Archive for

Some Days Are just Teary

Posted on July 30, 2013

The alarm began sounding just after 4:15 in the morning. The fog of sleep-hunger was so thick that it took two cycles of the alarm for me to understand what was happening. It took another little while to really grasp why I couldn’t just roll over and go back to sleep. I shuffled to the shower and began the calculations of just how much I could accomplish before 5:15 came, which was my cut off time to make it to the airport for my flight to Chicago. The minutes whizzed by as I packed, dashed off notes to the girls and Sean, set the oven to bake a meatloaf as they slept. After pressing I-hope-you-remember-this kisses onto each of their foreheads, I raced downstairs,…

+Read more

Categories: Me

Implausible Proposal

Posted on July 20, 2013

We were entering the onramp to head north to the lake. It was nearly 100 degrees, the girls were in the back seat, and we were all sticky and disheveled. A motorcycle vroomed ahead of us, its driver looking over his shoulder in our direction. He had one hand behind him on the seat while craned his neck back and popped a wheelie. The girls gasped. “Oh, my, oh my, ohmyohmyohmy. Mom, did he just do a wheelie?” Briar gasped. “That is so dangerous.” “What’s a wheelie?” Finley asked. “It’s when they make their bike go up on one wheel,” I explained. “Why did he do that, mom?” Briar asked. “Well, I don’t know. I think usually that’s to impress people.” “Impressing people doesn’t…

+Read more

Categories: Random

Tagged:

Image Matters

Posted on July 10, 2013

This morning I saw a link from Tracy, about hideous attacks made online toward a female athlete. It is at once hard for me to believe and completely predictable. We seem to have created an appetite in our culture for one-upping, sometimes it’s in terms of danger, but other times it’s really just about cruelty. How outrageous can an insult be? How severely can a person be drawn and quartered for their looks, sexual orientation, political views, or just their personality? I could link to an example for each, but at some point you have to stop feeding the embers. This afternoon I received an email from the Huffington Post letting me know that they were going to run my post about struggling with a lifetime…

+Read more

Categories: Random

Tagged: , , ,

Perfect Lies

Posted on July 2, 2013

I’ve wanted to be closer to perfect, clung to the hope that if I persevered I might be able to keep certain parts of myself as a mother and as a professional free from the ripples of failure and imperfection. I don’t mean my newlywed version of perfect; conquering the manicured nail mountain or even the ideal of keeping the kitchen clean and the pantry perfectly stocked. I mean sending in papers to the school office without water stains or scribbles from my harried attempts to scrawl the words on our way out the door. My hope has been to one day have the wherewithal to hold my tongue when it’s politically savvy or let something pass over me like water off a duck’s…

+Read more

Categories: Me