Posts from the “Love” Category

The Ones That Stick

Posted on June 3, 2014

I am guilty, from time to time, of trying to be an architect of memories, thinking that if I arrange the art project just so or if I plan the adventure out with care, then I can slip moments in time in each girl’s heart that they’ll remember for the rest of their lives. I work at creating these moments like a puzzle, turning ideas in my mind, sorting options, and then putting my head down until I make the pieces fit. The weight of wanting, needing, to nurture memories can be tremendous. Every once in a while something happens and I am completely awestruck by how the girls are memory tenders themselves. “Hey mom, can you wake me up early to work on the…

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A Light Touch

Posted on April 12, 2014

  Sean and I wrote a post back in November, which we shared here a few weeks ago. It was a post that, as one commenter wrote, did not resolve itself. I’ve struggled with how, when, and what to respond with in this space. We knew we were running the risk of judgement, maybe even putting people off with touching on such a delicate topic.  I’ve been deeply humbled by the private messages that I have received from men and women who felt a connection to our words. Wisdom, regrets, anger, they all came through with unflinching honesty. Sean took serious heat in some of the comments on Huffington Post and even more in threads that grew on twitter. A few jabs came at me pretty hard…

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Same Window, New Views

Posted on March 23, 2014

I’ve read two house-related posts by Rebecca that have had me thinking a lot about marriage, family, and the houses that play the stage for both. The window up there in the picture is a storm window from our first house. It’s on the eastern wall of a treehouse that we built for the girls. It is brittle and yet it has endured more seasons than I ever will. It is a view and a reflection, the care that we took in saving it and the way that we gave it a new use, offer hope. We bought our first house late in the summer of 2003. We were newlyweds and had already lived in 3 rentals together in Framingham, Watertown, and Saratoga. To say…

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Making Passes and Taking Hits

Posted on March 16, 2014

This post is a first for me and I thought it needed a brief introduction. I usually keep marriage along the periphery of the stories I tell. The silos of parenting and life are not as concise as they can seem in storytelling, they aren’t silos at all; they’re brush strokes sharing space on one canvas. Marriage, two sides, a post in two parts—first, what you’ve come to expect here, my words and emotional take on something that happened; second, words from Sean, his perspective on the same thing. It’s personal and revealing.  Our kitchen is at the center of everything, not because of an open floor plan, or even because it’s “that place where everyone gathers,” our kitchen is at the center of everything because…

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Something Else

Posted on March 2, 2014

Dinner was late; my plan to bake a chicken was thwarted by a conversation that ran long. Doing the what-to-make scramble, I grabbed a package of ground beef from the freezer, a box of linguine noodles and fixings for a halfway-homemade sauce. “Can we do the beds?” I asked. Sean looked at me, he was tired, but he nodded. “Yep, let’s do it.” We’d agreed to deconstruct the bunk beds so that the girls’ room could get refreshed and so that maybe, just maybe, Ave would be able to make her bed. The top bunk, as Bethany can attest, is challenging on the best day, debilitatingly maddening on the worst. “I bumped my head and my finger is bleeding.” Ave and I have both…

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