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Last Post: There’s No Handbook For How to Do This
5 years ago today, I started this blog. It was my birthday, and I was turning 39. Shawn had been gone for about six weeks at that point and honestly, I was still mostly in shock. I hadn’t yet hit rock bottom (though I believed I already had) and I was hoping that the blog might be a way for me to start to heal. Or at least I hoped it could be a place for me to tell my friends and family why I wasn’t returning their phone calls. My friend Caitlin helped me set up the blog in the weeks leading up to my birthday. I did all…
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Rule of Life
Every year, I make New Year’s Resolutions. Actually, that’s not totally true. The year Shawn was dying, I didn’t make any resolutions. I didn’t spend even one second thinking about them. I just wanted him to stay alive, which I don’t think really qualifies as a “resolution”. But the next year, I made a resolution, one that was quite straightforward. I called it the “Year of Yes” – something I had heard of online, and resolved to say “yes” to everything that I could. It was an attempt to create a new life for myself, a year after Shawn’s death. It didn’t work out perfectly, but it helped me move…
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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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Pico y Placa
I wake up early in Colombia. I’m not totally sure why, as the sun doesn’t come up any earlier than it did back home and the city isn’t that much louder than DC. But every morning, around 5 am, my eyes pop open and I am awake. It’s okay, this waking-up-early thing. I have always woken up early (though not quite as early as 5) so it’s not totally bizarre for me to be up before everyone else. Anyway, a few weeks into our time here in Colombia, I found myself awake in the wee hours of the morning, yet again. I figured I’d get up and make something special…
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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…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
