I immediately pulled out the cassette tapes of these albums my dad made for me in the 1980s. Incredibly, we still have a working tape player, and perhaps even more incredibly, the tapes are playing just fine. I've had them on pretty constant play ever since. Although I had forgotten that you have to physically turn cassette tapes over, which is kind of irritating compared to our modern streaming services, where all we have to do is tolerate a few ads or pay a monthly fee.
Parenting
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The wisdom in his eyes
Of all the things I'm grateful for, and that list is lengthy!, the fact that I was so distraught I never made a concrete decision about the arrival of this little unplanned person ranks right up there. That decision was made for me when Quinn arrived and there was no alternative plan in place.
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Some gifts are not all that obvious
What do I want in my own life right now? I want to grow my PSD work. What did Quinn deliver, completely out of the blue? The gift of his not only having spent time thinking about how to help me grow it but then the follow through of letting me know about it, too.
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Change is inevitable; how you manage it is up to you
This weekend, seven years ago. I thought my heart would break in two and never recover. It was a time I had dreaded for a number of years: the weekend I took Quinn to college. I would never have chosen for Quinn to leave. I loved having him across the hall; I adored seeing him everyday, and our 18 years together flew by all too fast. But the thing is, my life, all our lives, couldn’t grow, evolve and get even better, until we accepted that first hard change of moving Quinn to college. Let me tell you a story from Quinn’s drop off day: Freshman weekend there were a…
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A potential shooter, curtains and my early morning habits disrupted
But as I reread the emergency alert, I wish for one half of one second that we had curtains. And I hesitate to even write that because Dr Marry will use that sentence against me for the rest of our lives together. But it's true.
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25 trips around the sun with my boy
Even in that moment, holding this tiniest, most perfect of little persons, my mom didn't say yes or no. It wasn't that all these people didn't have opinions, but every single one of them knew I was going to have to do this largely by myself; that answer had to come only from me. I looked down on little Quinn John, and I decided to be his mom.
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A season to remember
My beloved boy is home for a week. I haven’t seen him since Christmas. That’s not that unusual, except that Covid-19 and the fact that he lives in Los Angeles has added an extra layer of stress to him being so far away. I was overjoyed to lay eyes on him when we picked him up from the airport last week, to be sure. Having him home got me thinking about a piece I wrote the spring he graduated from high school—a year I was sure would lead to me shriveling up and dying the day I dropped him off at college in the fall. Clearly, that didn’t happen. In…
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Until my throat is raw
I have lived an incredibly privileged life, and I have never felt physically threatened by people who are tasked with keeping me safe.
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Maybe math does have all the answers
What is much more interesting to me now is to consider who I am today because of that terrible night, exactly 25 years ago.
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Sweet lemon aid
This story originally appeared in the May/June 2020 issue of Inspired Home magazine. As you read this, we’re either still in or have just come out of an unprecedented global pandemic. Think about that for a minute. What other event in our planet’s entire history has literally brought the entire world together and absolutely isolated everyone simultaneously? Not every country fought in either of the World Wars and, while there have been other isolating pandemics, we didn’t have the benefit of technology to connect to people anywhere on the planet like we do today. So, what has happened because of this pandemic? There’s been a run on, of all things,…
