Posts tagged “Briar

Keep Your Head When…

Posted on February 22, 2013

A little over five years ago I was writing about reckoning heartbreak, as a moment in time refused to be ignored and I had to reevaluate what I was doing as a parent. The decisions I was making in the interest of having it all were taking a toll on all of us in ways that just weren’t worth the effort. Here I am, smack dab in the middle of another school vacation week trying to manage the things that were scheduled before vacation was on my radar, coping with the always crippling guilt of not feeling a desperate pull to take time off of work, and another intersection has appeared, virtually out of thin air. It’s funny because I’ve try to teach the girls…

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Stillness

Posted on September 10, 2012

Parenting reveals how often you move or, more specifically how often you didn’t move before. Your understanding of motion and stillness is forever altered. You bring your baby home and there is constant motion—scurrying for burp cloths, clanging about for gum gel, scrambling for a wipe. Then they are toddlers and your jerky movements are to swipe the lit candle from their reach, moving the cushion to break their fall, and swooping in to grab them before they actually kiss the back end of the strange dog. By the time grade school comes they are getting so fast that your movements are sometimes to keep up and other times it’s to hide the emotion when they say, “I’ve got it. I don’t need you,…

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Sleepless

Posted on September 23, 2011

“I can’t sleep.” It floats down from their room often; the voice behind it is always Briar’s. It’s never Avery, for her sleep comes like breathing. Sometimes Finley chimes in that she can’t sleep either, but she doesn’t mean it. Finley chooses not to sleep. She squeezes a bit more out of the day and then sleeps. Our Briar, though, she really can’t sleep. The nightly ministrations of lotion and brow stroking, storytelling and singing only deflect from the eventual struggle to sleep. Last night when she called, “Mom and Dad, I just can’t sleep,” we looked at each other and knew. It was 9:05, they’d been in bed for an hour and half. “Come here, Briar,” Sean called. “What?” she asked. “Come down…

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My Sweet Chaos

Posted on July 22, 2011

The girls are home. I cried while they were gone. A lot. I walked past their bedrooms trying not to get caught up in the twisted sheets and discarded clothes all wrapped up in their summery scent of cut grass, lake water and cheesey-snack dust. Then the first morning without them came and the room pulled me in. I ran my fingers along the blocks they’d connected. “Mom, did you see how we made rooms and how the ones sticking out by the planet come together and make a chair? You make chairs with blocks, so we did it like you. Do you love it most of all?” I stood inside the block kingdom and let the sunlight that had drawn me in wash…

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Magic from bits

Posted on October 29, 2010

Once upon a time I made a Halloween costume for Briar. I do not know how to sew, I cannot read a pattern, I don’t even flirt with trying a Martha Stewart project. Yet some part of me felt like I needed, at least once, to make a costume by my own hand. There were pinpricks and muttered profanities, supportive suggestions that maybe it was unnecessary from Sean and then, it was done. It was fanciful and twinkly with pastels and jewel tones, cotton and tulle. Looking back I realize it was very much like Briar. We joke that she is girlie and 100% Disney princess obsessed, but that is selling her short. She is, in my opinion, everything a princess should be—nurturer, ham,…

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