Today seems like a good day to write about grief, since a good portion of our country is feeling profound grief due to the election outcome. Most people do not deal with grief very well, whether it is their own grief or the grief of another. It is not something many of us have been […]
Earlier this year, I noticed that my relationship with the computer and the TV screen was out of balance. Both were getting more of my attention than the people and things in front of me. It took a family road trip during spring break for me to become aware of what was going on. On […]
I have been wanting to write this blog post for a few years now. The original inspiration for this post happened back when my daughter was in preschool and a classmate bit her. When I asked her teacher if the classmate had been told to apologize, she said that they don’t encourage insincere apologies at […]
My daughter has entered a grade level where she and her classmates are trying to work out some complex social dynamics. Children huddle and talk about some other child that they don’t like. I have been trying to work through my own emotional reactions to this so that I can find a way to talk […]
When I hired our children’s piano teacher, he stated clearly that he expected us (the parents) to participate in their lessons so that we could help our kids practice in between. The biggest struggle with practicing at first for both of them was being told they’d made mistakes. There were several power struggles in the […]
The other day when I wrote the post about name calling, I’d been sitting on a half-written version of it for a week or two. I have many posts like this, ones I’ve started and then gotten stuck on, so there is a massive pile of drafts waiting for me to write. A conversation on […]
The other day when I was running, I made a huge mistake in the middle of a busy intersection. It was completely my fault. I was ending an exhausting run that was having a negative impact on my cognitive functioning: in short; I was totally out of it. I got to an intersection, all I […]
Yesterday, I wrote about pruning the roses for spring, something I willingly do on my own terms. Sometimes in spring, plants get pruned on the weather’s terms. Things get ripped brutally apart from the weight of a heavy snowstorm, and you are left with broken plants, trees, bushes. You were excited about the potential fruit […]
Yesterday, I cut back two of my largest rosebushes for spring. It always seems impossible that the roses can survive such pruning, but every year, they grow back even better than the year before. I planted these roses when they were in one-gallon pots and each about a foot tall, and they’ve grown into massive […]
In the comic strip “Peanuts” the character Lucy is a bully, and perhaps her most famous mean trick is the football swipe: She tells Charlie Brown that she’ll hold the football for him, then swipes it away at the last minute and he falls. I hated this story line as a child. I got frustrated […]