Posts tagged “Confidence

A Good Fit

Posted on July 12, 2014

There are some milestones that I have breathlessly watched for—first steps, “mom”, reading, riding a bike. I rejoice as the girls achieve them and some times find myself a bit crestfallen at how much they make me ache. Over the past few months I’ve realized that we’ve reached a new one and it terrifies me. All three girls are sitting on an axis that is tilting them toward a new realm that involves unabashed worship of kids older than they are. I can see it in the trance-like effect of movies, the absolute silence that comes over them when we pass a group of teenagers, the way their necks crane when we pass the neighbor’s house that is always peppered with boys playing basketball…

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That isn’t me

Posted on May 4, 2014

I don’t like to think of myself as being susceptible to envy, but I am, in fact I’m really good at feeling envy. I like to think of myself as being accepting and generous, but it’s there, the green eyed monster. In spanish they call it envidia. Isn’t that nice, almost like a name? Envidia. It reminds me of an evil character in one of the loathsome Barbie books that found its way onto our bookshelves. I have often separated my envious side in my mind as being a sort of alter ego. I’m not really envious, I just have moments of being Envidia. Whatever gets you through, right? It turns out that as I travel through 40 I am more ready to see…

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A Poem of Self

Posted on April 13, 2014

Seventy inches, maybe 69, all mine hazel eyes, moody hair, constellations of freckles this upper lip that gets caught on a tooth skin that erupts in chills at the sound of a stretched cotton ball a throat that tightens and eyes that sting more often as the years pass, sometimes from joy other times not I’m getting better with not with not fair and not my problem not like others and not ready yet   The gift of these years is this my 70 inches, or maybe 69, finally fit I touch each one, rather than shrink from I know the outline and color my edges I can stay in the lines or bleed beyond the reflexive snarl of my twenties—still there but the…

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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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Self, Easy

Posted on January 28, 2014

I don’t think that getting older is hard; I think that what’s hard is that as each year passes the inevitability of pain gets closer. Incremental change happens in life no matter what I do to prevent it—wrinkles, thrown-out backs, an inability to listen to 18 year olds sing about heartbreak and life without rolling my eyes. All of these things add up and I realize that I know people with terminal illnesses, friends who’ve buried children, and romantics who no longer wear a ring on their left hand. These are the things that begin to weigh on my face, not the wrinkles. It’s an intimacy with heartache and the idea that unfair is really just a moment, an excruciating, unwelcome, out-of-your-countrol moment. Unfair is a beginning and…

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