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Thursday 9th May 2013
What to Expect When You’re Expecting (For All the Mamas Out There)
I am holding a butter knife in my left hand, thinking I could use it to slice through the expectancy hovering in this kitchen. My daughter, Lydia, drums her fingers on the breakfast bar, while her neglected oatmeal hardens on the edge of the bowl. “I’ve got it!” She pushes her glasses up ...
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Monday 6th May 2013
How To Build Your Dream House
Dear House-Builder, This is the letter I would have written to you eleven years ago, when you started framing up the walls of our home, if I knew then what I know now. Remember how I fussed over whether to lay tile or wood floors, whether to paint the kitchen that dark Georgia brick, or... Read More
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Friday 3rd May 2013
Motherhood: In Sickness and In Health (A Mother’s Day Tribute)
I lay in a feverish curl, dressed in footie pajamas while Mom watched mercury rise in a thin glass tube. With one hand, she held a thermometer under my tongue, and with the other, she stroked terrycloth – damp and cool – across my throbbing brow. Today – nine days from Mother’s Day – this... ...
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Wednesday 6th March 2013
Gladys (Patron Saint & Spiritual Midwife)
Aunt Gladys seemed more ready for Heaven than anyone I ever knew, but even when her body begged to go, she demanded more time on Earth. She told us that she was determined to outlive her four siblings. She saw herself as a sort of caretaker, I guess. So, she would will that heart of hers to ...
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Monday 4th February 2013
Birthday Surprise
Remembering these words today, written a year ago, as we consider the gift of our days, and the meaning of a full life … Great Grandma’s funeral is today. *** I turn 40 next month, the official gateway to a place called “over the hill.” My husband smirks when he ...
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Thursday 31st January 2013
The Pain and Beauty of Saying Goodbye
So, it turns out that Eunice Lee was mortal after all. I did wonder. Which sounds so silly. I know that. I mean, Grandma Lee made it 99 trips around the sun, and a part of you knew that every time that you visited her, it might be the last time. There’s a science to that... Read More
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Tuesday 2nd October 2012
A Letter to My Father
Dear Dad, I love that sound. It’s your pickup-truck tires crunching the gravel on the driveway, right outside our garage door. I hear that glad sound in the spring, when craggy trees burst forth with buds, then again when those same trees blush with autumn. This is the sound of you ...
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Friday 24th August 2012
I’ve Got Friends in Old Places
My youngest daughter raced across the polished linoleum of the nursing home’s dining room to get me. We had come to serve dessert to the residents, but this sounded urgent. “Mommy!” Anna tugged my shirt sleeve. She cupped hands around her mouth to whisper in my ear: “Katherine ...
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Monday 13th August 2012
A Letter for Daughters
Dear Daughters, It would be silly to say I knew what I was doing, that I was the mother making the daughters. Because it’s always been the other way around: The daughters have made the mother. I’ve tried to hold things together here with all kinds of strings, tying together our days ...
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Friday 3rd August 2012
The More Things Change
Dad was waiting for us on the back step when we pulled into the driveway, like his own father always did. We open the doors of the Acadia, swollen with fast-food sacks and flip-flops — all of it a grand accumulation that comes with six hours in the car. The girls skip toward their ...
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Midwife to Hope by Dea
One thing I do know is that women need women to help them believe that they can make it through pain into the broad place of peace.
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Holding the Story
For the High Calling: “I had over-yessed myself.”