When we can't help but notice the empty seats this Thanksgiving
(Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs) In just a few days some of my favorite people will gather around my living room table, and we will talk over turkey and heap a plate with mashed potatoes and gravy and pretend we’re trying to decide between apple or chocolate pie when...
When we can’t help but notice the empty seats this Thanksgiving
(Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs) In just a few days some of my favorite people will gather around my living room table, and we will talk over turkey and heap a plate with mashed potatoes and gravy and pretend we’re trying to decide between apple or chocolate pie when...
The birth of him is the birth of me
I watch my boy from where I sit, his back curved just the littlest bit while his head hangs over the Star Wars book he’s reading, and I marvel at how his brow is missing the soft spot between eye and forehead, how his face has thinned out of the baby cheeks and chin,...
Why I can't read Christian parenting books
I started reading parenting books when my oldest was just a baby. Maybe it’s because I didn’t really know what I was doing. Maybe I wanted to hear from people who knew children better than I did. Maybe I just needed a way to feel like I was improving my chances for...
Why I can’t read Christian parenting books
I started reading parenting books when my oldest was just a baby. Maybe it’s because I didn’t really know what I was doing. Maybe I wanted to hear from people who knew children better than I did. Maybe I just needed a way to feel like I was improving my chances for...
Miscarriage is a death like any other. Please let us grieve.
Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs. It’s been more than three years, but there are still flashes that remind me of that day—a song or a word or the way the light falls in a room just so. Tonight it’s words that send me back to a bright-white room where a baby, my baby,...
When we think we might have shared too much in a world that won't understand
I almost didn’t share it. I almost didn’t hit publish. I almost let that finished piece, nearly too painful to write and way too painful to send out into a might-not-be-so-kind world, sit in a computer folder marked for my heart and my eyes only. Because it was hard....
When who your son is and who “they” say he is are two very different things
We walk into the school, turning the corner down toward his classroom, and I can feel the tension and sadness pulsing through his hand in mine, and when I turn to him for this morning goodbye, his pupils are so big his eyes look nearly black. By this time next week,...
When who your son is and who "they" say he is are two very different things
We walk into the school, turning the corner down toward his classroom, and I can feel the tension and sadness pulsing through his hand in mine, and when I turn to him for this morning goodbye, his pupils are so big his eyes look nearly black. By this time next week,...
When you know what it’s like to be hungry, and you don’t want to be there again
I retype his words for a story I’m working on, a story I don't even want to finish in these days after learning my job, these eight years of security, will be swallowed whole by a black hole in less than three months. Most of us don’t know what it’s like to be hungry,...