One of my daughters turns 18 this week. She’s the one I think is most like me. The one my spirit recognized from the first moment I saw her face, when I burst into tears in the delivery room. The one whose early teenage years were also maybe the...
I finally gave up staring at the ceiling in the dark and blinking, and I drew a bath at 3am. (I’ve been having trouble sleeping) I had rotated in bed long enough. Maybe the hot water would help me. Lately, I can’t turn my mind off. I’m not sure if...
On Thursday, my 14-year-old daughter, Paige, announced that several of her friends would be coming to our house to get ready for the football game on Friday night. I just stood there, doing that strange smile moms do at 14-year-olds who are telling...
My youngest daughter, Paige, has been having some anxiety lately. It happens most often in the car or at bedtime. It happened on her way to Lake Tahoe with her best friends a few weeks ago. She called me from a mountainside four hours away, in a...
I have had a lot of feelings come up in the last couple of days centered around the fact that I’ve worked from home as a stay-at-home mom for the last 20 years. I look back, and I have done it all, but so much of the work I’ve done has been the...
I have always struggled with change. Maybe that is how I ended up moving back to the same street I grew up on. I love what feels comfortable. I love what is familiar. I remember when we moved back here to the house we are currently in, how I had to...
I’m in need of good dopamine boosts these days. My timeline apparently knows this, and is suddenly flooded with AI videos of Christmas time in the 80’s and 90’s: Kids riding in the back seat of their parents station wagon for pizza at Pizza Hut...
The other day, while standing in my garage, I heard a scream and a sob from next door that definitely sounded like an injury. It was my 2-year-old granddaughter, Mavis, who lives with her mom, dad, and baby brother in the house attached to ours. I’d...
Yesterday morning, I looked at my phone to discover the horrible news so many of us discovered: That Dolly Parton died. I wasn’t surprised by how it shook me. I have long admired a person who stays kind, and true to their convictions. I had followed...
My daughter, son-in-law, brand-new grandson, Henry, and 2-year-old granddaughter, Mavis, live in a house attached to ours. It is one of my life’s biggest privileges to be able to be this close to them. It means that we can share dinners, I can help...