My mind drifted back to earlier that month when I had held a man who had lost his wife to an unimaginable accident. “You’re telling me my wife is dead?” he said, eyes vacant, voice distant, as he held her limp body. “She’s dead? She’s dead? She’s dead? Just, completely, dead?” Over and over he said the words. As if he was telling himself for the first time, each time
Disallowing others to give me my self-worth or validation is something I learned somehow a long time ago. I can unlearn it.
“Ten-minute cleanup. Let’s go,” I chirped, singing the chorus of our nightly family theme song.
The three of us scattered and tossed everything we could reach into bins and baskets. The floor was temporarily clear, but no one felt satisfied or relaxed.
In therapy, it is my turn to speak. I tell my therapist the truth: I am no different than my clients. I was born with big feelings, big reactions, big thoughts. I never felt safe expressing them until I met my current partner, who holds me when I cry and does not ask me to stop, who listens to my ideas and loves every part of me that’s big.
Thank you so much for joining us on this crazy ride!
She is not a mother, so she doesn’t know that it’s not the “enough” part I am leery of now. I am questioning the “You are” part.
By Rachel Greenley Green is the rarest of eye colors—only two percent of the world’s population. My children had…
The kiwis I ate in the morning at my B&B tasted tangy, enticing, unlike my breakfasts back home. The memory of their flesh slipping between my lips scratched at my mind for the rest of the morning and followed me as I went on long afternoon walks outside Verona.
I’m no hypocrite, and I know that I don’t have the feeling inside me. So how do I understand my sadness at seeing any church alone, empty inside?
By Rob Norman I drove up to my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan after a very long hiatus. I…
. It turned out that she spotted me in the picture, but also spotted me for a Big Mac combo at McDonalds one day, and I promised to pay her back. But days went on, though four out of five days I had money in my pocket, it seemed like the days she reminded me to pay her, were weirdly on the exact days I had no money.
Becoming a mother has divided my body in portions, passing out small pieces at a time to my child, husband and self. I’ve been stretched to a capacity I formerly did not think possible and from there, have to learn to surrender my control of the unknown.
I pretend to start my period when I am thirteen so my dad will buy me tampons. The day before this my mother is bleeding all over the sheets.
When my husband died, it was the ultimate rejection. I’d never felt so desperate, never craved something so badly before. At first, I hardly left my house. I drank wine in my bed every night, straight from the bottle, cried myself to sleep watching back-to-back episodes of Lost, woke next to those bottles, empty, head spinning, nausea and guilt consuming
