Dear Brother: You Are Loved. You are Enough.
So you didn’t have a father. You didn’t have a shining example of what it means to be a man, and by the time the other one came to show you how to do this growing-up thing, you’d already lived too many years, and it was too late. You were too closed up. And sometimes...
Everyone Dies Under the Bar of Perfection
All day long, since he got home from school, he’s been raising his voice, letting it hang up there in the whine-range, and it’s grating and annoying and maddening, and his daddy and I say it over and over so it plays like a broken record, “Please speak in an honoring...
Dear Brothers: It’s Okay to Fall Off Your White Horse.
Maybe we’ve been expecting it for far too long, this stoicism. This bravery. This “everything will be alright” as long as you can act like it will be. You sit on your great white horse, holding on for dear life, like the knight, like the savior you are, and every time...
Dear Sons: You Have Shown Me Love
What did I know of love before the six of you came into being? Sure, I had your daddy, and that was a love deep and wide and long, but it was a love that did not open fully until there was another kind, this tiny little human being kind of love. We were suddenly...
There is No Such Thing As Perfection in Parenting
All my life I have set for myself unreachable standards of perfection. I have eyed my fall-shorts and felt the disappointment needling me, and I have heard that voice of condemn whispering it: Do better. And I walked it right into my parenting. Just last night I...
Dear Last Born Son: These Things You Should Understand
It takes only a look from those evening sky eyes, so much like your daddy’s, before I’m lost in time, lost in space, lost in a world where only you and I exist. It takes only one sweet, joyful smile to send me reeling, end over end, in a twister of tears, for the...
How to Do the Next Right Thing
There is a little boy, identical to another, who roams my house burning with curiosity, looking for all the hidden places, touching everything he can possibly find that looks interestingly forbidden. Day after day after day it’s the same story, and my tone often says...
Dear Shame: I Am Enough
There’s this story I’ve listened to all my life. Your story. Your story that says I should have been prettier. I should have tried harder. I should have walked thinner. I should have been kinder. I should have been smarter. I shouldn’t have missed that question; it...
Dear Stepdad: Thanks for Taking Us As Your Children
I still remember the first time you showed up at our door, three pizzas stacked in your hand, because you knew you were coming to a house of teenagers, and what teenagers don’t like pizza? Except you were coming to a house where a girl didn’t want to eat, period,...
Depression Does Not Choose to Die
This week, as we wait in expectation for the hope and light of the world, I am thinking, nearly nonstop, about a dear friend who just lost her husband to suicide. I think of her with such a profound sadness in my heart that it almost feels like a betrayal—because it...