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Field Trips, Open Houses and Other Events I Can’t Attend Anymore
The other day I was sorting through the kids’ paperwork after school and came across a permission slip for a field trip for Claire. I signed it, and then was putting it on my calendar when Claire came over to me. I asked her about what she thought she was going to do on the field trip, and she told me. Then she turned and looked at me with hopeful eyes and asked, “Can you chaperone my field trip, mama?” I sighed. There was no way I could take off. “I can’t, baby,” I said. I tried to keep my voice even. “I have to work full time now and…
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CNAS Tribute to Shawn (Part 2)
Below are the remarks I gave on October 29, 2018 at the CNAS event honoring the life and work of Shawn Brimley. Thank you all so much for being here to honor Shawn. I thought a lot about what I wanted to say to you tonight. Shawn was a brilliant, funny, thoughtful man, and I have many good things to say about him and his impact on the world. It’s hard to choose the best Shawn story or fully describe the impact he had on his coworkers, friends and family. Instead, I decided I would speak about what Shawn valued as his greatest lifetime achievement: being a dad to Claire,…
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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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The Marine
While traveling this summer, I had one day that was particularly bad. I was alone with my three kids and we’d been bumped from our original flight to a later one. We were seated in random seats across the very last row of the plane, and everyone was exhausted. As we got on, I instructed Claire to hold Tommy’s hand and make sure he didn’t fall in the crack between the airplane and the tarmac. When we got to the last row, a kind woman there offered to switch seats so that all three kids could sit in a row. She said she didn’t mind and then offered me the…
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Reading with Claire
Every night, the routine is the same. I read a book to Tommy. I read a book to Austin. Then I sit on the end of their bed until they fall asleep. They have a bunk bed, but they both sleep in the bottom bunk together. This is something they did for most of 2017, and it seemed like last fall, Austin was ready to move to the top bunk. Of course, now all bets are off. It’s actually comforting to me that they have each other, even if it means that when one of them wakes up and comes to my bed in the middle of the night, the…
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Shawn’s Birthday, Part 2
As promised, I took the kids to the cemetery on their Dad’s birthday, which was Wednesday. I had no idea how it would go. They were at a tennis camp with my friend Christine’s two kids, and so when it came time to go, Christine decided that she’d come with her kids too. So we loaded them up and took off right after lunch – just two moms on an outing with their kids to the cemetery. We talked a lot in the car about the cemetery. I told them that it looked like a park and that Shawn’s grave had a marker on it and grass growing over it.…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
