mother

  • Retreat

    I was on retreat this weekend with a group of women and I had somewhat of a leadership role. I gave a talk, and helped facilitate conversations, but mostly I was in the retreat experience along with everyone else. It might have been easy for the women to believe that the ‘leaders’ among the group…

  • Celebration Song (Red, part two)

    My mother had a print of a painting in her house and I said I liked it, so of course she bought me one. It’s called ‘Celebration Song’, by Tim Steward, and it seems to depict in streaks of earth tones a Heavenly scene of thirteen spirits rejoicing together. It’s a bit abstract, but to…

  • Look

    When my mother was very sick with ovarian cancer, and maybe wondering about her legacy or her impact or what our lives would be like without her, I told her about the rooms in my house. I told my Mom that if I stood in the center of any one of those rooms and turned…

  • Becoming

    One day when my kids were very small, I was talking to my mother about a new habit of mine. Even though I took several daily walks with the kids during those busy years, I had begun getting up really early and walking by myself before my husband left for work. I used the time…

  • Rizpah

    My devotional led me to a scripture I’ve never read, and I can’t seem to let it go. In second Samuel, we hear the story of Rizpah.  She was a concubine of Saul, and by no fault of her own, had her two sons taken from her in repayment for Saul’s bloody deeds. Along with…

  • Mary

    As I meditate on the Passion of Jesus, my thoughts inevitably turn to Mary. Any of us who are mothers know the feeling of watching our children suffer. Sometimes we can help, kiss the boo boo, make everything better. Sometimes we can be a shoulder to cry on, and sometimes we can do nothing at…

  • Around

    Today I taught music in the preschool my children attended, and that completes a circle for me. Over the years, in my role as an early childhood music educator, I have led programs in most of the places where my kids had their first playgroups, their library story-times, their kindergarten classrooms. All of the places…

  • Give

    My mother loved to give gifts. She loved hunting for and concocting just the right present, and she loved nothing more than watching me and my sisters open something great on Christmas morning.   As we got older, she would pick up on some small thing we might say during the year, and make it into…

  • Go

    Being a mother to children ages nineteen and almost seventeen can be a bewildering, conflicting business. They’re not children, for one. They are somewhere very close to adulthood, and it’s no longer my job to drive them places, or pack snacks or enforce some of the smaller rules I hoped would give structure to their…

  • Meal

    Over the span of my life, I have eaten a lot of delicious bites of food. The first bite of caramelized onion butter on warm sourdough at The Foundry, the sea salt dark chocolate caramel from Hilliards, the sharp, buttery taste of Kerrygold Dubliner cheddar. These are just a few. But it takes many more…