“Butterfingers are my life.” Our middle daughter, the child who teachers often described as an old soul in elementary school and who in young adulthood still has a somewhat tenuous relationship with smiling, made this statement one Halloween. My husband…
When our firstborn was just shy of eleven months, my husband was hit with a sudden and scary viral infection that landed him in intensive care. In an instant, everything about our little family’s life changed and for about a…
In the seventies, my friends and I played near a trickle of a creek in a ravine everyone called “Bloody Bones.” The water was copper-colored from what we always assumed was factory runoff. It might have been toxic, but I’m…
There’s a list of shortcomings that some mothers carry around in their heads. For a semi-empty nester and work-from-home mom, that list may be rooted in the fact that she spent a large portion of her kids’ childhoods finding ways…
Three years ago this month, on the morning of my fifty-second birthday, I woke up, struggled mightily to pull on a sports bra, double-knotted my tennis shoes, and slunk into the small group exercise room at my local YMCA. Note:…
“Boom, boom, boom!” is what I said at a party in our neighbor’s backyard that day. And a few hours later in the privacy of our family room, Scott called me on it. “You added a boom,” my very perceptive…
During a team-building activity in high school, the coach asked the group of athletes to share something that caused each of them anxiety. One by one, the courageous teenagers listed their things. When it was my daughter’s turn, she said…
If you’ve been pregnant, the concept of using your baby bump as a shelf might be familiar. For baby number one, the bigger I got, the better I got at finding practical uses for this convenient surface. Depending on the…
No one knows this about me. No one in my family, none of my friends, not even my husband. No one knows that I had an accident in a vehicle related to texting. Because I have always been committed to…
Can wasps even see with their creepy eyes? That might seem like a weird question, but I have such a vivid memory of staring down a wasp that I’m going to say, yes, they can. Wasps can see us with…
