Depression Lies

Last night as I was headed to bed, my Facebook feed filled with the news that the blogging community lost someone to depression. I didn’t know her. She was a friend of friends, someone who moved through some of the same circles as me and my people. But nevertheless, the news took my breath away….

eight

8 Reasons Why Christians Hurt People

1. They aren’t Christ, they’re Christ followers. Okay, so that’s the most obvious, simplest reason, which I needed to get out of the way before we could continue. For all of the tossing about of the term “Christ-like,” the design of Christianity is that there is one Christ, one Savior, sent to provide us with the grace…

Love. Just Love.

*deep breath* I am a Christian, a follower of Jesus, a believer of grace through Jesus’s crucifixion on the cross. I believe that I am asked to love people and hate the sin in myself. I believe in the separation of church and state, a construct that protects my rights to worship and live as…

InsideOut

From Messy to Joyful

Life can be messy. Just this morning I had a conversation with another mom about those long days and sleepless nights of diapering. Apparently the average baby goes through over three hundred diapers in one month of life, and I added that I’m sure my son went through far more than that. Forcing us back to the…

About the Girls

The end of last week was a little rough for me. We all have stuff. All of us. And we all have triggers that take that stuff and place it in our consciousness again, bring back feelings we’d rather not feel, cause us pain and anxiety. The recent news about the large, famous family whose…

the path

18 Things That Make Me Happy

I’ve been blogging now for 137 years forever too long nearly seven years, and I’ve never had an interesting About page. Don’t get me wrong- I’ve written interesting About pages. Unfortunately, each clever fact was really a passing thought in my head somewhere between shampoo and rinse/repeat. I have never gotten around to actually writing…

5 Things You May Not Know About Me &#...

Yesterday I participated in Jen from The Simple Pen’s link-up for posts revealing five things about each writer. My twist was that rather than list five things you may not know about me, I listed ten things – only five of them true. So now it’s time for the big reveal! If you haven’t read…

5 Things You May Not Know About Me

My friend Jen over at The Simple Pen asked me to join her in writing a post about five things people typically don’t know about me. It’s been so long since I’ve blogged (see the issue of me becoming sick of myself…) that I thought I’d dive right in and give it a try. Then I…

I Got Sick of Myself

When I started blogging, my children were two and four years old. My oldest went to part-time preschool from September through May. My youngest was in diapers. My family lived a state away, and my husband was gone eleven hours a day. My entire existence looked something like this. Pictures taken by children three and…

littleamy1

Legacy

One of my primary goals as a mom is to transfer the treasures of my own upbringing to my children while protecting them from the traumas. My childhood was a mixed bag of wonderful reckless abandon and stormy turbulence. I admired and respected my hard-working mother, yet often missed her presence. I fought without fear,…

Baggy Sweatpants, Reeboks with the Strap

About two weeks ago, something strange happened. I got home from an evening out and headed to the master bedroom to change into something more comfortable before spending time with my husband. I was wearing a sweater over a tank top and after taking off the sweater, I literally said “screw it” and kept the…

Five Ways to Improve IKEA

IKEA, I know we’ve had an on-again/off-again relationship. Don’t take it personally. There was that sliver of time when I couldn’t afford your European design, flat-packed goodness. The budget of the early-20’s living together in sin demographic allows for one thing: free hand-me-downs. Then we began to make some cold hard cash and suddenly a…

Brokenness Aside

– All Sons & Daughters, “Brokenness Aside“ I once had a close friend who shared with me the many inappropriate advances of what I’m going to call The Women of the Internet. If his point was to open my eyes to the sad condition of the human heart, he succeeded. That alone would have been incredibly…

When to Pour Out and When to Step Out

My grandmother was in love with Kenny Rogers. I’m assuming she was also in love with my grandfather, but she certainly talked more about Kenny Rogers. The woman who would rather drown newborn puppies than take a dog to the vet would actually blush when she talked about Kenny Rogers. This was serious business. As…

skydiving

A Bold Prayer

Every time I meet with my money guy, Ara, he makes me listen to an explanation of the risk level of my investments. It’s his job to determine if I’m feeling risk averse or if suddenly I’ve become a new person and want to roll the dice, invest with abandon. I always listen politely and…

A Writer Without Words

If you were to go into the Drafts folder of this blog, you’d find the following: 1.   “The reality of day to day life, this challenge of just living, is nothing like what I expected. After ten years and two kids, I’m just now becoming the mom I had always hoped to be. I more often…

blueirises

Alison

Alison loved the color blue. She loved irises, her cat Tigger, writing, music, acting, dancing, Sylvia Plath, order and neatness. She loved soothing candles and homemade soup that she’d make with specific friends in mind to show them she cared. She tucked in her shirts. She wrote thank you notes on thick stationery. She tied…

accessroads

Did You Off-Ramp or Take the Access Road

(This post was originally published 5/5/2011.) The first time I visited my husband’s home state of Texas, I was baffled by the roads running parallel to every major highway.  Imagine building two of the exact same road right next to each other, one with six lanes, one with two, one moving quickly, one not as…

The Myth of the All-or-Nothing Mom

(This post was originally published 4/19/2010) “…I try to draw the line but it ends up running down the middle of me most of the time.” – Ani DiFranco I grew up in a family that gave very little thought to how other people lived. Certainly we sat around summer picnics and shared all the…

dadwithkids

Four Guys, a Girl, and a Hotel Room i...

This post was originally published October 24, 2010. And you won’t believe where we’re going… A year ago I reviewed a book calledSpilt Milk, and while I enjoyed the entire book, there was one passage in particular that never left my heart.  Author Linda Vujnov writes: “‘All men are idiots, and I married the king…

The Words We Shared

(originally published 8/1/13) When my grandfather died rather suddenly several years ago, I have to admit that I was heartbroken.  He never took me fishing or held my hand while telling me stories.  He hadn’t showered me in gifts or doted on me as some grandfathers do.  He was a man who smelled of motor…