Category: parenting
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A Book Review: Farm to Film
Farm to Film is not a collection of photographs but, rather, a collection of moments, captured by a camera and then transferred into beautiful watercolors.
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How Do You Handle Your Emotions When Your Child Is Benched?
As a parent, it’s painful watching your child suffer when you are powerless to help. This poem, titled “Benched,” captures one of those moments for me.
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Parenting Rule #1: Stop looking the “gift horse” in the mouth
I had always wanted children. I simply had no idea that raising them — or parenting them once their decisions were all theirs — could feel so hard.
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‘Are you doing this because you love me?’
On a special Saturday morning, I spent time with my grandson saying I love you with every chore. He got it.
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A grandmother is born — again
I had missed the birth of my first grandchild, and I was determined to be as present as possible for the birth of my second. I would become a grandmother — again — on October 11 when my granddaughter, Adira Jane, was born. This time I wanted to do it right. Three years ago, as […]
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This is what love looks like
If you saw a little Marilyn Monroe action in the parking lot of Walmart last Sunday afternoon, it might have been me. I had no time for a flirty, bashful “oh no!” look as my dress flew in the breeze. I was fighting a thunderstorm that had blown my umbrella — and my dress — inside […]
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My kids make me feel 16 feet tall
Thinking about my own mothering moments makes me feel 16 feet tall at times. But today, my thoughts are with my friend Kaylen, who is celebrating her first Mother’s Day. She came into motherhood the hard way — not through nine months of anticipation and body oddities followed by “Labor Day,” but merely by falling […]
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My baby turns 21 today
Parenting is a full-contact sport, a risky business, an often thankless task, and my greatest joy and still-in-progress accomplishment.
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When Trouble is a teenager and acts just like one
Our cat is like a teenager who shows up when she wants — and doesn’t when she doesn’t…
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Power to the people, not to the parents
Sometimes our son misses our power. Such as the night before we lost ours when he lost his.
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What do you give your husband on Father’s Day?
What do you buy a man who has everything — five of everything, actually, packaged up in each child who has grown up in our house?
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Let the empty nest begin…
I have entered that period so many lament: the empty nest. My five children have left me one by one. But rather than lament it, I say…
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The goal of parenting…
I hadn’t realized until it happened that having one of my children host the holiday meal was a goal of parenting.
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Stream of cold consciousness writing…
My husband has saved me from curfew worry much of the time. He simply awakens me to let me know our child is home, and I am lulled, comforted, back to sleep. Except when the child isn’t at home by curfew.
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In fact, we are not entitled…
I was with my two colleagues as we drove across the university campus. Because we were lucky enough to have an “Official Business” decal in the windshield, we were entitled to drive the campus roads typically blocked from vehicles and congested with students walking or riding bikes. It was a mixed privilege. The guards didn’t prevent […]
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Why I love my hair stylist…
I married into my hairdresser, much the way I’d married into four children when I married my husband nearly 21 years ago. Apparently, the hair salon my children visited regularly was part of the marital agreement, but it agreed with me. (My premarital hairstylist lost my confidence when she constructed a bird’s nest atop my […]
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No news is no news…
It was after 9:30 before I decided I should at least try to sleep, but knowing my husband was driving alone on dark, stormy roads with a cell phone nearly out of battery power made me uncomfortable. I felt the same dis-ease I felt as a parent who was trying to sleep knowing her teenager […]
All Things Work Together 