Sometimes the perfect dress is like armor you put on to face a day filled with uncertainty… a small help when you want to hide as you walk through the inevitable surprises that might just slap your face, leaving you stunned.
Wild Love & the Wrong Dress
Maybe you had a whole map for us, made of that blue ink—
and mothering feels like bleeding,
blue drips from the detours we took around your beautifully planned masterpiece.
It’s Only a Paper Moon
As I worked on this big moon I felt it was the one thing within my control, and my contribution to creating meaning and beauty in a world that often feels as if it is wobbling off course.
A long and winding road in Tuscany painted by the author
Dream Travel
We put together a DIY writing retreat in which we will meet up at her family home in Brittany and work on our novels for a week.
Rewilding Motherhood
In Rewilding Motherhood, accepting an invitation to hold tension between what we think we want and what is currently being asked of us helps us forfeit resistance…
On Other Mothers, T-shirts, and Thankfulness
Motherhood is terrific and terrifying and wonderful and woeful and we need all the help we can get.
Who are the other mothers in your life, helping you find your way? Have you thanked them lately? May is a good time to do so.
Having a blast hiking at Beacon Rock on Mother's Day with daughter #3
A New Thought for Today
I have lots of old thoughts that circulate regularly so when a new thought flits by I notice it and see if it’s one I want to keep. Today’s thought, early on this Sunday morning Mother’s Day, was about privilege, a hot topic and one I’ve been entertaining in new ways. This new thought took me by surprise, as new thoughts often do, being new. It was a privilege to be my mother’s daughter. Many of you might think things like this quite often; I haven’t had a lot of thoughts like this, but the thought seemed beautiful to me. I decided it could stay, that I would like to think this way more. It is a thought that serves me well. After it came another I liked equally well, maybe even better: It’s a privilege to be a mother of my three daughters (three sons too, but today, as…
Paper doll Mom
Have you ever imagined a character you’re writing, or your mother, as something you might play with, some relic from your past? I’m going through my dead mother’s artifacts when I find a youthful head shot of her, colored and cutout, like the bust of a paper doll. Back before color photography, my mother painted her sepia photos with a set of Marshall’s photo-oils, bringing a rosy glow to her cheeks, shading her lips to set off her straight white teeth, dotting her eyes deep blue, and adding a touch of auburn to her hair. In the 50s, my mother was starlet pretty, a once-upon-a-time model, so the tinted head shot of her, taken before she stood next to the wrong man, is easy to imagine as an iconic paper doll I’d dress with my youngest daughter, the last one left at home. She’s 11, on the cusp of adolescence,…
Dented Love’s Saluted Image
“In my unresisting picture, all love seen All said is dented love’s saluted image” This line from beat poet, Bernadette Mayer, calls out to me from her book, Midwinter Day, written on the shortest day of the year; a mother with two small children wrote an entire book in one day. Cataloging every thought, every image and scene, beginning with waking from a dream, flitting from one moment to the next, as a mother’s life does, yet still missing many it is an epic memoir/poem streamed from what might be her subconscious. But what is dented love’s saluted image? What can it be, but motherhood? My mother, my daughters, my self This image, my mother, my three daughters, each born in different decades, and myself, calls me out too. So today, I’m putting them together. A line-up. Almost 10 years ago, before I left California, I asked my mother and…
Devious Dolls
What do you do with your mother’s doll collection after she dies? No one wanted them, except my youngest daughter, but we had to fly home from Las Vegas, and she already had too many dolls for the size of our house. “You can have one box of dolls. One small box,” I said, giving in, trying to think where we would put them when we got back to our down-sized house in the Pacific Northwest. We’d gone from 6 kids to 4, to 2, and now finally, to one; one child who still wants to play with dolls at 11. In today’s grow-up fast culture that’s got to be a good thing, right? A year and a half later, as our daughter turned 13, she asked for only one birthday gift: a dollhouse for her American Girl dolls, which are quite large. But when your quarantined daughter becomes a…