This past week I had some time off of work for the holiday, and it was much needed. My husband, who has less free time than I do, was able to take some time out of his schedule and spend it with the family. It was a rare treat for both me and my daughter, who seems to acutely notice her...
Monday, November 28, 2016
Friday, October 21, 2016
Thoughts on being lonely and other things
I'm not sure what it is about the changing of the seasons that seems to trigger things in me. It's not like a seasonal depression thing, really, but just a sense of restlessness and typically an impending dread of dealing with upcoming holidays and the drama they bring. Plus, as much as...
Tuesday, August 30, 2016
A little bit of credit
When I first set out on the whole parenthood journey, there were a lot of people who were significantly less than supportive. There were people, some very close to me, who said I wouldn't be very good at it. There were people who said they never "saw me as a mom". There were people...
Friday, August 26, 2016
It's an ok life
This morning while driving to work I heard a song on the radio from a Broadway show, and the song itself was directly related to the show's subject matter, but every once in a while you hit a cluster of lyrics that you relate to and you think "Well, that's for me today". Early on in the song,...
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
Time to reflect
I went on vacation recently, which was nice because I really needed to get away from day to day life and re-center myself. It's hard to appreciate the day to day a lot of the time, because you get caught up in the million demands of your average life, and often it seems as if the day is over just...
Thursday, July 28, 2016
An Update
It's been a while. There have been a few times when I've sat down and wanted to work through my thoughts here, but lately writing has felt like a chore. Life didn't stop moving forward, but my brain hasn't been able to stop and organize my thoughts in any sort of meaningful way for a while,...
Thursday, June 9, 2016
Departures are hard
A few days ago a friend of mine told me that she and her family were moving to Colorado. It was casual, just a quick drop-in comment amid a conversation we were having, but it hit me in the gut like a punch. I sat there, staring at my phone, trying not to cry. I was crushed. This...
Saturday, June 4, 2016
What was I afraid of?
Today my husband and I met up with a friend at a local museum to see an exhibit that's housed there through the end of the summer. We took my daughter along in her stroller, and she clapped and danced to the music playing in the exhibit. Later we took her to an outdoor area and let her run...
Monday, May 23, 2016
Unnoticed lessons
Last week my mother bought my daughter a new toy. This isn't really a shock, since my mother has a habit of buying things for my daughter whether she needs them or not. This time it was a baby doll that has a stroller it can be pushed around in. My daughter loves it, not because she...
Monday, May 16, 2016
Thoughts on understanding
Over the past week or so I've read several blogs written by people of faith that have gotten thinking. I'm not a person of faith, and generally speaking, I don't really like most people of faith. I find them closed minded, bigoted, exclusive, and self righteous. I understand these...
Monday, May 9, 2016
Mother's Day
Another Mother's Day has come and gone, and I find that Mother's Day is a weird holiday because you get to "take a break" as a mom, but then the next day you're just left doing all the stuff you didn't do when you were "taking a break". It's just an illustration that you can't really take a break...
Monday, April 18, 2016
It's like the ocean
Last week I was talking to a co-worker about her life and a friend she has who she feels she's drifting away from. She was saying that she just feels like it's hard to continue to be friends with this person because they don't ever seem to just fix their own problems, and it's frustrating. I...
Sunday, April 17, 2016
Maybe I'm a Vulcan?
I'm sure my geek husband will be a fan of the Star Trek reference here, but this is something I was thinking about the other day while I was painting my guest room. That's how things often happen, I'm working on something that is relatively mindless and can let my brain wander into lots of other...
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
My kid is my bestie?
I made a joke the other day that my daughter is my bestie, which is both sad and accurate. Not in the sense that I'm Amy Poehler in Mean Girls walking around like "I'm a cool mom!" or anything, but in terms of shared activities, it's sort of not wrong. We go shopping together, we spend tons...
Monday, April 11, 2016
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
Nailed it
Sometimes I don't know how much I buy into therapy. I did it for a while, because I needed to sort my shit out, but that mostly just made me realize that "my shit" was largely related to dealing with other people's shit. I think the problem with things like therapy is that it's supposed...
Monday, April 4, 2016
Familiarity
On Saturday morning I was out bright and early with my daughter running some errands and giving my husband some quiet time in the house since it's his morning to sleep in, and he often has some work he has to get done on the weekends so it's nice to give him a quiet space to do that. This seems...
Sunday, April 3, 2016
Broken people parenting
One of the things about being a parent who didn't necessarily have the best examples to work from is that it makes you constantly worry about repeating the bad example you had. It's not passive. It's never passive. It's an active concern that you have that nags at you after every decision...
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
I get it
My husband had lunch with a friend yesterday who was talking to him about a situation she's come up against with a couple of other friends. Basically, she and her husband are friends with two couples and have been for years. Since high school. Everyone in that group of six used to...
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
Beyond 100 days
Earlier today I was reading this article after it was posted by a blogger I follow on Facebook, and as I sat there reading it and feeling like none of it really applied to me too much, I got to a couple of sentences, or part of a couple of sentences, that hit me right between the eyes:
"The loneliness...
Thursday, March 10, 2016
Intentional Kindness
I've been thinking over the past week or so as lots of things have been evolving in my life. I've been thinking a lot lately about intention. Intention is an interesting idea, because it's so easy to assume that when someone hurts us, or someone does something that negatively affects our...
Monday, February 29, 2016
A year of being selfish
I keep thinking about life as I currently know it. My foster daughter had a party on Saturday, which I kept telling her was "her party" and that meant she was going to have to do all of the work for it. Then I proceeded to do a bunch of work for it. I made pizza dough. I made...
Thursday, February 25, 2016
It's all about choices
Recently someone I don't really talk to very often sent me an instant message while I was at work. She and her husband are talking about having children and she said "You seem to have taken to this motherhood thing and really have it together, so how do you handle life as a working mom?" Initially,...
Monday, February 22, 2016
Life as I know it
In the aftermath of being a crazy person, I'm continuing to feel incredibly embarrassed by the sort of crazy person I am and replaying my crazy over and over in my head so I can beat myself up over it because that's what I do to myself.
As I continue to reflect on the current life I lead, I find that...
Sunday, February 21, 2016
Being a mom can make you, literally, a crazy person
Lately I've been feeling isolated. I go to work, I come home, I care for my family, I watch a bit of tv, I clean up the house, I go to bed. Lather, rinse, repeat. My job isn't really a place for tons of socialization and lately it's been really nuts there. So, that leaves me...
