David is on leave (which to all of you civilians means vacation); he’s a happy pajama-wearing, beard growing man who is unintentionally throwing off our school schedule. I’m trying to stick to the basics but also hold our days loosely in my hand. We’re a family, and these are relationships. I constantly fight the urge to […]
A Whole Year Has Passed
We had family visiting for eight days, and then we landed on Easter weekend. Easter, and with it Grace’s first birthday; tomorrow, Easter Monday with Judah turning nine. Nine. Who is this child, nine years old, and too big for Thomas the Train? I stood picking through birthday decorations in an over-lit Walmart with tears dripping […]
Land of the Living
The night finds me distracted by library books and headlines about Weapons of Mass Destruction and the little boy making a bed on my living room floor. ISIS advances and Ebola sweeps, but today my grandfather said vows in his twilight years and married the woman he loves. FaceTime carried to their great-grandfather the congratulations of my children. I […]
Saving The World On A Saturday Night
You know that scene in “The Incredibles” where the ice dude shouts out “Honey, where’s my super suit?”– yeah. Welcome to the life of an EOD family. There’s my husband, happily lounging in his sweats and a hoodie, when a call comes in. Somebody somewhere has something that may or may not blow up and […]
Dear David
Remember when we were just you-knows, just barely falling in love–more than dating, but not yet engaged– and we would email back and forth from California to Salem? I would sit at my parents’ computer desk all that excruciating summer, blushing deeply if they came into the room. I hung on every word you wrote. […]
When Motherhood is Hard: Still In Christ
So Tuesday night found me flipping through Google, hunting down the local Christian schools. ‘Flipping’ is a good word because I’d earlier flipped my lid. “I’m about to leave!” I’d seethed to my husband as things had heated to a climax. “Why don’t you?” he’d shot back, thrusting the baby and leveling a glare. I […]
Homecoming
He made it in time for Baby.
Seasons of Grace
My husband has been gone for six months now. He wrote that in some ways it seems impossible that he’ll see me again– that I seem almost more a figment of his imagination–and I understand. After months and months of talking through keyboards and the occasional computer screen, it is very hard for me to […]
Parenting: It’s not for the faint of heart
I should have known it was his ears–that was always my mother’s go-to: “get the ears checked!”–but somehow checking ears always slips my mind in the hoary, blurry middle of the night. I wouldn’t discover that it was his ears until the morrow. We were sick anyway, my husband and I. Our colds were making […]
Edges
i see him on the edges of my days; his back in the bathroom as my eyes adjust to the morning light, a kiss, a smile; and the yawning hours, of day shutting and walls folding to sleep. in the middle we are full of all the goings-on, diapers folded, videos taken of Baby’s new […]