How Do We Preserve a Memory If We Don’t Capture it on Camera?
It’s the last week of school, and I am a weeping mess. It’s not a sad weeping, really. It’s a bittersweet weeping, a proud weeping, because every step they take on this road that is education and growing up and moving on is another step they take out of my home. Those...
The Way We Care for Children
He hugs the toilet, his head hanging, his legs folded beneath him in a way mine don’t do anymore, his arms trembling because he knows what’s coming. I sit beside him, not even a foot away, on the lid of a stool his brothers once thought it would be fun to pee in, and...
Dear Husband: It Was a Grand Day When You Were Born
Here we are. You’re another year older. It doesn’t seem all that noticeable, if I’m being completely honest, because I’ve lived with you every day of this getting older, from the time you were 21 to the time of now. You are greater and truer and much wiser than you...
Dear Mama: You Don’t Have to Do It All
I see you. I see you in the early morning, when it’s still dark, before the kids are up, trying to type out a business plan that’s been taking you a month to finish, because you only get to work on it in the tiny little margin hours, and I see you racing through that...
The Value of Apologizing to Our Children
We sit around the table, and we’ve just finished talking about what we appreciate about one another, and now we get to that hardest of hard questions, because this is our Weekly Reset: Did you hurt anyone this week? I file through my days, tripping over all the ways I...
Dear Second Son: Run Your Own Race. Be Who You Are.
It’s not easy being the easy one, is it? You come second in a long line of boys, and you’ve always been the one we worry least about, because you’ve got a good head on your shoulders, and you know who you are, mostly, and you don’t ask for much. You mainly give. It’s...
Dear Sisters: There is Room Enough for All of Us
It doesn’t take us long, does it? We have only to look at those magazines to think, Not me. I could never look like that. Ever. We have only to look at each other---the thin, the round, the short, the tall, the fair, the dark---to remember that there are standards for...
Mistakes Can Be Our Greatest Teachers
I’m standing just a few feet away, and there’s this boy, bigger than mine in every way, hanging on the swing my son is using, so my son can’t even move. He’s glaring at my boy, so I walk closer. “Get off,” he’s saying. “This is my swing.” And my boy is trying to...
Dear Twins: Welcome to Four
You were unexpected, to say the least. We walked in the door of my doctor’s room, and I felt hopeful, even though I tried not to, because we’d just lost a baby, your sister, and I really just wanted to know that you were still alive and still developing and still a...
Dear Sister: Let Me Tell You What I See
We were just kids when you would follow me around wherever I went, and maybe I thought it was annoying at the time, because I didn’t really want a kid sister talking to all my friends and embarrassing me with all her questions and messing up my "popularity." A kid...