Seven months. Articles and books talk about this “transition,” from raising children to parenting around the edges, but it seems to be different for everyone. Every child. When my first daughter went off to make her own life, I was a bit lost, and my heart ached, but I was raising two other people. Distraction…
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…
My daughter is in London on a school trip. She comes home tomorrow. It was Saturday evening before I’d heard the news of the London Bridge attack. We had already received an email from her chaperone about the fun they’d had that day and that they were back in their hotel room. I called her…
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…
I’ve never liked escalators. When I was a child, I was terrified of them. I’d grasp for a hand or stand there holding up traffic. I was always worried that I’d miss the first step and somehow slide into the steel folding blocks of decent. There they would crunch me up like yesterday’s garbage. It was…