Very recently, my sister was trying to teach my 6 year old niece a life lesson about thinking for one’s self. My niece was copying a behavior of some of her friends that my sister did not think was appropriate for a 6 year old girl. After a wily exchange, my sister finally asked my niece, “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do the same?”
To which my niece replied, “Well… is there water under the bridge?”
Read MoreGoing through old boxes, random pieces of a life once lived now stacked away in a dark dry part of my basement. There it was, hidden in time and busy perpetual motion, in a box that came from my childhood home to college, then apartment to apartment to my married home, now divorced.
An unassuming orange hairbrush. The detangling agent of the wily beast that has always been my knotty long dark brown hair. But it was more... my weapon of choice.
I always felt responsible for my father dying. This is not sane or logical or fact-based. Have the coroner's report. Know it wasn't really my fault and yet my heart hangs heavy just thinking of him.
Read MoreSometimes something so big happens that you can’t really understand it all at once.
Yet you must move forward, go through the motions – life is not optional. The sun rises and sets, rises and sets, with or without your head in the game. And that is where you find me here.
My mother died in March – she was the last piece of my original family.
Read MoreYesterday morning my daughter's grandfather died from a very short and rapid fight with cancer. After school, we sat her down, and explained what happened. It's never fun as a parent to tell your child something that you know will hurt her, and unfortunately that's had to happen far too much for her in her short lifetime. When I hear her laugh, it reassures me that she isn't forgetting how to be a kid. After several bouts of crying, I did hear her silly little laugh again, and it made my heavy heart happy.
Resting in bed with her last night she turned to me and she said, "Don't you think it's funny how people say memories of people are supposed to make you happy, but people aren't always happy when the people are actually here?"
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