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Hard Things Are Hard
It had been a really hard week at my school. An incident had shocked my students and made them fearful and frustrated. I stood in the back of the auditorium, listening to our head of school talk to the students. I sighed. I was about a year into widowhood and everything seemed hard. I didn’t need anything else on my plate. The head of school talked about the importance of holding space for each other and reaching out to teachers if students needed more support. The kids were listening, but it wasn’t an easy talk. At one point, our head of school paused his speech. I think he was attempting…
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My Nine-Year-Old Boy
We found out that you were a boy on Christmas Day. We had asked the ultrasound technician to put the sex of our second child in an envelope, and then we opened it together with our extended family. A boy! That night, we drove back to where we were staying. Claire was in the back seat, sleeping, and your father drove silently. “I am going to have a son,” he said, finally, breaking the silence. “I know,” I said. “I mean, we are going to have a son,” he said, correcting himself. I smiled at him. I knew what he meant. “I want to be a good father to my…
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The Boy on the Bike
I want to tell you a love story. A boy meets a girl. They are out on a double-date, but not with each other. Still, the attraction is there, so they ditch their original dates and decide to go out a few times with one another after that. But the girl has an on-again, off-again boyfriend who shows back up in town. And so their very brief romance ends. Nine months later, the boy is riding his bike, and he sees the girl walking down the street. They chat, he asks her out, and she says yes. They start dating. The girl’s on-again, off-again boyfriend (the same one from before)…
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Being Alone is Scary
One night in early February, as the wind whipped the trees so hard that they seemed to bend sideways, I laid in bed and tried to warm up my freezing toes. Life finally had a rhythm to it, and I was getting used to year three of widowhood. I thought about Valentine’s Day, and how it was around the corner, and I was still without a partner. This year, however, I was feeling a sense of peace about my singledom. I was still dating, but the urgency of finding someone new had abated. As I sat there writing and thinking, Tommy came to my door and then climbed into my…
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How (Not) to Date a Widow
A few months ago, I was texting with a friend of mine, who is widowed. He has had a couple of relationships since his wife died, and the two of us sometimes talk about the crazy world of dating. It’s been a mystery to both of us, really, but it’s been nice for me to have a man to bounce things off of every once in a while. I think he feels the same about me. Anyway, he’d recently broken up with a woman he’d been dating. She had become distant with him over the course of a couple of weeks and he decided she must not like him that…
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Which Box Do I Check?
Because this is a blog about my life and because I have very little shame, I’m going to let you in on a secret: I recently had laser hair removal. I won’t go into too many details, because it’s not relevant to this blog post, but suffice to say, it’s something I did this past winter, before we were all locked down in our houses. I’m not sharing this information because I am a chronic over-sharer (although I am, and Shawn certainly was too) or because I think all widows should get laser hair removal (do what you want with your body!) No, I’m sharing this information because of what…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
