December 28, 2022 early am I’m up in the early, pitch dark silence of York, England, sitting in the living room of the beautiful AirBnB I rented nearly a year ago for just this occasion, the final day of my 5th decade. A number of people I love are asleep in this house with me: the incomparable Dr Marry, my spectacular mother, her partner Bob, my beloved Quinn and his girl Leona. All, and my brother Wes for part of it, have made the trek across the pond to celebrate this milestone birthday with me—something I have been planning since Dr Marry and I celebrated my 46th birthday in Yorkshire…
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2022, here we come!
What are your goals for 2022? What word or phrase resonates with you and why? If you're stuck on identifying a word, try this clarifying worksheet. As I said at the start of 2020, it might not feel like it's shedding light on anything immediately, but let it percolate a bit and see if you don't hear something when you read it out loud that inspires you.
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2021: My year in review
n other ways, COVID has opened up the world because there's been different time to explore people and things online. I've enjoyed developing new relationships with people who are invested moving through the world like I am, and I've rekindled some very old friendships with regularly scheduled zoom calls. *Because of that, I think some of what is dragging on me is that I'm realizing that some of the friendships I thought were rock solid have just not held up very well these last couple of years. People who were once important to me have not felt very supportive of the path I am pursuing. This isn't something that I've…
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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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What do you do when the Universe gives you an answer?
How often do we beg, plead, ask the Universe, God, our ancestors, the spirits to provide answers to our greatest needs or desires?
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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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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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2020: my year in review
Beyond the devastation (and our late in the year diagnosis), COVID was a gift for Dr Marry and me. I closed down my offices in March and have been working from home ever since. That means Dr Marry and I had all spring and summer and much of the fall together since his job was also a hybrid of in-person and virtual teaching. We walked and biked more than we ever have. I baked copious amounts of bread and went back to my pre-full time job delight of searching for and trying fun new recipes.
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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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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.
