-
From the Archives: Maybe She Will Be the One to Save Me
One Saturday night in the late fall of 2019 as I was putting my kids to bed, I got a text from my friend Christine. Are you awake? I just picked up someone for you. I showed him your picture! I was laying down in Tommy’s bed, aimlessly scrolling through news stories and social media posts, but I sat up. Did Christine really just write that she had hit on someone for me? What? Are you out? I texted back. We are at a bar. Want his number? Should I give him yours? she asked. Then she sent a string of ideas about how I should start texting him, but…
-
From the Archives: Dating and the Cabal
In the second year of widowhood, I became friends with a group of young widows. We called ourselves “The Glamorous Cabal of Widows” or “The Cabal” for short. Not everyone was dating yet, but when one of us went out on a date, we always texted the group. There was usually someone around to provide support, or in some cases, humor. We compared dating to root canals and war and everything else that we could think of that was bad. Fuck him, was a common reply to a date that went poorly. My other friends who heard about the Cabal only said, “I wouldn’t mess with any of you,” which…
-
From the Archives: The Mindfulness and Grief Therapy Session
I spent a lot of the first half of 2018 looking for something to ease the strain in my chest, a pain that was obviously due to my mental state and yet also had a physical component. One night, I had my dad listen to my heart with his stethoscope, because it felt so out-of-whack. “You’re okay,” my dad said, though I knew he was only talking about my pulse and not the emotion that had caused me to wake him up so he could reassure me that I wasn’t having a heart attack. If I could have just taken a pill and made the pain dissolve, I would have…
-
Homesick
It surprised me that Halloween was my breaking point. Here’s the thing – moving to Colombia in August was really hard. Seemingly everything was complicated and the kids took a long time to get even remotely comfortable with life here. People were super friendly, which was wonderful, but it didn’t really help much when (for example) I was trying to help a teenage girl navigate middle school social structures in another country and language. The kids each had their moments when they were sad and wanted to go home. Claire’s lasted the longest, but the volleyball team seemed to have done something incredible that really lifted her up. Once she…
-
From the Archives: Kelly and Paige
Two years after my mom died, I met my two best friends, Kelly and Paige, at the UCLA family camp in the San Bernardino Mountains where we all worked in the summer before we graduated. Kelly made french fries at the sandwich shop and Paige ran the art center and I organized games for elementary school kids. We all lived together with a few dozen other college kids in a dorm with walls so thin we could hear every word of each other’s conversations, even with the doors closed. “Someone is making out next door to me, but I’m not sure who!” I’d scream-whisper to one of them in the…
-
Just Like You
Claire made the volleyball team last month. To be quite honest, Chris and I were pretty surprised. Yes, she’s a decent athlete, but she’s never played volleyball before and there were many kids who tried out. On top of all this, her Spanish is pretty limited, and the coach doesn’t speak English. We don’t really know why she was picked, but she was elated. “I get to go to Cartagena!” she shouted, as she announced her team placement. Yep, this is what it meant that she made the team. At the end of the season, we would be sending her across Colombia. Without us. But that wasn’t the hard part,…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
