Dear Societal Expectations: I Quit
You’ve been telling me how to be a woman all my life. You, with your glittering perfection and your attractive bar of expectation and your promises for love and acceptance and significance, if I’ll just do this. Just this being perfect. Just this juggling everything—home, love, family, career—and making it all look easy. Just this […]
Dear Husband: I Would Still Choose You.
We “met” long before we met. We “met” in all those emails we exchanged, back when you worked in downtown Austin and I spent my summer interning for the Victoria Advocate so I could live at home and save a little money before I went back to my third year of college. I...
Dear 21-year-old Me: Live, Laugh and Love
Dear 21-year-old me, I know where you are. It’s where you always are. You are sitting inside your office at 200 Old Main, where you’re waiting for the designer to finish laying out the newspaper so you can edit it one final time before it goes to press. You’re tired...
Dear Mom: Now I Understand
So it’s almost time to mark another birthday on your timeline. Another year that you’re here to walk me through this parenting game, this real world, this beautifully brutal life. I am so grateful I get to have a mother like you to shepherd me and guide me and listen...
Dear Single Mom: You Will Make It.
Here you are, locked in your room. Trying not to remember that he was supposed to share this room with you, that he promised to have and hold until death parted. Trying not to think about that one you loved, who never came home. Trying not to acknowledge that your...
Dear 11-year-old child of divorce: There is still hope.
So the letter came. You put it on the bureau for your mom, but you just had a feeling it was something bad. Something tragic. Something you might never survive. Hands know when they hold a thing like that. So it was not entirely surprise that met you when your mom...
Dear lonely ones: There is somewhere you belong
The thing about belonging is you have to accept it. You have to believe it. You have to know it’s yours. And if you don’t, there are no words in the world a person can repeat often enough in just the right tone that will make any difference at all.
To the kindergarten parent on the first day of school
Tomorrow I will rise early and sit through reading and writing and praying and then I will steal down the stairs to prepare breakfast and then steal back up to kiss them from their beds and point to their chalkboard schedules. Tomorrow I will walk down a concrete sidewalk, my hand wrapped around the fingers […]
Dear Teacher: Please take care of my boys.
Every summer, it’s the same old thing. The school year creeps up on us, after more than two months spent playing together and resting together and just being together, and here comes my old friend anxiety. This year three of them will go to school, and I feel the...
Dear Memaw: Even after all this time, I still miss you.
It’s been seven years since you left us. Well, seven years since you died. You left us six months before you died. I remember the day clearly, because we were coming up on my firstborn’s birthday, and I got the call right when we were taking him out of the bath. Mom...