Believe, Doubt, Love

Believing When It Is Hard to Believe

9 Comments

I am, and always have been, an open book. I say the things I think the exact moment I think them. Apparently I write that way too. There is no filter, no editing, no careful selection of facts and emotions to create a picture of a theoretical existence.

And if being an open book means talking about the myriad times I have chosen to find joy even in heartbreak, it also means talking about the times when I could not.

Maybe it’s not pretty. Maybe it’s uncomfortable. But it’s real. Besides, a good book always makes you a little uncomfortable, doesn’t it? Read more...

Continue Reading

Parenthood, Writing

New LOP Article On Babble: Summer Ain’t Over Yet

No Comments

Babble Summer Ain't Over Yet Screw You Back to school displaysI typically don’t write a lot in the summer because, well, I like summer just as much as my kids. I did manage to write about that for Babble so please click here to read the article!

“When I was a kid, the end of the school year was brutal. I was ready for summer vacation by mid-April. My brain, which generally fired on all four cylinders, was torturously limping toward the finish line on a flat tire and a crappy suspension. And the idea of finishing my last school project (inevitably a diorama of some kind) was more torturous than being trapped in a pit of snakes. Read more...

Continue Reading

Parenthood

This Is The Me They Love

No Comments

My 7-year-old took this picture of us watching his brother’s basketball game when we weren’t looking. It’s blurry and overexposed and all I could see were the things I don’t like about myself: Double chin, wrinkles, the weird angle of my profile, the perpetual coffee stain on my shirt.

 If I’m being totally honest, I was planning on deleting it when he wasn’t looking. That’s the problem with modern technology, digital photography, smartphones and filters: We can instantaneously erase anything that isn’t “perfect.” We can keep reviewing and critiquing and recreating a picture over and over again until we get what we want. Read more...

Continue Reading

Loss

The Light And The Dark

No Comments

We were away this week. And by away I mean away. I completely checked out. No phone, no email, no texts, no TV, no Facebook.

Just people. Sand and seals and starfish. Card games and songs and mini golf. Lobster rolls and three different clam chowders. Bright sun and cold fog. A precious baby boy who shares my name. Family.
Chatham vacation beach family

I was so unplugged I didn’t even take that many pictures. And it was amazing.

Maybe I didn’t check out as much as I checked in.

There was some hard stuff too. That town, that house – they are filled with ghosts for me. I stood at the same counter where I heard my dad’s last words. I walked the same stone terrace where my brother and I lay hand in hand later that night. I drove the same winding streets where we followed the ambulance for miles. Read more...

Continue Reading

Loss, Love

Years That Ask Questions: A Letter To My Father On The Second Anniversary Of His Death

2 Comments

Years That Ask Questions And Years That Answer

Dear Daddy,

It’s been over a year since I last wrote you a letter. Two years since I stood in church clad in a black dress that mom told me was more appropriate than the orange one I wanted to wear.

I had thought about that dress the whole 12 hours we drove home from Cape Cod, in the silence that filled the car between the calls. The calls about death certificates and funeral receptions and Valium prescriptions. I thought about it as we drove past New Haven and I made Billy stop the car so I could walk on the Green just as I had 15 years before. Just as you had 40 years before. Read more...

Continue Reading

Growing Up, Relationships

This is Forty

2 Comments

40th birthday this is 40

Last month, I bid my thirties farewell. There wasn’t much fanfare. No dark clouds in the sky heralding the end of life as I know it. I just woke up one day and was 40.

40 is a tricky number. To some it is a dirty word. To some it is a chance to throw a big fun party that rivals your wedding. To some – judging by all the articles titled “40 things I’ve learned at 40” – it is apparently the age of total enlightenment.

But no matter how you slice it, 40 can be weighty. Read more...

Continue Reading

Epidermolysis Bullosa, Parenthood, Wahoowa

Thankfulness

4 Comments

Tony Bennett UVA basketball

It is hard to watch your children do something that you know will hurt them, even if they love it more than anything in the world. It is hard to allow them the space to make their own choices, even if you know how those choices will turn out.

But a big part of parenting is doing just that. We spend so long believing that the hardest part of parenting is holding on.

Holding on to a newborn you are sure is going to slip from your clumsy hands. Holding on to your sanity as you fumble through the day on no sleep. Holding on to a spoon, slippery with mushy peas. Holding on to a toddler’s hand as they take wobbly steps. Holding on to art work and memories of misspoken words. Holding on until they are just a little older. Read more...

Continue Reading

Loss

Father’s Day Without A Father

No Comments

Father's day without a father

This Sunday will be the second Father’s Day since my dad died. Thus begging the tricky question of what to do on Father’s Day when you no longer have a father.

For some, I imagine that Father’s Day without a father is a reminder of the giant gaping hole in your life. The display of Hallmark cards, the inundation of emails entitled “Give Dad What He Really Wants!” and the heartrending TV ads of dads as our first loves and our heroes all feel like salt on wounds that have not healed, but have just been bandaged over. Read more...

Continue Reading

History

Why D-Day Matters

No Comments

DDay landings Omaha beach

Of all the places I have seen in my life, I have never been so physically and emotionally rocked to my core as I was on the beaches of Normandy. At Coleville-sur-mer, at Pointe du Hoc, at Omaha Beach.

It is impossible to grasp the magnitude of what these men – these boys really – faced when they came out of the waves 70 years ago, unless you see it in person. The photgraphs do not do justice to the sheer length and breadth of Omaha beach.

On a clear, beautiful day it is enough to make you dizzy. Now imagine that the water was soaked in blood, the air was yellow and gray with smoke from explosions and gunfire. Imagine that the boat reeked of vomit and that the men sitting in front of you were killed before they could even make it into the water. Imagine that the beach was longer than 3 football fields and rimmed with cliffs 150 feet high. Read more...

Continue Reading

Loss, Parenthood

They Can’t Take That Away From Me

1 Comment
00631_n_10acylv3s50419
Lynn Brubaker

I was reminded yesterday that it was Ella Fitzgerald’s birthday. I grew up with Ella playing on scratchy LPs as I danced around the den on top of my father’s feet, listening to him sing off-key.

My father had eclectic taste in music, and he clearly felt it was one of his greatest parental obligations to introduce us to all of it.

Music, for my father, was more than a song. It was a story.

He would play the staples of his college days–The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel–and tell us the story of the anti-war movement, the drug culture, and the sexual revolution. He would play Broadway show tunes and tell us about political corruption in Chicago, the gangsters and bootleggers of the 30’s, or wartime in London. He would play Motown and tell us of growing up in the south and how music changed his generation’s views on race. He would play some new band and remind us that songwriters are the poets of modern society. Read more...

Continue Reading

Loss, Wahoowa

Joy Comes in the Morning

2 Comments

2016-04-21 00.16.09
The night my father died, I did not sleep. My mind was humming with the kind of things you think about after your dad dies.  But mostly I was thinking about how to tell my children. How to tell them that everything had changed but that everything would be okay. How to counter the blows which their faith in God, still nascent and unquestioning, would suffer. How to protect their innocence, their joy.

I sat on a sofa, waiting for them to come around the corner. My 7 year was the first one down, his hair askew, holding his blanket around his neck like a superhero cape. The child whom, a few hours earlier, I had held while the paramedics tried to resuscitate my father. The child who believed the reassuring words I had whispered in his ear to muffle the sounds of the static on their radios. He rounded the corner cautiously, afraid of what he might find, yet positive, in the way that only a child can be, that there was a happy ending.  My 5 year old followed him, blissfully unaware that the world he knew when he fell asleep was no longer the same. Read more...

Continue Reading

Growing Up, Loss

A Mother’s Farewell

9 Comments

IMG_20160404_231121

Update: See this piece featured on Mamapedia!

A few weeks after we were married, Billy and I strolled into a coffee house in Alexandria. There on the bulletin board was a sign advertising beagle puppies born on our wedding day. If ever there was a sign, this was it. It seemed serendipitous to start our new life together with a little ball of fur to whom we were forever joined by a sunny day in January. We named him Charlottesville, in honor of the place where we met and fell in love.

Charlie shared our first home, our first months as newlyweds, our late nights and our early mornings. He took our loud voices and our moves in stride. We cut our parenting teeth on him, learning that when you become a parent, the things you give up pale in comparison to what you receive. Read more...

Continue Reading

Wahoowa

The Big Dance

3 Comments

FB_IMG_1456638811814

Three years ago, Virginia basketball was headed for the NIT, another in a seemingly endless series of mediocre seasons ending in disappointment.

Exactly one year later, they were the ACC regular season and tournament champions and a Number 1 seed in the NCAAs.

So much can change in one year.

That season was magical. The kind of magic that you feel when you are a kid on Christmas morning. The kind of magic that makes you believe anything is possible.

We lost in the Sweet Sixteen that year, bounced early by a foe we never saw coming. A few months later, I lost my dad. Read more...

Continue Reading

Loss, Love

Dreams

3 Comments
Image courtesy of Pexels
Image courtesy of Pexels

My favorite time of the day is the space between sleep and wakefulness, when you are vaguely cognizant of being warm and comfortable and you have not yet remembered the things that hurt. The blurry place before the light sharpens into hard angles when you cannot yet distinguish between what you have dreamed and what is real.

The place where, for one brief moment yesterday, I had a father again.

Like most of my dreams, this one came back to me in a series of disjointed pictures. We were looking for something. Keys one minute, pieces of a puzzle the next. One nameless object after another. Read more...

Continue Reading

Wahoowa

54 seconds

9 Comments

For 39 minutes last Tuesday night, Virginia played its worst basketball of the season. For 39 minutes, they played like the team that had lost four games to unranked opponents.

Those losses stung. Losses always do. But what I told my boys – and I’m fairly certain I meant it – is that losses are okay, good even, if you can learn something from them. If they show you what your weaknesses are so you can figure out how to correct them.

I’d like to say I was just talking about basketball but I wasn’t. We all lose. We lose friends, we lose business deals, we lose arguments. Read more...

Continue Reading