I haven’t been sleeping super well lately. On Monday night, though, I had a vivid dream. A dream that was interrupted by Whit whining at the top of the stairs, but it was so powerful (and I almost never remember my dreams) that after putting Whit back to bed, I scribbled some notes on my [...]
The house my parents lived in when I was born is three blocks from where I live now. Literally. And my parents live 1.2 miles from us. People always hear this, and think: wow, you really haven’t gone very far, have you? The truth is, I lived in Paris for four years, London for four [...]
Friday Matt took the kids out for dinner and taught them his favorite party trick (yes, those are napkin boobs). I had dinner with two of my dearest friends from college. We are all in various aspects of transition, and sometimes it feels like we all orbit each other like atoms, always aware of one [...]
Devotion Devotion lights candles at dusk. She braids her grandmother’s hair with an antique comb. She works as an ecologist at the university. She wears long flowing tunics with bright cotton pants. She has never taken a dance class, but she moves with an unstudied grace, sensitive to the edge where her body meets the [...]
I have a friend who spent her 20s dabbling. For various unforseen personal reasons she wound up on a somewhat circuitous professional route. She went to journalism school, she travelled around the world, she wrote, she taught yoga. Things happened, bad things, and heartbreak. At 30 she decided to change her life and go back [...]
My older-and-wiser younger sister, Hilary, has always has the most brilliant friends. I’ve mostly watched them from afar, impressed by their intelligence and erudition. There always seemed to be conversations going on about stuff I could barely understand. I was thrilled when Hilary told me about her friend, Launa, who was moving to the South [...]
Five years ago next week, I opened the door of my house to one of my oldest and dearest friends, in town for Whit’s christening (where she became his godmother), and realized that I had forgotten her birthday. I didn’t even say “I’m glad you are here!” – I was too busy with my full-on [...]
I was flattered when Lauren from Embracing the Detour asked me to share the story of my life’s big detour. The detour that began one Friday morning when, wearing my Madonna-in-concert headset and on a conference call about recruiting plans for the next year, I glanced down at a pregnancy test and saw two pink [...]
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t [...]
On our last day in Sanibel, Grace and Whit were horsing around in the pool. She dunked him aggressively and he was very upset. My mother immediately reprimanded her, asking her to get out of the pool for a few minutes. Grace, in classic form, dissolved into tears. She sat on a chair by [...]
