HI THERE.

My kids were seated on either side of me, not because I like to split my attention equally among them but because their bickering required it.

“I had no idea I was holding all of these expectations for my kids and my mother’s relationship until I realized there’d not be one.”

I feel like life for me over the past decade has basically been this: me scurrying around scooping up my marbles, then losing them again. Scoop em up, lose em again. Scoop, lose, scoop, lose.

I hate it when the stuff of my exterior life does not match the stuff of my interior life, and visa versa. When one is not communicating to the other very well, getting all the words wrong in a botched game of telephone, it’s confusing and disorienting.

I slashed through the cardboard with a serrated knife, because, like everything else in my life, my kitchen shears were misplaced.

Me: WTF. Did that just happen? Did I just downplay a deeply traumatic experience that occurred 17 minutes from my house and terrorized thousands directly (and millions indirectly) by rationalizing it?

“Hi there. Tell me about yourself.” He held his cardboard sign, folding slightly in on itself because of the crea…

When you are a runner for your midwestern college’s indoor track team— which holds its season in the Winter— and your coach loves to wa…

My kids were seated on either side of me, not because I like to split my attention equally among them but because their bickering required it.

I slashed through the cardboard with a serrated knife, because, like everything else in my life, my kitchen shears were misplaced.

Buried so deeply beneath life’s mountain of sippy cups and Legos and socks with no matches, I found myself doubting that what they said could be true…

Conversation 2.0, both the platonic and nonplatonic-oriented kind, is sometimes hard to make the leap to, especially in a world where the niceties of shallow small talk sometimes feel like the only space that is safe.

What a Mother’s Day outing taught me about beliefs and grace.

My kids were seated on either side of me, not because I like to split my attention equally among them but because their bickering required it.

I don’t particularly like the experience of shopping at the grocery store.

Although I am a complete maniac for a good deal, clothes shopping from store to store for longer than the length of two Mickey Mouse Clubhouse episodes exhausts my thinker.

Don't get me started on tourist shacks set up to bait you into agonizing over which trinket, as a parent who occasionally says yes to fun, to get ripped off by: a beanie baby horseshoe crab, an hour glass key chain, or a flimsy mood ring.

Amazon’s fine, I guess, but honestly I’m not sure my credit card can handle much more of it.

But friends.

Friends are different.

I hate it when the stuff of my exterior life does not match the stuff of my interior life, and visa versa. When one is not communicating to the other very well, getting all the words wrong in a botched game of telephone, it’s confusing and disorienting.

I watched three people die in two weeks’ time.

My kids were seated on either side of me, not because I like to split my attention equally among them but because their bickering required it.

It’s OK is what we say to people when we’re holding their hands, rubbing their backs, holding back their hair. Why can’t we offer ourselves that same comfort all the time?