mother

  • Daughters

    All of the mother-daughter pairs were at the craft store today, and then they all followed me over to the Paper Store. These girls and women stuck out to me all day long. They were a variety of ages…children to elderly, and some were sweet and others were annoyed. After all, this is the essence…

  • Four

    My mother is the only person who knew pretty much my whole story and loved me anyway. She fiercely loved me, thought I was wonderful, and said so. She saw my insecurities, failings, and anxieties and knew the root of most of them. She could hear something quake in my voice about four seconds into…

  • Yarn

    It seems to me that a life spent with young children is made of varying textures and materials. There are the structures that give shape to your daily life, like the school day and activities and sports. These provide the skeleton of a schedule and also tend to dictate your community. These structures are brick;…

  • Feed

    Once I was a baby who lived inside my mother’s womb. There, she housed and fed me and provided everything I needed, but I didn’t know that. I just took what was offered without regard to the source. Later, I was born and sought nourishment, protection and safety from her in other ways, again completely…

  • Six

    I haven’t been able to bring myself to really read about it, let alone write about it, but it’s everywhere anyway. My friends and neighbors, and even Rob Lowe and Maria Shriver are experiencing it and writing in excruciating detail. I keep seeing references to that song by Nichole Nordeman everyone is talking about, but…

  • Christmas, Death, Birth revisited

    Earlier, I wrote about a pattern in my life that keeps coming up, and it’s modeled after three days in November of 2012 in which we celebrated my Mom’s last Christmas, mourned her death, and focused on her new life in Heaven. Now I find I go through these seasons over and over; times of…

  • Bird

    People I know are seeking and finding new opportunities, and I am mostly so happy for them. They are leaving, moving forward, and growing, and I am not. I’m a bird in a nest when everyone else is flying and I am left picking at straw. Sometimes watching them makes me cranky and jealous, and…

  • Heart

    As an adult, I have dealt with heart palpitations on and off for years. It can feel like a racing or pounding in my chest, and the most scary version feels like I’m skipping beats. I have even had a full work up twice to determine the cause, wearing the holter monitor for a day…

  • Girl

    When I was a teenager, on summer days when I wasn’t working, my mother sometimes encouraged me to “call a friend and go somewhere”. Maybe she thought I was being difficult, or maybe she was hopeful that something had shifted in the landscape, but she certainly knew the truth that I couldn’t make myself say:…

  • Garden

    What was your favorite book when you were a little kid? It seems to me that the books that speak to us in childhood are treasures, keys that unlock something in our lives we need for the day and from which we can draw later. Last night, I was walking through a bookstore and found…