Early summer morning, low clouds spitting rain. My girls are running late for work again. They’ve been lolly-gagging in the bathroom and we need to be on the road to the local market, where they’re getting their first taste of earning an honest wage. I wear my “annoyed face” as they scurry to the car, but secretly, I’m proud of them. They’ve been ...
During the winter months, when the thermometer hovers below “chilly” and the sky turns metallic, I have to dig a little deeper for my joy. This stretch of calendar feels trip-wired for small bombs of worry and valleys of melancholy. Going about my day, the blues sift around in the background, like a mist or vapor. But at 3:30 AM, they puff up into ...
“When you become a parent, you might as well just open a vein.” I’ve long forgotten who said that to me, but as a mother, I immediately understood. Parenthood abruptly catapults one into the realization of how many ways you can fail at protecting your child from life’s randomness. Before you, at all times, ...
Lung cancer. That will stop a conversation. More than any of the frightening medical diagnoses, that one seems extra ominous. Someone utters the words “lung cancer” and I think of devastating, almost insurmountable odds. At the age of 32, that’s what Lee Rhodes was told when she learned that her worrisome ...
Excerpt from Ladies Home Journal, LHJ.com/Community/Your Stories Okay, I’ll say it: After four kids and 25 years of marriage, it’s not easy to get in the mood for sex. My husband would disagree. I can give you the play-by-play of my first date with the man I married: the Greenwich Village restaurant, our heads tilted in ...