Story
One can bear anything if one can put it in a story. - Isak Dinesen
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I hate divorce
In our family we don’t toss the word “hate” around. Partially because it’s such a strong word and it just sounds unpleasant coming from a child’s lips. Partially because when you use a word too much it loses its potency and you forget how harsh of a word “hate” can really be. The kids and I try to create a culture in our home where “hate” is unspoken. (Hopefully) you won’t hear the kids (or me) saying, “I hate tomatoes”, “I hate when we are running late”, “I hate the color mauve”, “I hate the sounds of fingernails being clipped”. So understand the strength of my words when I…
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adjusting
Here’s one thing that’s weird about being the only parent at home. Deciding an emergency contact person. It’s kind of suddenly an arbitrary decision, when before it was a brainless decision. The form has a blank for “emergency contact” – insert spouse’s name and information. No thought required. But now. Now, it’s like — hmm, maybe today I’ll pick Friend A, maybe tomorrow Friend B. Which friend is more likely to answer her phone if a stranger calls? Which friend could leave what she’s doing to help me out in an emergency? And of course I know that if any of these friends received That Phone Call, they would…
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thank you . . .
How do you follow a post like yesterday’s? I don’t know. I guess the same way you follow a day like last Thursday and a year like last year, you just do. And, in so many giant and in so many tiny ways, last Thursday was a day not unlike any other day. It was a legal end of a nearly twenty year marriage but the real death of the marriage had happened long before Thursday. I’m certain I’ll write more about this topic in the future – there’s a whole lotta processing and shifting and working through going on in my heart and in my life and I’m…
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…. than all my sorrows
Last Thursday my husband stood in a court room before a judge and officially declared me to be no longer his wife. That morning two kind friends took me out to breakfast. We talked about regular life and hope deferred and hope renewed. We ate cinnamon rolls and shared stories about our kids and our hearts and books we’ve read. Then we went back to my house. And Hilary pulled Jo and I to stand in my bedroom. Bed wildly unmade from the three kids and the one grown up who fitfully slept across its sheets the night before. Ridiculously large loads of laundry piled too high on the…
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what I learned in college that I wish I could undo
We try to make our kids vanilla, somehow. Universally, I mean. And also – as educators. Maybe even as parents. (I like vanilla as a flavor for ice cream, but maybe not as a description for a run of the mill, looks and sounds like everyone else kind of recipe for humanity.) Social media, modern culture, fashion, the machine that tells us what to eat and what to watch and what to wear and how to wear it and when to wear it are endlessly fond of this concept of sameness. They thrive on it. (Even while duplicitously declaring it unique.) It’s so good for business. It IS business. When…
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I didn’t miss the internet and I was glad to put my phone away.
One of my favorite parts of being at Lost Valley Ranch was the disconnectedness to regular life. And the lack of cell service. (That and my bed being made every day by someone besides myself.) For that one week I couldn’t see the growing number of e-mails I was missing. My phone was set on permanent airplane mode. Do they make a setting like that for all of my life? It was a sort of freedom, for sure. An intoxicating kind of freedom. Freedom from not only routine responsibility but from being inundated with the continual hard of the world in which we live. I didn’t watch any news or…
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not a rockstar . . .
On our adventure there were times the six of us received some looks, some comments, some stares. Questions from strangers. This one older gent in Cracker Barrel in some state I can’t even pretend to recall was quite determined to learn our life story. He wanted to know where my husband was and how on earth “all those kids” could be mine and was I really traveling alone with them and his wife literally slapped his arm and begged my forgiveness but he kept on asking question after question. I don’t think five kids is all that many really and I have no idea how we look to passersby, but…
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Lost Valley Ranch: At The Beginning
An Immediate Disclaimer: This isn’t going to be the “real” Lost Valley Ranch post. I mean, I probably cannot do this past week’s experience justice in one blog post anyway. (Also. My internet connection is rather shady so it can’t handle lots of photos and links tonight.) Also. Re-entering the world of Instagram and Facebook and even opening up my computer is all a little overwhelming tonight so I can’t get my act together right now. And – although I have missed all of you guys – I have not one bit missed social media as a whole nor have I missed screens in any shape or form.…
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when Mother’s Day is messy
In the world of blogging and platforms and building your tribe (and whatever other words we have created post Windows 95), word on the street says you should write about whatever is “trending”. Time your posts to be about approaching holidays and topics that are on point and subjects being covered in the news and in mainstream media. Write about what people are talking about. Eh. Sometimes that lands in my lap. I mean, at Christmas I probably had some Christmas posts. I’m sure occasionally I talk about something that someone “important” somewhere is talking about too. I guess. Generally I just write about what I write about – you…
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would you do it all over again?
Would you do it all over again? It’s the kind of question your brain asks itself at 2:26 in the morning after you’ve watched an unrealistic romantic comedy and the screen has gone black and the volume has gone mute and the only sound you hear is the shaking and whirring of the uneven ceiling fan. Would you do it all over again? It’s the sort of impossible question that barely deserves a response but there’s this glimmer and sliver of your heart that feels compelled to think it through. No one is really asking. You know you’re only talking to yourself. But your self is still kinda curious and…
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finding the scrapbooks
I think I’m going to blame Riley. She wants to have a yard sale in the front yard. (I strongly dislike yard sales. Having them, at least. They never seem to make enough money to justify the time spent organizing and the time spent standing outside your house for one whole day and the time spent taking every leftover thing to the thrift store after you finish wasting your entire day not selling it all.) However. Her idea for a yard sale made me think I should go through a closet or two and that led me to unearthing the bags full of scrapbooks. Actual scrapbooks. Books made with sticky…
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don’t call my son the man of the house
Please don’t call my ten-year-old son “the man of the house”. He is not. Currently – we simply have no man of the house. And that’s terrible. Tragic. Not right. Wrong. Not the plan. Incorrect. Broken. But all of those truths do not make my ten-year-old son anything except a ten-year-old boy. He is not more a man now. He is not a grown up. He is not capable of bearing the weight of being the “man of the house”. I don’t want that for him. I want him to be a ten-year-old boy. I want him to think about starting fires outside at the fire pit. I want him…
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night …
And then there are some nights. Nights so long you’re nearly certain the dawn will never come. (Your only assurance being the fact that, thus far in your experience, it always has.) Nights filled with sick kids offering a play by play of their stomach aching misery from the bathroom. Nights when you are only certain of one thing – there will not be adequate sleep gained for you to operate as The Responsible Human life is guaranteed to expect of you the next morning. Nights when the dreams that greet your restless soul are so violently vivid and unexpected that your brain is literally reeling with the images come…
