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Moments of Pause
Over the past few months, it’s really felt like things are getting easier here in Colombia. Sure, nothing is really the same as it is back home. It takes me three times longer to go through the grocery store and I still get lost in my own neighborhood and when someone in my apartment talks to me in Spanish, I only get about 50% of it, even now. But the kids have settled into school and they have sports events and they even get invited to birthday parties and so, in some ways, it all feels similar to my old life too. That’s been a nice feeling. I have a…
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Any Day You Can Die
I was walking to my Spanish class the other day and out of the corner of my eye I saw a sticker on a post that was in English. I guess it grabbed my attention because I don’t see much in English in my daily life. Or maybe it’s because of what it said: Any Day You Can Die I stared at it for a minute, and then snapped a photo. Was it encouragement? A nihilistic viewpoint? A threat? A dose of reality for English speakers? Who knows! But I kept thinking about this sticker all day. A few nights later, we went out to dinner as a family. Out…
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Ask a Widow: Dating With Kids
I’ve talked so much about dating as a widow that it’s strange that I haven’t written much about dating and kids. When I have written on this topic, it’s usually about how to date with small kids. Here’s an excerpt from a piece I wrote that’s titled, “Could My Date Be a Father to My Kids?“ Once I started dating, I found that I would very quickly move from “do I want to kiss this guy?” to “could he be a father to my children?” That made dating really difficult. I’m not a total idiot, so I didn’t say these sorts of things out loud on a first or second…
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Let’s Make Light As a Family
The kids cried when we told them we were moving to Colombia. They didn’t want to leave their friends, their rooms, their toys and their extended family. They didn’t know Spanish and they didn’t know the culture of Colombia. They didn’t want to live in an apartment and they didn’t want to eat arepas for the next year. (They now love arepas.) But we had made a decision, and slowly, they all came around to it. We did offer one carrot – we promised them that once we got to Colombia and had been there for a month, we would all take a trip to the beach. A few weeks…
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The Power of Yet
The thing about moving to another country is that everything seems hard – going to the grocery store, trying to talk to the guy in the elevator, paying for something in cash – and it’s doubly hard with kids in tow. We’ve been in Colombia for about a month now, and while some things have gotten easier, every single day I’m pretty exhausted by the time dinner rolls around. Of course, I have plenty to be grateful for, but also…it’s just a lot. Take school. The kids are going to a bilingual school, so many of the parents speak English, and yet the text threads that I’m on for each…
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Happy Birthday, Grandpa Tom
Some people say that I’m the most optimistic person that they know. But that’s not really true. That award should go to my dad. I mean, sure, he can get all fired up over some story he reads in the news or some call in a Texas football game. He can be grumpy or frustrated. He has other emotions. And yet, my dad exudes a kind of optimism that is contagious. Even when he’s grumpy, he is so joyfully grumpy. “Aren’t we lucky?” he often said to me as a kid, often in circumstances when I felt bored, annoyed or something that amounted to less than lucky. “Aren’t we lucky…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
