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The Treadmill
People really hate having treadmills in their houses. I’ve heard this before, but I truly realized it a few months ago when I posted this to my community listserve: I’m looking for a free/cheap treadmill. If you have one you’d like to sell or give away, please email me. I got three responses in the first 20 minutes it was up. I wanted a treadmill because it’s been really hard to figure out how to fit in a workout without Shawn around. Of course, my dad is almost always home during the school year, but in the mornings (when I liked to work out) the kids really just want me. …
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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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Single
I was chatting with some of my girlfriends the other day when we began to discuss this guy one of them knew who lives in another city. I can’t remember his name, so I’ll call him Bob. Anyway, Bob is apparently single and my friend wanted to find him a girlfriend. We all spent time having a heated, if somewhat ridiculous discussion about which teacher at our kids’ elementary school we’d like to see him date. Then, one of the women there said, “But really, I don’t really have any friends who are single anymore.” Others chimed in. A few people had some divorced friends, but most of the situations…
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Run Away
On Monday, I woke with a pit in my stomach. “Six months,” I thought. “Six entire months since Shawn left this world. How could that be?” I didn’t quite know what to do with the anxiety I was feeling, but my cousin Amy offered to take my kids for the morning and I gratefully left them with her. “I’m going out on a run,” I told her. “Great,” she said, “there’s a loop you can run around here, or you can cross the main road and go further.” I took off. It was raining, which is weird for Texas in July, but it meant that the heat didn’t hold me…
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6 Months
In the past 3 weeks, I’ve endured Father’s Day, Shawn’s birthday and our wedding anniversary. Today, it’s the 6 month marker since his death. I woke up nervous, though I’m not sure why. It’s not like anything has changed today, and the specific time period of six months is a made-up marker anyway. But I’ve now lived a half of a year without Shawn, and that is something that gives me pause. If you had asked me a year ago if I would be able to handle six entire months without my husband, I would definitely have said “no.” And yet, here I am. I am not whole anymore, but…
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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
