“Vacuuming can be therapeutic,” the middle-aged woman told my 22-year-old self.
With five children aged three to fifteen, my parenting radar sometimes get twitchy, oversensitive. My trigger finger gets itchy at every blip that shows up — and believe me, there are a lot of blips.
I wanted to write about love for Valentine’s Day. When I thought about love, I thought about my marriage beds.
Our family said goodbye to two remarkable women this past December: My grandmother and my aunt died within two weeks of each other.
Erick’s habits don’t impact me directly, nor has he ever tried to impose them upon me, but it’s almost impossible not to feel lazy and gluttonous next to his saintly levels of discipline.
The noise — those booms and pops and sizzles — may ward off evil, but it’s also a perfect, primal way to commemorate all the emotions of the past year.
As I am writing this there are nine days left until Christmas, and we still don’t have a Christmas tree.
About partway through I realized that it wasn’t just a film. That’s when I leaned over and whispered to my husband, “This is the perfect metaphor for perimenopause!”
Three-year-olds and teenagers, as it turns out, aren’t all that different.
Now, my experience of middle age may not be universal, but in my experience middle age is when your heart breaks and stays broken.
This morning, my 11-year-old daughter said, “I don’t know why, but I’m not really feeling excited about anything right now,” and I thought to myself: Me, too.
Perhaps because I’m a writer and a lover of literature, it’s been helpful for me to view life in terms of story.
“Mommy, what do two lines mean?” my nine-year-old daughter called across the kitchen. And just like that, the Bad Thing entered our house
It’s an obvious metaphor, but it’s true: Where you look is where you’ll go.
I need to come clean: Although I’ve written on this topic in a variety of ways before, I’ve always beat around the bush, obscured my true feelings, tried to be polite. But I think it’s time to be honest, to come right out and say it: I don’t like summer.
