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Claire’s Hero
At the start of fourth grade, Claire came home with an assignment to write about her hero. “I picked you!” she announced to me. She then spent much of the afternoon finding a photo that she liked of me and writing about why I was her hero. It was really sweet and touching. My kid – the one who’s just on the cusp of being a tween – still thinks her mama is awesome, at least some of the time. As she was working on it, I sat down next to her to see what she’d written. “My mom is a brave courageous person,” it said. “My mother inspires me…
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Falling Trees
It was the first day of Sunday school yesterday, and my children happily went to their classrooms which meant I had 45 uninterrupted minutes to drink coffee and talk to other adults. I hadn’t been to church in a while and so the time passed quickly as I caught up with all my friends. Soon it was almost time to go get the kids. All of the sudden I heard a loud noise and the power went out. “I’m going to get my kids right now,” I said to my friend Kristin. “I’ll go get the big kids and you get the little kids,” she said. I went downstairs, but…
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Reckless
Last week, I was hanging out at school with one of the art teachers. He was asking about my summer, and I told him that I really hadn’t had much fun. “I just want to have FUN again, you know?” He nodded along in agreement, although I think it was fairly impossible for him to imagine what life has been like for me lately. It hasn’t been fun. It seems like everything I’ve done lately has been for my children, and that all of my free time has been taken up with the annoyances of running a home by myself – finances, yard work, permission slips and the like. So…
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Parent 2
My kids all came home after the first day of school with backpacks full of forms. “You have to fill everything out today!” Claire instructed. Even though I’m a teacher, I still can’t understand how schools make you fill out the same information a dozen times. Can’t they put all this stuff in a database or something? Of course, I never minded it that much before, because filling out forms was merely an annoyance. But now that I have to look at the “Parent 2” slot each time I fill out one of these forms, it makes me sad. Last year, I started writing “no Parent 2” but that didn’t…
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We All Hurt
“You’re awfully young to be a widow,” the jeweler said to me with a shocked expression on his face. I was at a jewelry shop looking at new ring settings. I’ve been thinking about getting my wedding ring re-made into something that I could wear on my right hand. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it, but I figured talking to a jeweler could help me figure that out. Obviously, I had to tell my life story to the jeweler, and I found out quickly that he was one of those people who said exactly what was in his head. I mean, I’m sure a lot of people…
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No Ma’am
I came home from work yesterday to find three ladders in my back yard. They extended from my property across the fence and onto my neighbor’s roof. I did not put them there, but my dad reported that the workers next door had done it without asking. My kids were running wild near the ladders and I started screaming that they needed to go inside. I mean, take a look at that cover picture – it’s pretty insane. I tried texting my neighbors, but I couldn’t immediately reach them. I barely know them anyway, as they bought the house a few months before Shawn got sick and still haven’t moved…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
