My Jenn-eration

Every night the ritual is the same. Hope is fussing, her way of letting me know in early evening that she’s just about had it with the day. I so relate to what she is feeling. While in general I am everything to everyone all day long, there is one time when this is not true. This is our one quiet moment when we are truly alone. As the third, she is more than familiar with having a bottle just about anywhere. She might be eating at Dylan’s school pick up, or Ruby’s school pick up, or while I’m on the phone with my father, or getting dinner started. Like the MVP of our family that she is, she rolls with it. Which is precisely why at around 6:30/7pm every night when she needs me most, I give her that. Just me. Not me divided or multitasking but just me. We go in her room and draw the shades. I can feel both of our bodies beginning to relax in the relative darkness. I close the door and we settle into the glider. Just me and her, her evening bottle, a gentle if not slightly unconsc...

Today we went to the beach. The morning was slightly blue, slightly overcast. The surf was relentless. Dylan and I bounded into the waves, getting pushed and pulled and generally thrown about. Those waves were boss today. If ever in life you think you are really in charge of anything, just head to the beach. Those waves will teach you otherwise. I was thinking about this, and how relaxing it really was to be knocked about out there once I actually surrendered control. It is funny how much we exhaust ourselves in life trying to set the pace, control our schedules, relationships, outcomes, feelings. Once in a while it is quite a relief to just let go, to let life take you where it does. And so it is that this week I’m missing my mom. I’m not sure what it is that has got my heart stuck in this place. Maybe it is the time of year when everything is blooming, or that I’m coming up on the anniversary of her death. Maybe it’s that Hope is beginning to really change from a newborn t...

I’ve been asked to participate in the “my writing process” blog tour from Kristen Levithan at Motherse. Kristen is a former history teacher and current freelance writer. She’s also a fabulous mommy of 3 children and a particularly awesome friend. She is a wonderful writer not just because she is smart (which she is) but because she writes from a place that is authentic and relatable. I am grateful for her friendship and the works she shares with all of us. I particularly enjoyed her most recent piece in Brain, Child Magazine reviewing Jennifer Senior’s new book All Joy, No Fun. You can read her review HERE(http://www.brainchildmag.com/2014/03/book-review-all-joy-and-no-fun/). She also has an essay in Brain Child Magazine’s new book, This Is Childhood. Read more about her wit, humor and fabulousness on her blog HERE (http://mothereseblog.com/about/). What are you working on? What am I working on? Mostly life. I just work on living and breathing and reminding myself to focus, i...

We are at the kitchen table playing with play dough. The children mold and twist, blissfully unaware that with each passing second my anxiety level is rising. When we started, not but 10 minutes ago, there was red and yellow and green and blue and white. And now it is brown. That blah color brown that play dough always turns whenever you take all those bright shiny colors and mush them together to make one amorphous shade. I can’t figure out what it is that bothers me so much about this process. I want to blame it on raging obsessive compulsive disorder or an unhealthy inclination to want to control uncontrollable and relatively unimportant things. But it definitely irks me, like the way I feel when Dylan wears the Star Wars pajama top with the Ninjago bottoms. Nothing is crisp or unique or whole. Haphazard. Mismatched. Brown. I’m thinking about this in the dark outside the pharmacy as I unwrap a Creme Egg and savor its sugary sweetness, pouring its faux yolk down my throat. Wh...