Last weekend Bill installed new ceiling tiles in our basement, a chore that had been waiting for a few minutes of his time since March 2005 when I had recently broken my foot and couldn’t walk without crutches and, in a completely unrelated but maddeningly timed coincidence, the downstairs bathroom toilet overflowed through the disconnected […]

“So, Emily. Tell me honestly. Does thirty-seven sound old to you?” I’ve been trying it on all day, you see. Thirty-seven. 37. That’s how old I am now, as of today, as of about 8:30 this evening. I am Definitely Not Used To It yet. I wait for Emily’s answer. Emily, my younger sister. The […]

William: One week ago tomorrow was the HopeFest. Bill: Or, fifty-one weeks from today is the HopeFest. Emma Grace: Daddy, can you make another HopeFest? William: Yeah, and invite Switchfoot and U2. That’s how the conversation went last Saturday morning over breakfast, and now two weeks have gone by since HopeFest 2006, and still we […]

“Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to […]

So one of the more difficult aspects of this return-to-full-time work has been the abiding awareness of an ending of sorts: I am back to work full-time; I am committed to this; my children are growing past a full-time need for me; I am not at home with them any more. I no longer have […]

“So tell me about William. What he likes, if he likes school, how he felt about coming to school, what he likes to do at home…. Tell me about him.” This from William’s teacher, in the first round of my First-Ever parent-teacher conferences. It was a week ago: a half hour with three of my […]

I’ve told you before, O Reader, that I do not write this blog for you. No, what we have here is a Selfish Act, a kind of hedonism. I write here for myriad reasons, and some of them, I will admit, are good ones. But the sad and honest truth is that, in the end, […]

“Will you stay with me a minute?” This from Emma Grace, lying abed, thumb in mouth so that her words are simultaneously squeezed and stretched and sounding like something I am incapable of reproducing in print. “Mommy, will you stay with me a minute?” This, after I have already helped with the getting-ready-for-bed. After I […]

that it can take up to an hour to put away ten loads of laundry? And this even when you separate the laundry by room, and within room by drawer, and don’t bother ironing At All. Why is putting the laundry away such a Dismal Chore? But I have my excuses. This back-to-work-full-time thing takes […]