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On Motherhood, Wherein a Few Musings Leave the Nest

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For some reason unknown to me, this summer I have more friends and co-workers expecting babies than has been true in all my years of parenthood. And while not all of these mothers have sought my advice, a surprising number have asked me to share my wisdom. I admit, gentle reader, to no small amount of alarm in thinking that I have reached that silver-frosted age where people assume I have wisdom worth imparting on the topic of childrearing. I'm not so humble as to keep my opinion to myself about many other topics, but motherhood? Oh, honey, are you sure you want to hear from me? This week, the child who made me a mother turned 16. When I think about this statement, I feel as though I need to follow it up with a comment about how the second born made me a different kind of mother, the third; a third, and the fourth; again another. And then, honesty compels me to think about the one I never got to parent and how this one, too, formed me as mother. Lest you get carried away thinking t...
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The "No I" Phone

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It's a cheap party trick: I pull out my phone, flip it open to check the time or send a quick text, and watch for the reactions. In the decades I've owned a flip phone, people have given me a few double takes. Recently, though, when I opened my phone to squint at a photo texted to me, the person sitting across the conference table surprised me with a "Haha! I love your phone!" And I did, too. I loved my flip phone. Then, in a deadly mistake of distracted domesticity, I scooped it up with my bed sheets and dropped it in the washing machine: Eco Cold, extra spin. Oh gentle readers, the tragedy of beautiful T9 predictive text programming drowned at the bottom of the linens spin cycle! Yes, I lost saved phone numbers, the blurry store photos I'd snapped over the years to double check prices when back to internet access, the text threads with details about addresses and meet-ups... all lost. Sad, inconvenient, annoying, frustrating, all of it. But the biggest tragedy, ...
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Amtrak Adventuring

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Trying to see it all, 2011 I may never look down the aisle of an Amtrak train without remembering a baby bouncing, holding fast to the seat as the train rocked and bounced even faster. All the world over, trains carry a reputation for efficiency and frugality. That has never been my experience with Amtrak.  The Adventure Begins, June 22, 2011 Thirteen years ago (almost to the day) our little family set out on our first Amtrak adventure. We thought three weeks touring the United States on a train with an infant made so much more sense than the alternative. The alternative being flying or driving (with the same infant) to a wedding in the middle of Cornfieldville, Ohio. Being young and foolish, it made perfect sense. Our baby did not yet sleep through the night, so sitting up in coach seating night after night wouldn't affect our sleep all that much. With a rolling ice chest filled with lunch sacks that prevented us from knowing in advance whether our meal was Option A, B, or C, w...
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Thoughts on Momming the Work-at-Home Life

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This week, my oldest turns 10. In case you're curious, that statement does funny things to the inside parts of me. It also makes it a decade that I've been a working-from-home mom. I was enjoying my first maternity leave (still pre-baby), when my boss called, sharing news that had completely rocked the company. In the end, she convinced me to cut my maternity leave short with the promise that I could work from home. So I did. Much of my first year of clocking hours while working from home looked like this picture. Notice my tired eyes and the computer screen have both been carefully cropped from the picture. In fact, much of the reality of working from home with small children (and then adding homeschooling to the mix) has been carefully cropped out of public glimpses of my life. For something that has characterized my life for a decade, I've only written three small blog posts about it... and those all came within the first year. Well, that isn't complet...
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Lenten Anniversary

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For years I avoided the thought of marriage because living it well seemed impossible for a person like me. I am a person easily overwhelmed by hardship, sorrow, suffering and evil. The only way I could be comfortable with the enormity of the life-long commitment to have and to hold, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, was to tuck my wedding day right up close to Easter as a reminder that God raises the dead, the hopeless, the sorrowing, the repentant.  Only in the stirrings of Palm Sunday and the triumphant "Hurrah!" of Easter could I imagine living the symbol meant to explain the mysterious wonder of Christ and His church.  Only in walking through the Holy Week and seeing Christ's ultimate life-giving death, could I begin to trust the strange thing that is marriage... the many deaths to self that somehow bring life.  I needed to start my marriage with the hope of Easter glimmering in the near future because...
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