No Finish Line

I watched my daughter race into her girlfriend’s house, all giggles and smiles and excitement, and I smiled.  More than anything else, I felt….relieved.  Grateful.  Finally, finally she seemed to have found a group of girls to bond with and share typical for her age experiences. It hasn’t always been that way.  While I always [...]

Adrift…And….Feeling Stupid

You know what I hate? I hate when you go and read someone’s blog and you discover that, through their own words and takes and experiences on life, that you really don’t like them. This doesn’t happen often to me, of course.  I go to blogs that are written by people that I am sure [...]

Life With My Girl

I can still remember the moment when I learned I was going to have a daughter.  I was flat on my back in the ultrasound room of my doctor’s office in Stillwater, Oklahoma.  R was with me waiting with baited breath as the technician measured the femur, checked the heart chambers, and did the full [...]

Dysfunctional Thanksgiving

It’s the day after Thanksigiving and I feel decidedly….ungrateful. And for the life of me, I’m trying to get myself back to that place of gratitude, to look around me at my blessings and my gifts, of all the rambling statuses on Facebook that people posted yesterday about life and love and happiness….but I’m just [...]

“That’s So Gay”

“Oh, that is SO gay,” my daughter said the other night at the dinner table. My husband and I looked at each other, a question there for both of us.  Do we go there?  My 22 year old son, home now post college graduation and furiously interviewing at any number of amazing companies, looked down [...]

My Father’s Birthday

We were sitting in the breakfast area of the Hampton Inn with my father. It was Labor Day weekend, and this year, my father’s 70th birthday fell on the Saturday of that weekend. Two years ago, R’s mother had thrown a splashy, expensive party for his father when he’d turned 70.  We didn’t have enough [...]

First Day of School

I got in my car and followed the school bus.  R followed me in his car, both of us nervous and wanting to make sure that Michael didn’t freak out or meltdown on his first day of kindergarten. It was a big day at our house, a warm late August day.  R had almost missed [...]

A New World

I looked around the classroom, slowly, holding Michael’s hand.  It looked a great deal like your standard issue preschool classroom:   letter block foam play area, bins of toys tucked neatly into cubbies, perfectly penned nametags pasted to the wall near coat hooks.  R stood silently next to me, his face unreadable. “Look, Michael,” I [...]

First Night

I lay on our bed in our new house.  The fatigue and days of sadness crept up on me in the quiet moment of solitude, the first in days, and the tears started to fall. I’d spent several days with my sister and my two boys up in Michigan as R and Melinda watched the [...]

Am I Being Fired?

I grabbed the phone off of the charger on the second ring, hoping that it would not wake up Michael from his nap.  I recognized the 818 area code as somewhere in the San Fernando Valley; that was Rick’s tour manager, Ronnie.  He called from time to time to mention this thing that Rick didn’t [...]