Lately I’ve been thinking about the story my life is telling, and the story I tell myself. They are not always one and the same, I think. Some people might look at the story of my life and conclude it’s a story gone wrong. Maybe they reduce it to something like this: she’s divorced; she’s a single mom. Those might be the facts (or a few of them), but there’s a bigger story than that, and though it may include some sad and even disturbing chapters, that’s okay. Every good story does, and the story I tell myself is not a sad one. Continue reading “A Story Worth Telling” →

Since the winter of 2015 when our lives cracked wide open, the memories have come at me hard in February and March. I tell myself it’s okay to remember. I also tell myself it’s okay to forget, though it doesn’t seem like I’ll be forgetting anytime soon. Continue reading “When There Is No Best” →

On Friday I realized I was depressed. It was a relief really, when that little flash of insight came: This is depression. Right, I thought, it’s February. Something about the sameness, the grayness, the endless-ness does me in each year. Winter just seems so true, and Spring seems like a fairytale. What I have to remember, of course, is that fairytales are true too. Continue reading “Evidence Unseen” →

We’ve been looking at the world atlas this week; the seven-year-old has been particularly obsessed with the map that identifies the richest and poorest countries. Then last night he said, “I need to look at the atlas again. I need to see something about Japan.”

“Why Japan?” I asked.

“Do you remember about the bomb?” he asked.

And then I remembered that he’s been worried about nuclear war, though he hasn’t raised the issue lately. Someone at school had told him that North Korea was going to nuke Washington, DC, in the way that older elementary school kids love a good scare. I had told him that wouldn’t happen, that North Korea had no hope of sending a bomb that far, and then I’d said it might hit Japan, or the ocean. Continue reading “Weight of the World” →