of crazy and I prefer to just judge my general health by how well my clothes fit. I decided, though, to join a contest at the new place where I’ve started