The concept of unplugging is a thing of beauty. Set aside the phone, close the laptop, hide the remote, and give yourself completely to the three dimensional. The pressure to unplug and the judgement of not doing so has become an oppressive blanket. The divide between those of us who use the online realm for [...]
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
The other day I was driving toward our house to meet the bus. I was coming around a bend that always gives me pause, something about it makes me brace for a child darting into the road. One night, I was coming home very late, just as I came up the hill to the bend, [...]
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
I have no illusions that raising three daughters will be easy. I know from my own experience that self-confidence and self-acceptance can be ephemeral, a revelation of my own worth one day is hammered by crippling doubt another. Then there are things like Steubenville and the coveted thigh gap. The technology that they are growing [...]
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Eight. More than eight years with you. These years are motion and fire. They are amorphous and finite at once, molten lava coursing through time, inexplicably and unapologetically racing and slowing to form the many facets of a spirit. You are eight and I have been infatuated and tormented by you since that first blush of pink [...]
Friday, February 22, 2013
A little over five years ago I was writing about reckoning heartbreak, as a moment in time refused to be ignored and I had to reevaluate what I was doing as a parent. The decisions I was making in the interest of having it all were taking a toll on all of us in ways [...]
Monday, September 10, 2012
Parenting reveals how often you move or, more specifically how often you didn’t move before. Your understanding of motion and stillness is forever altered. You bring your baby home and there is constant motion—scurrying for burp cloths, clanging about for gum gel, scrambling for a wipe. Then they are toddlers and your jerky movements are [...]
Friday, September 23, 2011
“I can’t sleep.” It floats down from their room often; the voice behind it is always Briar’s. It’s never Avery, for her sleep comes like breathing. Sometimes Finley chimes in that she can’t sleep either, but she doesn’t mean it. Finley chooses not to sleep. She squeezes a bit more out of the day and then [...]
Friday, July 22, 2011
The girls are home. I cried while they were gone. A lot. I walked past their bedrooms trying not to get caught up in the twisted sheets and discarded clothes all wrapped up in their summery scent of cut grass, lake water and cheesey-snack dust. Then the first morning without them came and the room pulled [...]
Friday, October 29, 2010
Once upon a time I made a Halloween costume for Briar. I do not know how to sew, I cannot read a pattern, I don’t even flirt with trying a Martha Stewart project. Yet some part of me felt like I needed, at least once, to make a costume by my own hand. There were [...]
Thursday, September 9, 2010
It’s the first day of school and I’ve been reading posts by other parents all over the country with children in every grade imaginable. We are all standing on the same precipice and yet the truth is no one sees the same thing, no one feels the exact same searing panic laced with euphoria. It [...]
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
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