It’s a Wonderful Life
He didn’t want to miss out.” About this time last year, Adam Oakes, a student at VCU, died of alcohol poisoning after drinking a 40-ounce bottle of whiskey at an off-campus party. On the local news, I heard one of…
Un-Stuffing the Holiday Season
As weird as the holiday season was last year – no meals out, no shows or movie theaters, no big family gatherings, no church service on Christmas Eve – I have to admit, paring back the shopping was kind of…
Why We All Need Halloween
“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…
The One About Breastfeeding
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…
Mother Earth and Her Day
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…
Moms Need a Grace Period
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…
Start Something!
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:…
Three Stockings Were Hung…
“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…
Raising Compassionate Kids
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…
Early Steps to Raising Readers
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…
