“Go out into the world and make a difference.”

Mildred is the loving mother of many children—foster, adoptive and birth. Sean and I met her about eight years ago when she taught a few of our “PRIDE” foster parent training sessions. “Go out into the world and make a difference,” she said at one class, a quote I jotted down that’s been stuck to our … Continue reading →

More Perfect

Today this is how safe my family is: My 2-year-old baby girl skips around the house in lime-green underpants, her family cheering every time she succeeds in making pee-pee in the Elmo potty. This is how sweet our life is: Later, she and my son and his friend take turns stirring a wooden spoon through pumpkin batter, … Continue reading →

Opening day

Eleven years ago, I read a book I can’t remember in the bottom bunk of a bedroom I was sharing with my new boyfriend, Sean Flynn. Once the sun lit the room white, the gangle of a man I’d just begun dating sprung from the bunk above me toward the nearby desk and roused me … Continue reading →

The mystery of being loved

A friend, saying she’d been a fearless young woman, added that she’s become increasingly anxious as she’s grown older. “When I feel that anxiety starting to build, I tell myself, ‘I am loved.’ It calms and centers me.” The next day, another friend shared a link to a Krista Tippett podcast in which the interview subject, … Continue reading →

James Foley’s prayer

“If nothing else, prayer was the glue that enabled my freedom, an inner freedom first and later the miracle of being released during a war in which the regime had no real incentive to free us. It didn’t make sense, but faith did.”—James Foley, “Phone call home,” Marquette Magazine, fall 2011 My sated and somnolent … Continue reading →

All this change makes me feel

I want to run toward and away from change. I want to be in its inner circle and skirting its periphery, a safe distance from the roil and tumble of its consequences. When things change, I want to hold my babies closer even as I rejoice in the slow curve of learning to let them … Continue reading →

My wish at 34

34 years old but still living in the same body that first received the tickling warmth of his breath on the lobe of my ear; his lips’ tender press in the crease of my neck. My same back to his belly. My same belly filled, that night nearly 10 years ago, with the warmth of … Continue reading →

I may leave, but I’ll never let go

Twelve weeks ago right now I was about an hour away from waking up to the funny feeling of an uncomfortable fist opening and closing in the vast, cramped space between my heart and my hips. The discomfort of that rather obtrusive fist would persist through a long, hot shower, then increase as midnight silently … Continue reading →

“The Thing Is”*

The last time I was this stuffed with life my grandmother lost hers. What I have left of her now is a curio cabinet filled with a few photos and mementoes, and her scent secured two years after her death in a plastic bag of her bath towels, which I refuse to wash. Every once … Continue reading →