Love, Parenthood

The Weight of Time

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**Update: See this post featured on Scary Mommy!

Ten is the number of months that I was pregnant. Ten months of constant sickness, sleeplessness, and anxiety about whether I would be a good mother weighed on me much more than the thirty pounds I carried on my frame.

Four is the number of hours that I slept each night when my babies were new. The nights before your body becomes inured to sleep deprivation seem endless. And those four hours, cobbled together in snippets of brief respite, weighed on me during the day as I struggled to have a lucid conversation or stay awake while that tiny creature rested on my shoulder. Read more...

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Growing Up, Love

16 Years of Choices

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2015-10-22 21.32.32

This week, Billy and I celebrated the 16th anniversary of our first date (our “dateaversary” as we call it). A night that we walked into a bar as friends, just like so many other night. We drank some beers, watched a ballgame, and chose to take a leap.

Our story did not begin that night. Stories, after all, do not have beginnings or endings but simply arbitrary dates from which we mark a before and an after. October 19th is that day for us.

Billy once told me that fate brought us together; that there were too many coincidences, too many ghosts, too many decisions that could have gone the other way for it to be random.  But even if fate brought us together on the lawn of the law school, it was we who made the choice to be together that night in October. Read more...

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Believe, Love

Radical Hospitality

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DeAnna Casey Photography
DeAnna Casey Photography

Some months ago, our assistant rector gave a beautiful sermon about radical hospitality. Although his sermon was more specifically concerned with the social upheaval of the summer and the church’s duty to extend radical hospitality to those who had been disenfranchised or marginalized, I took his message on a very personal level instead.

Maybe it was because the sermon coincided with the first anniversary of my father’s death and my heart was raw from the emotion of that service.

Maybe it was because I was struggling to make sense of a friend who no longer seemed to care about me. Read more...

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Loss, Wahoowa

Saturdays

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Three weeks into the college football season and most Wahoos are already looking forward to the start of basketball (T minus 48 days in case you’re wondering). It’s always hard to be a UVA fan, but the last few years have stretched even the most faithful of us to our limits. On the other hand, I suspect the pharmaceutical industry is sending Coach London a big ol’ gift basket every week.

Indeed, many of the faithful, some who have been season ticket holders for 40 years, have just stopped going to games. Read more...

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Growing Up, Loss

August 21st

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One year ago, as our family vacation at the beach drew to a close, I felt more than the usual end-of-vacation melancholy. All summer long we had been living with my mother, sheltering each other after my father’s unexpected death in July. And it had worked like a dream: in that idyllic bubble we created, temporarily freed from any commitments or expectations, we had managed to buffer each other from the worst of the shock and pain.  But like all dreams, it couldn’t last. After our vacation, we would be returning not to my mother’s house and our safe little bubble, but back to our house. Back to real life. And I wasn’t sure I was ready for it. Read more...

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Loss

The Last First: A Year of Grief

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2014-10-07 14.27.41***Update: See this post featured on Scary Mommy and The Mighty!

In the last 365 days since my father’s death, we have faced and surmounted a litany of firsts – from big ticket items like holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries to smaller hurdles like the first time my mom had to zip up her own dress or the night I absentmindedly called my dad’s phone and heard it ringing in my own desk.

Today is the last first. The first anniversary of his death.

In some ways, it feels like just yesterday he was standing in my kitchen and in others, it feels like I have aged a lifetime in these 365 days. A year is so short but the days are so long. Read more...

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Uncategorized

A Love Letter to Preschool

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06 10 15_0040 Yesterday my baby graduated from preschool.

I know he probably doesn’t look like a baby, with his shaggy hair and the new hole in his grin where a tooth used to be. But when I look at his face I don’t see the six year old boy that you do. I see the tiny wrinkly face of the newborn that nuzzled my shoulder in the wee hours of the night. I see the face covered in pureed carrots, the wobbly first steps he took in Palm Beach, the tear-streaked face that watched me walk out the door on his first day of preschool, the pain of skinned knees and blisters, the determination in his face before he threw his first spiral. Read more...

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Loss, Love

The Story of My Life

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After you lose someone, there are a lot of tough moments that you are prepared for – birthdays, holidays, cleaning out closets. But the moments that trip you up are the unexpected ones. Like watching a video of your first day of college and seeing your dad on the screen.

Despite being momentarily amused watching a younger version of myself sitting on the floor with a ridiculous scrunchie in my hair cataloging my CDs (yes, I am old enough to have had actual CDs and scrunchies), my heart and my stomach contracted in unison when I saw him amble across the screen. Read more...

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Uncategorized

Ten More Things That Are Not Cool About Getting Older

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10. Mail no longer consists solely of care packages, CDs from Columbia House, letters from your best friend dotted with hearts, and magazines containing quizzes guaranteed to tell you whether your crush du jour is indeed the man of your dreams.  Now your mail has nothing but bills, fliers for gutter cleaning, and quizzes from your financial advisor entitled “What Will College Cost When Your Child is 18?”  Do not, under any circumstances, EVER take this quiz.  It will scare you so badly you will actively root for your child to fail his second grade spelling test. Read more...

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Growing Up, Loss, Love

The Still of the Night

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3am

I am an unabashed night owl, a trait I inherited from my father.  No really – researchers have actually found that there is a genetic component to a person’s circadian rhythms. Growing up, I would often come downstairs in the middle of the night to find him reading or working or making up his own crossword puzzles. Sometimes we would talk but often I would simply curl up next to him, my head rising and falling on his chest in rhythm with his breathing.  Nighttime was when he helped me solve my problems, mended my broken heart, and told me fantastic stories.  Nighttime was our time. Read more...

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Growing Up, Loss, Love, Relationships, Uncategorized

The Picture We Never Took

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Last Friday was apparently National Sibling Day.  I didn’t know that was a thing until I saw the plethora of pictures pop up on Facebook and Instagram.  Hallmark used to be the inventor of fun but meaningless holidays.  Now it’s social media.

But maybe it shouldn’t be a meaningless day.  We have holidays to recognize mothers and fathers – why not brothers and sisters? They are, after all, our first friends and our first loves.  It is from our siblings that we learn to share – the affection of our parents, the space in the backseat of a car, the last piece of cake.  From them we learn how to fight fairly and how to forgive. We learn how to keep a secret and how to communicate without uttering a word.  We know each other’s greatest sins and biggest dreams. We have seen each other at our best and at our worst and we love each other anyway. Read more...

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Believe, Loss, Wahoowa

The Moment When Everything Is Possible

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Sunday morning I put on my lucky orange pants for the last time this season.  I didn’t know it at the time of course, although I had an inkling. That is, after all, the nature of the post-season – survive and advance or lose and go home.

One year ago, I stood in a similar stadium, watching Virginia play the very same team, and there wasn’t a single part of me that believed it would be the last time.  Hope is a funny thing that way.

But one year ago, I didn’t know what I do know. That you cannot will something to be simply because you believe.  One year ago, I hadn’t yet listened to the voices of the paramedics performing CPR on my dad.  I hadn’t held my child and told him everything was going to be okay, even though I knew it wasn’t.  In my head I knew.  But my heart still believed in the improbable.  As my brain was busy calculating the ugly logistics of death, my heart was exhilarating in the moment that was surely ahead of us when the doctors would joyfully tell us of the medical miracle that they had performed. Read more...

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Loss, Love, Parenthood, Uncategorized

Legacy

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A month ago, I had the great pleasure of accompanying Jack’s class on a field trip to the Chrysler Museum.  As we were passing through Huber Court, Jack caught sight of my parents’ names etched in the marble wall and stopped mid-stride.  Oblivious to the boisterous chatter of his classmates fading into the glass gallery down the hall, Jack stood immobile.   And then he slowly reached out his hand.

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Silently I watched him run his fingers over the grooves in the marble, painstakingly tracing each letter in my father’s name.  I knew what he was doing.  He was willing himself to see and feel my father instead of just a name carved in the cold marble. Read more...

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Loss, Love

What Harry Potter Taught Me About Love and Loss

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In the months since my father has died, I have heard the same question over and over again: “Are you really okay?”  Most of the time it is a genuine question, although sometimes it is dutifully asked as a perfunctory exercise of social graces.

Either way, my answer is always the same: “I’m really okay.”  I always have been, even if I didn’t understand why.

But the parade of confused looks and barely hidden disbelief at my unconventional reaction made me start to think that everyone else knew something I didn’t. Read more...

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Love, Parenthood, Wahoowa

Sometimes It’s More Than a Game: Why I Took My Kids Out of School for a Basketball Game

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Someone gently reminded me the other day that I have been uncharacteristically quiet since Christmas.  And I gently reminded my friend that the Lucky Orange Pants have been busy with more important things.  Like basketball  season.

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know that Virginia is one of two undefeated teams left in college basketball and ranked second in the country.

Second.  In the whole country.  For someone with a massive fear of heights, and a long memory of crashing and burning, this is a scary place to be. Read more...

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