Category: This is Us
-
Imperfect Christmas Wishes
My wish for you this holiday is to let go. Let go and find the space to rest, to love your people fully, and to find your own peace, joy, laughter and togetherness among the imperfection.
-
How Much Can You Handle?
Sometimes there can be an odd sort of symmetry to life. Something happens in one part of life and then is unexpectedly mirrored back to you in a different part of life. We’ve experienced this recently with the exact words, “How much can you handle?” coming first from the man-child’s psychiatrist and then from my husband’s…
-
Hard Choices and the Space Between
It’s been almost 3 years since we made the decision to use medication as a tool to help my son manage his mental health. 3 years of the trial and error that is inherent to the delicate balance between brain chemistry and drug efficacy. 3 years of weighing potential and actual side effects against positive…
-
Behind the Smiles
We took a couple of days to get out-of-town at the beginning of last week – just the four of us and the dog exploring a local mountain town. If you try to piece together our time away based on social media posts, you’d assume it was a relaxed couple of days full of food…
-
Make a Wish – Part 2
In the first part of this post, I talked about World Mental Health Day and how the significance of that date was different for me this year, as my son was about to turn 13. That was yesterday. Now we’re at today, and suddenly I have a teenager living in my house – a teenager…
-
Make a Wish – Part 1
October 10th. World Mental Health Day. Also the day before my son turns 13. When he wakes up tomorrow he will have made another trip around the sun while living with anxiety and depression, and will morph from being a child battling mental illness to being a teenager battling mental illness. The fact that the focus…
-
It’s Okay To Keep Walking Away…A Letter To My Middle School Aged Kids
Dear O & K, Yesterday, I watched you both walk away from me and toward your middle school. Together you walked for the first time toward a shared experience that is all yours and not at all mine. As you walked away I was reminded of another time I watched you walk away from me,…
-
Unexpected Visitor
As we were finishing up dinner tonight, we heard a voice at the front door saying “Hello?” It was a friend of my son who he has not seen in over a year. A friend who was both his fiercest ally and biggest source of heartache through the final two years of elementary school. For…
-
Nothing a little salt air can’t make better…
Life doesn’t always go as planned. But salt air can help fix just about anything…
-
Grace, Indeed
Meet Grace. She’s an 8 year old white lab – a former service dog who was retired when she developed diabetes and cataracts. And as of today, she’s the newest member of our family. We weren’t intending to get a dog right now. The kids have wanted one for ages, but it’s never seemed like…
We're All A Little Broken 