Four women on the subway platform, chatting animatedly, discussing the evening’s plan—a show and meeting someone later if I’m overhearing correctly. Which is the stop to get off at, and is that other co-worker going to be joining? one of them asks, I think wistfully, with the standard New York night out hope that this will be the one you find a spark. These women look nothing like me, but as we...
January 21, 2025 On any given day, our kids’ room is littered with dirty clothes. Their trail of discarded attire reveals distracted wandering over the course of the seemingly simple act of getting dressed: pants inside out on the carpet, underwear tossed in a corner, dress nestled in next to a pillow on the bed. My kids appear about as bothered by it as a snake whose shed its skin. Meanwhile...
January 27, 2025 I don’t know about you or your community, but my community has been shaken over the past few weeks. Not in order of importance, and not exhaustive: The intense local grief for a neighbor who died in a house fire the other night, several others made homeless. The mundane challenge, for federal worker friends and neighbors, of the need to abruptly reorient to fully in-person work...
January 9, 2025 I’m sorry this is late. It is Thanksgiving. Recovering from the Thanksgiving holiday. Preparing for Christmas. Christmas. Recovering from Christmas. New Year. Kids at home for days etc. etc. Back to school chaos. Snow days. Sick days. Unfortunately, I suspect we may all be running out of excuses reasons for whatever it is we’ve been putting off, though the clever amongst us can...
January 5, 2025 Among the things we are grateful for this past year, my husband added this: those times when at least one child eats my cooking. Pleasing a single child is not so hard. Our eight year old son meets the dinner table with surprising flexibility. I ask which cross-section of the options I compile on an ordinary weeknight he would like on his plate, and he often replies, “Chef’s...
December 21, 2024 This is the season where Christians worldwide commemorate a birth. But before the birth comes the waiting, the in-between season of Advent, a space for holding contradictions. Christ is coming, Christ has come. I love the contradictions. They don’t force a choice, don’t foreclose possibility. Is the world desperately broken or is there redemption? Am I hopeful or afraid? Is it...
April 19, 2024 “I shall not want” the chorus echoes, a refrain I hold like a worn lovey. It is hard explaining this to my children, who cannot fathom a world without the primal fire of wanting, or why that would be a good thing. “Think about everything you want, the things you need, the things you enjoy—and all of those things not being there. We call that absence “wanting.” So, to ‘not want,’...
Empty. Full. Overflowing. The images these words convey are versatile and shifting. My kids head out the door to school and a prayer for the road calls on the love of God to so fill them that it spills out of their backpacks and touches everyone around them. The overflow of abundance, leading to generosity. Or the residue of family life dotted around the living room—the shoes and books that...
Did you have a time when you asked what you would do with your life? Did you find an answer, then stop asking? I thought, when I was younger, that’s how it worked. People got jobs and that settled it. Fireman. Teacher. Pilot. As a college student, back when it wasn’t weird to be unsettled, when we were supposed to be dreaming about who we would become, I wrote a poem reflecting on this...
November 6, 2024 I pull nearly everything from the crisper out onto the counter, the staples you can munch mindlessly, raw, that I keep on hand for my best kid-hack, the ‘rainbow platter.’ The wilting scallions. The zucchini starting to go off. To this I add the pittance of vegetables I have grown and harvested myself, the last of the sweet peppers, the last of the onions planted 18 months...