Escaping the Quicksand

When overwhelm settles over you and starts pulling you into its grasp, it can feel a lot like those old television shows where someone fell into quicksand and their efforts to escape only tended to make them sink faster. For those of you not quite as old as me, and so...

Don’t Wish It Away

At some point during the early weeks or months of parenting your new little one, someone will tell you that you will miss these days when they’re gone. At that same point during those early weeks or months (or first two or three years) of parenting your new little...

Do the Write Thing

Because of my husband’s church-related job—he serves as the Director of Traditional Music at a local church near where we live—he gets Fridays and Saturdays off as his weekend, and because of this, I have come to love Thursday afternoons as the lead-in to our weekend....

Don’t Should All Over Yourself

One of the most dangerous words in the English language seems innocuous enough, but, trust me, it’s a dangerous one: should. Despite its danger, I am fairly certain it’s a word many of use more regularly than we ought. And when we do, we use it to inflict some serious...

A Course of Breakfast Discourse

There are two questions I regularly have difficulty answering. The first is what do you do? This one is tricky for me because there is not one thing that I feel captures what I do, but, even more, I don’t like the idea of being defined by what I spend my time doing....