I made a thing! A really large thing, as it turns out. It’s been awhile since I’ve worked on anything creative besides writing but my left hand is getting weaker and the mantra I keep hearing over and over and over with regards to MS weakness is “use it or lose it.” It’s confusing. My arm and hand feel weak and the sensation is such that I’d prefer not to use it. To just let …
Blog Posts
You know how sometimes you read an article or listen to a podcast and think, “That was really good/interesting/weird/creepy/awesome” and you want to geek out with someone about it but it doesn’t seem big enough to put up on Facebook or something? I often want to debrief after I listen to a good podcast or read an interesting book — to chat about what moved me, angered me, stirred my imagination. And when one of …
Last Thursday I started something brand new. Well, new and old, I guess. I went back to school. I started a graduate program in Creative Writing. Creative Non Fiction, to be precise. I had to choose between Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non Fiction and it was a tough choice for me. Well, I didn’t seriously consider poetry. Not really. But I do enjoy writing Fiction so I went back and forth for a while before …
Last month my husband made his first joke about my illness. We had made a few meager attempts at joking before but this was the first one that took. We’d been watching our dog run in the grass and my husband claimed that he (the dog) was becoming more and more like me. No, think about it, he said. He sleeps whenever he gets a chance, the highlight of his day is eating, …
I wrote this last Fall as an assignment for a writer’s workshop. The question was Where Art Thou? Where do you currently stand before the divine? You know, just something light and breezy to share with a roomful of strangers. I borrowed a little from this piece, which I wrote a little over a year ago, and came up with the following. It ended up being a really interesting assignment and I so enjoyed hearing …
Tomorrow marks one year since I found out I have multiple sclerosis. It’s been one of the hardest years of my life and I’m still processing so much of how I feel about it. I’m a 5 on the enneagram so this might take awhile. On Sunday Jason asked what I wanted to do for Mother’s Day and I told him I wanted to take a family bike ride. So we piled the four bikes onto …
Last Friday night Jason and I went to hear Pete Rollins and Rob Bell speak at the Neptune Theater here in Seattle. We managed to snag seats with a couple friends and it was, as Rob Bell podcast-listeners like to say, SO GOOD. If you listen to Pete Rollins or Rob Bell with any regularity, it was familiar ground in many respects, but approached from some new angles and allowed me to sink further into …
Isaiah turned eight last week. Jason and I both felt a strong melancholy as we talked about it and prepared for his big day. It was all the usual “How can our baby be eight?” and “How can eight years have passed already?” but more so I think it was, “How can we only have ten years left with this guy at home?” A decade used to feel so long and it still does, I …
It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world ^ I’ve had that line from a Mary Oliver poem memorized for about a year and it came to mind when I saw this photo this morning. It’s from a poem called Invitation and it seems fitting for Good Friday. I’ve been thinking this week about how I’d like to discuss Easter with our boys. We were …
I was asked to pare this piece down so that it is strictly a personal essay – without the cultural critique. This is my attempt to do so. I’m still unsure which version I prefer but this one is definitely shorter, that’s for sure! The Double Bind of Breasts Learning to Love What I Lost I used to have big boobs. We’re not talking double J’s or even large enough to cause …
