Morning quiet, the day all new, and as Kevin and I sit eating breakfast in small savored bites, sipping coffee hot and steaming, Adam comes, carrying his notebook. He lays it out purposefully on the table next to Kevin’s place, spreading flat the pages of favorite finished worksheets, pressing his finger into the paper, pointing […]

I live my life on an unpredictable sea.  I’m guessing, but I think maybe you do too. Storms come without warning, and I fly overboard, plunged beneath the swells. Mother’s Day, and I sit at the table with Adam while Kevin puts the finishing touches on lunch–the beef stroganoff that has been simmering in the […]

Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant between me and you…(Genesis 9:14,15). Twelve years old, and she asks for rainbows for her birthday. My rainbow, this reminder that God is faithful; this beauty—a whole spectrum of color, Light bent through rain until we see […]

I know how you feel. Days come when I wake up and think, I don’t want to do this. I feel like the husk of a woman, emptied. I am clay, a bowl dusty from the kiln, all scooped out by the master’s hand and cooling in the ashes.  With His fingers He has crumbled and […]

Sometimes, I’m thankful for autism. On days like Tuesday, when Riley jumps in the van and puts her fingers on my shoulder, waiting.  When I look back at her and she smiles, words tumbling out, words like these, words that cut me sharp but leave her pristine: “Mom, today someone said a bad word at […]

Thursday morning, I push a table knife right through the bottom of a glass jelly jar. Nothing shatters.  Nothing cracks.  The knife jabs in more deeply than it should.  And turning the jar upward on a diagonal, I see the flat, silver, jelly-smeared tip of my knife jutting messy through a rounded, toothless gape, all […]

Thursday morning, and it hits me. The tears unexpected, I turn the corner into our neighborhood, thankful I’ve made it well beyond the place where I left my kids before the emotion rolls over me in waves, making me gasp. Sometimes it happens that way. I’m going on about my day, and then I see […]

go to the dentist Last Thursday, I wrote it nonchalantly on the schedule, just below morning chores and breakfast. The girls already knew.  Riley pays attention to the calendar, had prayed about it the night before.  Remembering the last visit—when the dentist pulled me aside right next to Zoe and told me two of her permanent […]

Do not believe that I have mastered contentment. I pursue it…ruthlessly.  But just as I feel it graze my fingertips, it disappears, the butterfly I cannot catch, dancing just nearby. Do you struggle, like me?  Blessed beyond what you can believe and yet still somehow allowing the ridiculous sigh from your lips?  I count gifts, […]

This is the first year that Adam has been able to tell me what he wants for Christmas.  Just a few weeks ago, I stood in the kitchen wrapping my arms around my nine year old son, who laughed but squirmed with discomfort.  I kissed him on the cheek and smiled into bright blue eyes […]