Love and Puke

My 7-year-old was up all night puking. It made me think of my dad.
When I puked as a kid, my dad would hold my hair out of my face and press a cold washcloth over my forehead. I remember feeling so miserable, and so loved.
As I sat on the bathroom floor at 3:30 this morning, rubbing a miserable little boy’s back as he dry heaved into the toilet, I was thinking about Dad.
He died on March 30, almost exactly two years ago. We laughed when my brother-in-law imagined Dad’s relief at not dying on April Fool’s Day. “Only a fool would die on April Fool’s Day,” my brother-in-law joked in my dad’s gravelly voice.
As I held my son last night, Dad felt very close. His last words to me, a couple of days before he died, were, “I love you so much.”
He would have understood why I was thinking about him as my son was sick all night long.

Related articles

Maximize Your Career in Your Current Organization

From a University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education webinar: Prospective clients sometimes ask me how I have the credibility to coach senior executives in industries I know nothing about. Challenging question, right? So I have a choice here: I can answer in a way that risks sounding defensive, talking about my experience and my degrees. I like to do something really unexpected instead.
I like to talk about knots.

Read More »

How to Network When You’re Not Networking

From a University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education webinar: It can be useful to think of networking in terms of the classic journalistic Who, What, Where, When, Why and How, although I’m going to mix up the order and start with Why. Why do you need to even bother with this networking thing? We’re going to talk about something I call the “career lifecycle” – which sounds awful, doesn’t it? I think you’ll find it reassuring, actually.

Read More »

Assess whether coaching is right for you