December 15, 2025Isaiah 58 Below is my contribution to our church’s 2025 Advent devotional, written for today, December 15, on today’s Old Testament reading. Sunday after church, and all my kids want is a screen. “No screens on Sundays” doesn’t compute as a way to rest—what is rest but zoning out, no one bugging you? One’s hogging the couch where another wants to sit, and Sabbath...
December 5, 2025 Prayer is my mind racing to try and solve the various work on my plate: write the stubborn paragraph, cook the meal I’m responsible for next Monday, hash out an agenda. But the paragraph is comprised of thin wisps of words which float away as soon as I’ve thought them, however brilliant they shimmered for a moment in my mind. The meal remains illusory, the agenda wavers and melts...
November 29, 2025 We got a text from our *child’s school alerting us in advance that our child had not been chosen for something for which they’d put a metaphorical hat in the ring. “We’ll announce it tomorrow, and we’re letting you know so you can prepare your child as you think best.” “How should we break it?” I mused to my husband, neither of us looking forward to delivering the bad news...
June 12, 2025 Birthday Cake Start with a clean house.OK, well, if not clean exactly,Your messes discreetly set aside.Company ready. Flour the floor,Inadvertently, as youFlour the cake pans,7 of them,To make, as requestedChocolate and strawberry. Old champagne in the fridge,Was it leftover from Easter?Flat for weeks,Like so many things left around the housePast their prime,You failed to discard it...
May 29, 2025 Haven does not want to be on a stage. It is clear on those accidental occasions when she is put on one anyway, when, for example, the current of the school calendar winds its way through events like ‘spring concert,’ and ‘poetry festival.’ With a dozen other four-year-olds, she is, with great ceremony and enthusiasm, ushered to the small elevated platform in the school gym. Guiding...
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 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...
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...
November 2, 2024 I return home after ten days away and without any effort whatsoever notice what’s wrong. The neon pink mums I labored to plant before I left didn’t get watered, and they’re shriveled now. Squirrels have dug in the pots, seeking homes for buried treasure and leaving a trail of dirt in their wake. The porch is covered in dirt and leaves, joint effort of squirrel, bird, wind. And...
October 17, 2024 “I don’t think she likes me anymore,” my daughter confided after school, talking of her new best friend—the one she’d made over the summer, just after her previous best friend moved across the country. Tears glistened in her eyes, lips quivering, brows tilted inward and down. Her normally bright face looks up at me, asking for me to make it untrue. “Oh honey, I’m sorry, that...