Category Archive

I got knocked down recently. And now I’m getting back up. A month ago an anonymous visitor left several comments here. The comments seemed mean spirited and personal. And the benevolent place where I was casting these writings changed into something creepy and critical. That’s not a place I enjoy visiting. It’s a barren place, an enervating place. The magic of creating something out of nothing – of writing – doesn’t survive there. Or at least mine doesn’t. So I haven’t written …

I worked out with a personal trainer. And felt like an athlete again. Let me explain: I am so not a personal trainer kind of person. I’m a run-barefoot-in-the-woods-and-be-free kind of person. But Tim and I are trading sessions: I life coach him, he personal trains me. And I was curious. What does a personal trainer do? I guess I expected to get yelled out, to be told to gut it out, to be shamed somehow. What I didn’t expect was …

I had a root canal and fell in a hole. My tooth had been hurting for a while, but of course it went acute on Friday night. I got through the weekend on ibuprofen and NyQuil, only to discover that my dentist doesn’t work on Mondays. Good for him. Bad for me. As the pain grew worse, my confidence and optimism dissolved. My attention focused on my jaw and the ebullient happiness of the last two months dried up, leaving …

I went to a party. (I know, I’m going to blog about that? Really? Bear with me.) In my old life, going to a party would be the last thing I wanted to do. Particularly a party where I knew no one except the host. In my old life, I just wanted to be home with my partner and children. Quiet. The last thing I’d want to do after a long week at work was go out. The last thing …

A favorite coaching client of mine looked at me and said, “I am so weak.” I couldn’t disagree more. I was thinking, “You are strong.” So strong to admit a weakness; so strong to be so vulnerable. So strong to start. This client has lots of plans about what he wants to get from coaching, but what he wants – what he really, really wants – is to lose weight. Eighty pounds of it. When he imagines himself as an …

Someone asked me today if I were “letting myself go gray.” I detected a note of incredulity in her question, but maybe I was being defensive. It all started with a blowsy woman I knew briefly awhile back. She was in her late 40s and had carefully foiled blonde hair. It seemed to me that she was trying very hard to look like a younger woman. Watching her, I decided that I don’t want to try that hard. It took …

I once read about somebody who intentionally limited their wardrobe to 100 pieces of clothing. I want that. Imagine the simplicity. The space. So this afternoon I purged my closet. My partner was not supportive. “Why would you throw away perfectly good clothes?” he asked. (This from a man who has issues throwing away old newspaper.) I’m not throwing them away, I’m recycling. I got most of them from Goodwill, they’re just going back for another round. I collected six …

Last November, my daughter’s teacher sent out photographs of the Kindergarten Thanksgiving party. Little kids with cornucopias eating treats. I couldn’t look at the photos. I couldn’t bear it. Mommy Guilt used to ache in my heart. Aching sadness about missing great expanses of my children’s lives. Regret for the haphazard rush of our lives. It was a cost of our dual-income life. On Wednesday, I picked the kids up late from after-school care — just before 6 p.m. I …

A friend of mine used the word “provenance” at a dinner party last weekend. It’s bugged me ever since. One of the kids had placed a pink foam crown on my partner’s head and my friend asked whether it was a birthday crown or a princess crown. So far so good. And then she quietly wondered about the “provenance of the crown.” She said it quietly. Fluently. “Provenance” isn’t part of my active vocabulary, and is barely part of my passive. It’s …

Writing has become important again. I hadn’t realized I’ve been craving the exercise. When I’m running, when I’m doing dishes, when I’m falling asleep, words I want to write down are on my mind. Writing them down, in the right order, feels good. Nourishing. I haven’t written much in the last 10 years. I haven’t made space for it while deep in the bowels of corporate America and while raising small children. One of the greatest surprises of quitting my …