Proudly serving unpolished working motherhood, with bipolar depression & hilarity on the side
It started with biting. I’d be working from home at my little white desk and my phone would buzz. On the other end was the preschool director, her voice mixing notes of frustration and sympathy. “I’m calling to let you know Banana bit a classmate today.” “Oh. Um. I’m so sorry to hear that,” I’d […]
The competition moms were going full force behind me. “LET’S GOOOOO, MAISY!!!….oh noooo. She just missed an AA time.” “She’ll get it next time. She looks so strong,” reassured the mom next to her. Next heat it was her turn. “COME ON, JACKIE, COME ON!!!….argh. GOOD RACE HONEY. Darn it. That was a second slower […]
I always thought my grandma stopped ice skating when she hit 70. Wrong! “I’ve raised four children and now I want to do what I want to do,” she told me matter of factly. What she wanted to do, in her seventies, eighties and nineties, was skate on the open-air rink near her house. So […]
There’s a lot of fluffy half-truth bullshit out there around parenthood that just tap dances on the reality of what it is to raise another human. And the sugar-coated stories about motherhood in particular trigger the hell out of me, probably because I bought into them for so long. Silly me. Had I bothered to […]
I was not a Hallmark movie kind of new mom. No obsessive nursery decorating, no mother-daughter dresses, no series of portraits declaring “I’m (this many) months old today!” You have to remember, I missed my own infant losing her umbilical cord due to my time in the special hospital. (If you’re new here, by “special […]
What’s it like to compete at the pinnacle of sport, the national championships, in an adult body? That was the original idea that flashed through my mind for this post as 400+ of my best friends and I swarmed the University of Delaware for the 2022 US Adult Figure Skating Championships. But unlike the guy […]
He bounded to the altar like a ball of positive energy in the land of Jesus. “Welcome!” he exclaimed, and then proceeded to pour out a beautiful PowerPoint laced with ambition and enthusiasm for our children’s program as the lights shone on his wrinkle-free face. Having begrudgingly left my seat at the back of the […]
Oh, right. Them. That was my not-so-thoughtful reaction, when someone pointed out that we need to make an effort to include men in the group. Sure, they’re included. I mean, who wouldn’t want to sign up for our four-week intimate discussion of an insightful Oprah-and-the-expert book on trauma? I just never thought, until that moment, […]
I’ve spent way too much time getting over him. He was always so quick to toss off a studied laugh, grab the reins of any conversation and start throwing ideas around the room. Never mind if those ideas were only loosely tethered to reality, he was going to sell ‘em to you like an old-time […]
Some things look impossibly perfect till they shatter. For them, the magic broke in an instant. One moment, they were flying around, contorting their bodies into impossibly beautiful shapes. And then, the tiniest of collisions as their skates hit each other, and down they fell in a heap. They got back up and finished, leaving […]