I bought my children new shoes for the first day of school and when they returned after winter break. Twice a year. Every year. In the budget or beyond the budget, they had new gleaming white tennis shoes as they marched into class for a new and improved quarter, semester, year. There were years Michael…
There have been moments in my life when I have missed the joy. Raising three children can be a blur of responsibility, expectation, and endless compromise. While there are lazy Sunday moments, so much of it is confusing, terrifying, and exhausting. It would be foolish to say that I packed every lunch with care…
The goal was to write a blog post once a week and I failed. No lives were taken, no money lost. Just a mental game I played with myself that didn’t work out. Oh well, there’s always next week to get it right. My daughter turns twenty-four on Saturday. She’s at that age where…
I don’t think my daughter ever played dress-up. She had some gypsy stuff and leftover Halloween costume props that would surface as perfectly acceptable school accessories, but she never walked around in my heels or wanted to wear my work clothes. Now I know why. Katlyn is my oldest and today she turns twenty-three.…
Being a mother is difficult work. Not in the sense that running a marathon or skiing a black diamond is difficult and not in the sense that finishing a project or painting window trim is work. Motherhood, the act of “moming,” is difficult work because if you are anything like me it is predominantly blind…
Jack had a bath today. My youngest turned sixteen at the end of February, and then two weeks later my son turned nineteen, and a couple months before that my oldest bought her first car . . . on her own. But, Jack had a bath today. This is what I like to call Look Over…
Less is seldom more. My son will move out of our house and into his college dorm next week. He drives me nuts. He’s been what they call a “challenge.” Loud, self-absorbed, and crazy moody. He still eats in his room, still tries to sidestep chores or responsibility, still runs at full speed and scares the crap out of me. He’s arrogant and selfish…
I like to think of myself as funny. I’m pretty sure I won something in high school related to being funny…best sense of humor or best laugh, maybe. No, I don’t think it was my laugh because that’s a bit of an awkward and snorty mess most of the time. Anyway, the point of the…
It’s Memorial Day, again. Honestly, as I get older sometimes things become rote. Here we go again, another Easter, it’s time for Halloween again. As we move into summer, it’s another long weekend of flags, boats heading to the lake, and the smell of coals burning. More often than not, when I get in these modes, slip…