Yearly Archives: 2015

The winner will a FULL scholarship from this amazing benefactor. Details in blog.

Listen as people ask if Samuel is your only child. Tell people you had a daughter but she died; comfort them as they work through imagined grief.

Forty years ago, when I was eleven, my father traded my mother and my two sisters and me for another woman with three daughters our age. A clean swap.

I loved my grandmother, the most spiritual person I have ever known. And I'm not even sure what that means.

I am white and so is my husband. We knew when we chose to adopt outside our race that our children would face hurdles that we’d never encountered, but the recent tragedies that have birthed the #BlackLivesMatter movement have shown me that, despite our good intentions, we didn’t fully grasp the magnitude of our parenting responsibility when we started this family.

Don't comment on my body or my face or if I am smiling. Don't ask me if I am pregnant unless you see me giving birth or you know for sure. Don't offer unsolicited advice about how I can be more beautiful or perfect or womanly or successful. Unless I ask you, zip it, Dude. Zip it.

As you know if you follow me on social media or come to my workshops etc, I am very passionate about my latest project:...

To have this love--a prayer finally answered--and then to have it so suddenly snatched away in such a short time, and by the very person who had offered it, left me winded in a way all the deaths and breakups before hadn’t.

Our lives can be filled with stress, and hard choices, and things don't always make sense. I worry about my daughter and how well (or poorly) I have done raising her as a single father, my relationship, my job situation, financial troubles and the future; and there are times when the physical and emotional pain has felt overwhelming, and I would like to escape life on life’s terms for a little while; it is at times like these when the bottle (or rather several bottles) can tempt me to go off track.

I want to write about the visceral dissonance my head and gut absorb each day as I scroll through images on social media—the pumpkin martini recipes and beheadings in Iran and cute cat videos and acid thrown in children’s faces and new iPhones and thousands of faceless bodies—women, children and men blown to bits, continents away. I want to write about the strange juxtaposition of these things and try to make meaning of it.

But I am an adult now- and we don’t have such things waiting for us at the finish line. The only validation we receive for completing the task is the internal satisfaction of a job well done, which can be particularly difficult in the face of other people’s criticism and disappointment.

When she was 39, her mother blurted out, the day after her daughter had a life-threatening pregnancy loss, “Oh my goodness! You still look pregnant!! Look at you.”