When I Gave Myself Permission: A Middle-aged Stay-at-Home Mom’s Self-love Surprise

“As I was walking to the mall, I felt this palpable sense of delight and satisfaction slowly, surprisingly blooming. I was so pleased with myself, so happy at the thought of indulging with a few minutes and a few dollars just for myself. No maximizing of time and effort, no stacking of household errands and must-dos to justify the twenty-minute trip. Just letting loose for a little bit.” #permission #selflove #stayathomemom #motherhood

No Frigate or Magic Like a Book

There is something so special, so powerful about how a novel or a storybook transports you to a magical place, a different time, an imagined reality as you’re in the comforts of your home or sitting in the train for an hour-long commute. There’s something fair, just, and good about being able to visit places and meet faces with just the cost of a bus ride and a library card.

College Drop-off: A Mom’s Survival Guide

In the days and moments after I got home, I started to allow myself to feel everything, to stop beating myself up for crying at the airport, to accept my new normal as a wife and mother in a half-empty nest, a woman with a third of her heart living halfway across the world.

To a Calm and Meaningful (Pandemic) Christmas

How do we celebrate Christmas now during this unusual and unrehearsed time of our lives? How do we go about this holiday season that’s traditionally filled with happy, colorful places and lovely, familiar faces, with exchanges of hugs and kisses as well as food and gifts but is now expected to be tempered by pandemic health and safety protocols, by sadness and grief over personal and practical losses?

What’s Left Behind After the College Send-off

“It had been a great blessing to be a college parent: to witness how this beautiful, strong and capable child is growing into her own young adult self, to have the means to give her this opportunity to study and live abroad and to broaden her horizon as well as my own, to entrust this messy and exciting part of our lives to God.”