The White Oak Tavern, a dimly lit but bustling restaurant adjacent to NYU’s campus and close to our hotel, is brimming with a cacophony of sound. Loud talkers, clanking forks and knives against white plates, music that is more foreground than back. It’s Friday night at 9:30, an unheard of time to eat dinner at home, but perfectly acceptable here. We’re in the city for a short weekend trip, not touring colleges like we probably should, but instead planning our Saturday over pub fries with a trio of dips, buffalo wings, and a Caesar salad topped with three filleted sardines.

The two olders have a list, mostly inspired by TikTok’s shaken matchas and street photography ops and their drive to shop indie artist booths at Chelsea Market and the streets of SoHo until they literally drop. The younger wants xiao long bao—pork soup dumplings—dipped in ginger, soy, and black vinegar from the mouth-watering Din Tai Fung. And besides pedicabs through Central Park, which makes all three grimace when I suggest it, I aim to please.

At first glance, I’m smiling, nodding, designing the day around their ideals. At first glance, this weekend isn’t about me, but I’d be lying if I didn’t let you look closer. Of course it’s about me as much as, if not more, it’s about the kids.

I don’t love this notion that, to spend time with teenagers, we have to “pin them down” or “catch them while we can” or “tether them,” yet getting quality moments with my teens these days requires more effort than it used to. And quality time has been my love language since the beginning of my time, sitting in a waterlogged diaper in a giant letter K on the beach, as my dad carved the rest of my name in the sand with a plastic yellow shovel.

A buzz of anticipation builds among the four of us as we sample each other’s main courses and swoon over the chimichurri on K’s steak. Soon C and his friend are absorbed in their own conversation, out of earshot from my side of the table. A few moments later, after K and I both admit we’re full and lean a little farther back in our chairs, I feel my younger son’s hand slip into mine.

It catches me off guard because these moments are fewer and farther between these days. Snuggles on the sofa watching MasterChef, kiss-kiss face and a wave as he pops out of the car in the morning for school, bright eyes connecting with mine as he tells me about his latest block print in art. I can’t remember the last time he took my hand on his own accord. It was probably months ago, likely in a scene kind of like this one.

My eyes well, and the candlelight blurs into a flickering pool. I want to snap a photo of the moment, to return to it later, but instead I squeeze his hand three times.

I. Love. You.

When my kids were younger, I didn’t think much about the future. A combination of survival and naivety, I lived very much in the present moment. The old adage about mouths to feed rang true back then: three healthy meals, multiple snacks in reusable cups, and years spent nourishing them from my own body. Pumping so much breastmilk in the wee hours of the night, I swore I could hear the pump’s mechanics chanting, get your groove on, get your groove on, get your groove on.

I barely registered the cliché I heard often: they grow up so fast. Maybe a lot of people with young children ignore it, not from a place of denying reality, but because when you can barely pee uninterrupted, it’s nearly impossible to imagine a world where your kids build lives of their own.

Now it seems all I think about is the future, and what form we’ll carry into it.

Lately both of my teenagers have been reminiscing about the rigatoni with red sauce their dad used to make on their boys’ nights, on the nights I was inside my first queer relationship discovering more about who I was. Their faces go open and bright. It’s not the pasta they miss. It’s the feeling of those nights, a ritual that made them feel safe.

There were plenty of nights when I was the one home, making salmon patties at their request, snuggling up on the sofa after dinner to watch The Great British Baking Show. But a lot of our adventures also involved my former partner. It is difficult to realize that some of my kids’ childhood memories that involve me might also be laced with pain, because so many of them also involve a person they loved and lost.

Now, I want—need—time when it’s just the three of us. Not to replace what we had, but to make new memories and to change alongside them. To feel our rhythms synch. To laugh, bicker, disagree, get lost, try new things, and learn about each other. I promise I’m not a complete pile of slush, but my time with them, alone as mom, feels important for our connection.

Important for me.

After dinner at the tavern, we’re on a mission for dessert and photo op number one and we cross through Washington Square Park, weaving through clusters of college students and pungent smells of weed. When we reach the edge of the park and pass through the white arches, C says, “I’ve never in my life experienced so much smoke in one area.” We glance back at the scene, clouds of white pluming from huddled groups talking and laughing. I think about my college house, the one I lived in senior year, and how some nights it would fill with smoke as we sat in a circle on the floor, eating flavored macadamia nuts and debating chocolate-covered or garlic. I urge myself not to wonder whether C is disgusted or mesmerized by the scene.

Coffee and mint chip gelato split with four spoons on the sidewalk and then on to Cornelia Street, the street that inspired one of Taylor Swift’s saddest songs. I don’t know the song well, but later discover it’s a song she wrote inside a relationship, feeling happiness and love while anticipating its loss. C and his friend pose under the lamp post while K, at their request, spams photos, holding down the shutter so they’ll have plenty to choose from.

A few passersby in their early twenties, likely drunk at this hour and familiar with the photo stop, jump into the frame, mouths open, tongues out, hands raised. In this moment, under the street light, my sixteen-year-old’s innocence is illuminated, spotlighted in time, and I imagine if the entire world stopped, what would his monologue be? What words would he use to describe this juncture in his life?

We decide midnight is a good time to turn in and meander back toward our hotel. I notice the restaurant next door to our hotel, the one I’d visited last winter, escaping a single-digit cold and taking my first sip of an orange wine gifted by a neighboring table, has closed. Its name is still written in elegant white script across the window, but the space is empty except for a tower of chairs stacked in one corner. I am not entirely sure why I feel sad, other than vacancy has a tendency to elicit pangs of grief. The reminder, once again, that the only constant is that everything changes.

The only constant is that everything changes.

I find this immensely humbling, more than a little scary, and wildly liberating, and I return to it again and again on my lifelong quest to understand impermanence. Choosing a more nuanced, complex expression of family over the years wasn’t a swift obliteration of the box. Shifting into an identity more of my own is a process that just keeps unfolding. So why would this chapter of life be any different? Yes, there will be inevitable change; yes, there will be grief; yes, I will be okay; and yes, sometimes I won’t.

For now, I want to hold the future more lightly, so I can show up for what’s in front of me.

This city’s energy is an invitation: Stay in the flow.

Walking next to K on the sidewalk lined with full trash bags stacked at the curb, I shift my focus to C and his friend, ten paces ahead, and call out, “This is our hotel!” before they pass it by.

A small, fluffy, tan, chubby creature with large paws scampering across the trail. My mind went: someone’s dog? No. Coyote? No. Fox? No. Holy F***! Mountain lion! A cub to be exact, which means that somewhere in the dry autumn brush and rotting leaves, she was watching.

I immediately turned around, lifted my hiking poles into the air to make myself larger, and hiked away from the area, turning back every now and then because I know a mountain lion usually attacks a human from behind, lunging for the vulnerable back of the neck. But here’s the thing—given the mountain lion’s keen sense of sight and smell for hunting, the mama could have done whatever she wanted with me. Yet all was quiet aside from my breath and the clacking of my poles as I banged them over my head.

When an animal chooses to reveal itself to a human, I do not take this lightly. We are visitors on their land. For all the times I’ve hiked through the forest, which is many, many, many, I’ve never before seen a mountain lion let alone a cub. For the briefest moment, I watched the cub do a little pounce and scamper before it saw me and ran into the brush. The lightness of its play juxtaposed with the fact that one day it will become one of the most formidable beings in the forest awed me on the trek back toward my car.

The little cub was having what Brandi Carlile would call a You Without Me moment. If you haven’t yet heard the song, it’s about the bittersweet reality that our children grow up, leave the nest, and become their own individuals. I saw Brandi perform this song both in Nashville at the end of August and at Red Rocks a few weekends ago, and both times it was the one song in her set that made me weep.

As a mother, I get to witness this happening, not all at once, but little by little. It started with his first breath, no longer relying on my body for sustenance. And then comes the movement, the rolling, crawling, walking, scampering away. All of the I want to do it myselfs. The mismatched and backwardsly worn clothes. The first Halloween where he doesn’t want my homemade hot-glued costumes anymore. The first theater audition prep when we don’t run the lines together. The trip to Europe over the summer with a friend. The homecoming dance where beforehand no parents are taking photos. The set of wheels he will gain and the car conversations I will lose in just a few days.

My older son turns 16 on Sunday. The child who made me mother. And I know this list might sound like I’m depressed about it—of course there’s grief. But holy shit, I am so proud of this human.

Yesterday, C came home from school and talked about a debate in his AP Gov class. The debate was about the constitution of the United States. And there at my kitchen island where we’ve gathered for every party of his life to sing Happy Birthday from the highchair to the stool, I listened to my son articulate, advocate, and effing nail his point of view. It was this beautiful mix of all of the conversations we’ve had over the years combined with his unique and individual experiences and perspectives about immigration, systemic racism, and the inequalities that sit at the foundation of our country. A You Without Me moment that gives me hope for our collective future.

This morning I realized that alongside my two teenagers, I’m having more of my own You Without Me moments these days. Learning, playing, growing toward what this second half of life will bring. It’s me who feels like the mountain lion cub in some ways. Not yet inhabiting my full scope of power. Not yet able to see my own formidable nature, or how or where it wants to show up. I don’t mean the formidable of attack and intimidation, but the kind that co-creates positive change, that refuses to look away. The kind that takes what it knows about pain and transmutes it into something that helps.

The best thing about You Without Me moments is the witnessing. As mother, I have the privilege of being proximal to my kids’ growth. And they get to witness mine (even though I’ve cringed a lot over the years reckoning with their third row seats to certain aspects of my journey.) Underscoring all of it is a massive amount of trust. Trust that they can handle what life throws their way. Trust that I’ve provided enough of a foundation for them to launch. Trust in the throughlines of connection. Trust in the space and freedom to pounce and scamper as we figure ourselves out, no matter our age.

Though I’ve given a lot of myself to mothering over the last 16 years, I never lost myself to motherhood. I always made sure to stay rooted in my identities in my work, friendships, relationships, and hobbies. And despite this, I’ve also built my days around my kids: school pick-ups, turkey meatball soup at their request for dinner, keeping my ringer on if the older one will be out late, the way my phone vibrates when Life360 tells me they’ve arrived home. The more You Without Me moments they have, the easier it would be to collapse into fear of what will be left. And now a reframe my therapist would be proud of: What if it’s not what will be left, but what will have more room to expand?

When I heard C’s heartbeat for the first time, I was 29-years-old and ten weeks pregnant, laying back on the midwife’s exam table. The wand pressed against the side of my low belly and slid in the ultrasound jelly toward midline. I strained to hear it amidst the static. The midwife readjusted the wand lower, just above my hip bone, angled down. And there it was. Rapidly whooshing through a crackling speaker, my baby’s pumping heart, faster than I expected, racing toward me.

I remember his Kindergarten orientation. How he released my hand in front of a shelf of peeling and faded book bindings in the library and stepped into the care of the Kindergarten teacher who floated with him to a table with pencil-shaped name tags. C uncapped a blue Sharpie and wrote his name slowly on the tag, in all caps. He spent the next hour touring the school and rotating through the specials—art, PE, and music. When he returned, his smile was so wide that his white baby teeth showed on both rows. When I felt his hand slip back into mine, I understood how fast it would all go.

After finishing my hike on Wednesday morning I stopped by the Ranger’s Cottage to report my mountain lion sighting. There on a display table was a full grown taxidermic mountain lion with a little placard full of facts about the animal. The one that caught my eye was that mountain lions can lunge up to 40 feet.

40 feet!

The approximate distance I stood from the cub on the trail.

Had she wanted to, the mama could have fiercely protected her cub. But what are we really doing when we protect our children, especially when there’s no real threat, just a millennial hiker clacking her poles in the air? Somewhere in that impulse, we are also attempting to protect ourselves. Control the narrative. Prevent any potential loss. I’ve done it, and I’m sure I’ll do it again, but I think the real lesson of 16 is that You Without Me doesn’t have to mean complete separation. It just means staying close enough to them on the trail but far enough away to let them walk it.

We arrive to the Airbnb at dark, after I follow directions to a parking lot where we find a designated spot assigned to our rental. It’s directly in front of an old bar called The Village, with dilapidated dark wooden paneling, the letters displaying its name in faded yellow.

This is creepy, my older son, C says.

This is a place I used to go on my summers home from college, I announce, slinging my backpack over my shoulder and yanking my roller bag across bumpy asphalt.

He raises his eyebrows. Eww, he says.

I don’t tell him he’s right. How the place smelled like a wet sock and the lighting inside matched the yellow tinge of the letters on the outside. I don’t tell him how I used to down Miller Lites and dance with boys I didn’t find attractive or kind. How I gave them my time, my body anyway. C is almost 16. Just a few years away from my romping days at The Village.

Our suitcases rumble and thump across the sidewalk which is under construction and torn apart to reveal snaking tree roots that were turned to stone in the name of urbanization. When we make it to the front door of the row home, I fumble with the keyless entry in the dark. Finally hearing the mechanical clicks and whirs of the door unlocking, we push our way into the entry and take the first looks.

The first looks of places are always exciting. We usually wait for any stragglers before touring the rental, together making our way through the space to choose bedrooms, ooo and ahh at features we do not have at home.

Tonight, the boys stand still as the living room opens like a mouth around us.

No one says anything for what feels like several minutes but is probably just a total of a few seconds. I survey my children’s faces and note wide, scanning eyes, slight grimaces, and hands that are still clutching suitcase handles.

Ummm, C says. This place is definitely haunted.

Suddenly everyone is in motion. K is counting the number of chairs on the first floor. Fourteen! There’s even a chess board set up like the ghosts are going to play tonight, he says.

Can we go back to Moppy’s? I’ll sleep on her floor, C says.

A gold velvet curtain is draped across the dusty front window of the rental, and when I peek behind it, I see that this used to be a storefront.

No, no, it’s fine, I say. I think about what drew me to the place as I scrolled Airbnb. Why at that time I thought my Gen Alpha kids would like a historic vibe.

We end up in the same bed that night, all of us little logs in a row.

The next day after a dramatic retelling of our arrival the night prior, my mother shares that my great grandmother grew up just a few houses down from our Airbnb on Duke Street. While this news only verifies for the boys that our rental is haunted, I imagine that if it is, Josephine is our protector. Josephine who perhaps visited the Airbnb when it was a store, begging for a peppermint stick at checkout. Josephine who watched her husband get hit by a car while catching the trolley for work. Josephine who was pregnant with my grandfather as she witnessed her husband die. Josephine who allegedly donated Charles Lindbergh’s flight jacket (a gift given to her brother in appreciation for his journalistic account of Lindbergh’s flight) when she cleaned out the attic of the summer cottage at Mount Gretna.

I wonder, Am I the only one of my generation to still speak her name?

It is my way as a writer to record keep. To keep saying the names of the people who came before, to keep mulling over their stories and how they intersect with my own. I worry that my father will get lost after me, that because my children didn’t know him, they won’t speak his name, tell stories about him, breathe life into his being. Perhaps this is part of why I write about him so much.

That night, I lie in bed next to C, who is already curled on his side asleep, and think about the ghosts of my past. Tonight it’s not only those who came before but also all the past versions of me that come alive when I’m here. This paradox—dead but alive—is haunting in and of itself.

Hitting midlife means there are more ghosts than ever before, each of them representing the reality that nothing ever stays the same. And just as I record keep my ancestors, I am devoted to documenting the narratives of all the girls and women I once was.

In Pennsylvania, I’m awake to all of the scenes that surround me and trigger memories laden with sensory detail. The Pine View Dairy with the cows who will lick your ice cream if you get too close. The weathered old barns with Amish dresses drying on clotheslines. The open fields where I used to watch white-tailed deer prance through the corn. The eggshell blue house where my babysitter lived. The tummy drops on the Whee! Road. The oak tree at 39 Whipporwill that offered shade to a green plastic kiddie pool and two little girls with waterlogged diapers taking turns on the froggy slide. The field hockey field, track, and Lions Club pool where I spent most of my teenage life. The pond at Willow Valley where my first boyfriend and I broke up on a bench eating General Tso’s chicken and fried rice from styrofoam containers. The hike at Tucquan Glen where I fell in love with the natural world. The rundown bar where I lost sight of my worth. The bedroom where I watched my father die, and ten years later, the driveway where we launched bottle rockets into the sky and the boys danced in his memory with sparklers on his memorial bench by the golf course.

It feels self-centered to wonder and worry about my own name. What will become of me in three generations time when I’m a just ghost? Will I be deduced to a few dramatic stories, or will I disappear like many of those who came before? And does it really matter in the end, about the real end?

I drive my children past my childhood home of 24 years each time we’re back in Lancaster. They are generous listeners, somehow registering this ritual as important to me. The narration is mostly the same, with some variation. Maybe a new story interjected as the car crawls up the road. This was my bus stop. I still remember sitting on that rock waiting for the bus 208. This was my friend’s house, and we’d put on fashion shows in that bay window. One time she wrote to Brad Pitt and checked her mailbox for weeks hoping he’d write back. This was my other friend’s house that got struck by lightning and caught on fire. We used to play under those pine trees. This was my house.

I take it in, all these years later, blue siding instead of the color of coffee with a heavy pour of cream, weeds overgrown that would kill my father if he wasn’t already dead, my dormer bedroom window shrouded in curtains. The oak that started a mere twig in the ground, when my parents, barely 25-years-old, planted it, is now, almost 50 years later, broad at the waist with arms spread wide.

On the morning that we check out of the Airbnb, K swears the chess pieces have moved and C is already at my mom’s having refused to stay with us the night before. As I walk down the sidewalk that’s already radiating its heat, my suitcase bumping along, I glance down the street in the direction of Josephine’s house. I conjure the only image I have of her, borrowed from a portrait photograph of her, and silently thank her for keeping us safe, if she had to. Maybe I will do this one day for my great-granddaughter—not in a creepy, haunting way, but as a quietly present and protective force because I know that love is the one thing the ever-changing tides of time cannot touch.

Over the past few months, I’ve been consciously working on my connection with my younger son, K. He turned 13 in April, and a lot of life changed for him between the ages of 11 and 13. He lost a parent-figure, started the awkward middle school years, lost many friends to other schools, and watched his brother expand into his teenage high school world.

K and I have always connected through cooking and baking (the latest a peach pie!), but I was ready to find something else for us to share, and he started talking (a lot) about fishing.

This was a natural entry point for me. My grandfather had taken me fishing on the Conestoga River, and I’d reeled up numerous little flopping panfish we called sunnies while he puffed on his cigar in his retro lawn chair with woven turquoise and blue plastic. “That’s it, kid!” he’d say, hoisting himself from the chair to assist.

With family friends who owned a boat in Avalon, New Jersey, I crested the waves of the salty, cold bay to fish for summer flounder and striped bass. We’d bring the fish back to the beach house and cook them on the grill with lemon and butter wrapped in foil.

And, in addition to my fishing history, I had the camper van, my adventure wagon, but my children had been slower to warm-up to it, probably because I called it mine versus ours from the beginning. I knew it might be a way in for K to fall in love with the van, (not really the van but the opportunities she provides), like I had.

K had a strong opinion about where to go for our initial fishing gear shopping trip. And so that’s how we landed at a massive Cabela’s in Thorton, about 40 minutes from home. The amount of taxidermy in the store is wild, and we joked that a spin off of Night at the Museum, called Night at Cabela’s could have great entertainment potential. In the fishing section, we met Jim, a short, white-haired man, dressed in all khaki, with metal-rimmed glasses, who knew exactly the supply we needed for reel and spin fishing. Shiny metal spinning lures. Rooster tails. Powerbait and salmon eggs. How to rig a rod for bait fishing versus lure fishing. How to use a fly on a spinner rod. What kind of fish swim in the lakes we were planning to visit this summer and the best ways to catch them. Jim was kind and a wealth of information, and when we parted ways with all of our swag in a fishing net slung over K’s shoulder, he said, “You’re lucky. You’ve got a mom who will take you fishing.”

Maybe K feels lucky. I’m not sure. Maybe he will someday. Regardless, I’ve always appreciated the parts of myself that buck against the patriarchy by bending traditional gender roles. Being one of two women in our town to coach Little League for three years. Taking my solo hikes, even in the dead of winter. Womaning the grill and camping so often my process is a well-oiled one. I was excited to don a trucker hat and cutoffs to go fishing with my kid.

The road opened up in front of us as we drove the short distance toward Golden Gate State Park’s Kriley pond to test our luck at some trout fishing for a two-day stay. Sitting beside one another on camp chairs plunked on the side of the pond, K’s hands tied a knot we’d learned on YouTube. 7 times over the line, through the eyelet, wet the line with spit, and pull hard. I’ve stopped trying to remember its name. Cinch, I think. Fishing line is slippery and translucent, making the knot-tying not really a cinch at all, but K caught on fast, as he does many things in this skill arena.

The first lure yielded no fish, not even a bite, nothing. We switched to fluorescent pink Powerbait that smells synthetically fishy but agreed it felt like a bribe. Changing the rod setup was a chore, but it had a pulse to it, that energy of anticipation of a code about to crack. If we could just find the lure the fish would pay attention to…

We broke lines, lost lures, fumbled in our bulky gloves to use a hemostat properly when we caught the two fish we reeled in that evening. The first one I couldn't save; the hook had gone too deep, and I worked at it too long, too clumsy. Stricken, I said a prayer for the fish then left it in the meadow grass for another animal’s sustenance. In that moment, I knew if I kept fishing I'd have to learn proper release.

We stayed for many hours that first night, doing things novice fishers do, each of us catching one rainbow trout and finally giving in to the dark. Back at the campsite, I stood by as sous chef on the asparagus as K, in his headlamp, grilled two filets to a perfect medium on the cast iron, basting them with his homemade chive butter he’d prepped at home the day before. We ate them drenched in pools of A1 on blue plastic plates sitting side by side in the van’s backseat.

That night I dreamed of the fish in the meadow, still there, facing me. I woke with a tightness in my belly. A foreboding sense that perhaps we should hit a pause button on this hobby until Mama could get her shit together.

But the first thing K said when he woke was, “I can’t wait to fish again tonight.”

In the daylight, the campsite was familiar. It was the spot my former partner and I had taken the kids for years, the first weekend of every summer, a kind of tradition. When I asked K if he remembered it, he said, "Sort of." I've often wondered how much of the loss I carry is mine, and how much of it belongs to my kids. K sometimes recalls memories that are meshed with others. A place mismatched with a situation. The wrong people present for a real moment in time. Memory is strange that way.

K was the first to ditch the gloves on the second night. “We need to wet our hands because the fish have a protective layer,” he told me. “I’ll do the releases.” Agreeing that lure fishing was just more fun compared to using bait, we tried several spinners out. Finally, one caught their attention, and it was gold and yellow with red polka dots, small, spinning underwater, and stealing fragments of light from the setting sun.

We went from nothing to a fish every few casts, like we’d found the password.

K knelt at the water’s edge, hands already wet before the fish even cleared the surface, and worked the hook free in seconds, no fumbling this time, no hemostat, just his bare fingers moving with a swift and gentle approach. He’d hold each one under the surface for a second before letting go, its silver scales glimmering, like he was giving it a moment to remember. Maybe there was some benefit to those screen time minutes I’d added on YouTube that morning, but tutorials can only go so far. K had an intuition that was undeniable.

We photographed the first few, cheered, high-fived. If one of us caught one, the other ran to assist with the net. Twelve trout, by the time the sky was orange against the tree line then blue, pink, purple. And this night, every fish swam off the way they’d come.

Later, after a salmon dinner we pretended was a fish we caught, we laid in bed marveling at our success before turning on Bruce Almighty on my laptop, the perks of van Wifi. A nearby fisher at the pond that night asked us what we were fishing with. Unwarranted but satisfying flattery. I gave him one of the lures of which I had a few in my tackle box. As he departed with many thanks, he looked at K and said, “You were a fish factory tonight!”

The way my kid smiled…

Writing this now, I looked up the spiritual meaning of fish. Abundance. Renewal. It’s almost too convenient. But finding ways in with K has felt like its own kind of code cracking, learning what makes him laugh, what motivates him, what causes him to withdraw or open up, where his trust starts and where it's still being built.

Dear Readers,

This fall, I’m co-facilitating Embodied Alchemy: Weaving Collective Wisdom and Writing, a women’s writing circle for anyone moving through their own version of a life transition, a becoming, a season that refuses to resolve neatly. It’s a space to write what’s true instead of what’s been scripted, and to explore feelings that sometimes seem to contradict each other without needing to reconcile them.

We’re starting local, with five monthly Sunday sessions here in Boulder beginning in October, and we’d love to have you. If you feel called, or know someone who might be interested, send me a message, and I’ll share more details. <3

With gratitude,

Keri

How that sharp point bit the paper, the lines of my letters so crisp, the marks intentional and clean. It felt powerful and sounded precise. There was no eraser on the end of this pencil, so the ideas gripped the page. As a budding writer, this was exhilarating. What I had to say felt like it mattered, like I could sit up taller and claim my space as the author.

I remember wanting a fresh tip as soon as the one I was using became the slightest bit dull. Maybe it was because there were ten or so tips readily available and that knowing instigated my obsessive changing. This went against my typical pencil-use behavior. With the Ticonderoga #2s, I didn’t mind a slightly dulled point or how the pencil glided across the paper with a soft swishing sound.

The moment that I’d go to change out the tip on my push pencil and discover the next one was actually my first one, that I’d lost count and the point was already dull, was the moment the pencil lost its appeal.

When there was more, I wanted more. And when the tips ran out, the pencil had no use.

Lately, I’ve been struggling to write on this platform. The not-knowing-what's-safe-to-say, the self-censorship, the ideas that feel too live to touch. Initially, writing here was like writing with the sharp points on my push pencil. The ideas grabbed the page, and I allowed myself to crack open around my most recent middle space, the ending of my former ten-year relationship.

What’s strange is that I’ve written and submitted a few pieces for publication in the past month or so. Like the validation of an external publication saying yes outweighs the anxiety. This Substack is just my own publication. Publishing myself here is saying yes to myself, and that is the hardest yes of all.

There is no gatekeeper, no editor, no publisher to tell me my work has earned its place. It’s just me both asking and answering the question.

I'm in Japan right now (more on that later), and today I visited Fushimi Inari Taisha, a Shinto shrine in Kyoto. One of the rituals available to visitors involves a small rock on a pedestal: you make a wish, then lift it. If the rock is lighter than expected, your wish may come true with ease. If heavier, the path will be difficult.

I stood in line behind a few other tourists until it was my turn. The rock was smooth, dark, about the size of a cantaloupe. Placing both hands on the coolness of the rock, I closed my eyes. I’m going to tell you my wish because this was not my birthday. I wished for self-trust. And then, I opened my eyes and lifted. The rock was extraordinarily heavy.

I laughed a bit aloud, alone, as I moved out of position and let the person behind me to their destiny. Of course it was heavy. This is part of my lifelong work, to trust myself. Just because the path has already been difficult and I’ve put in my time, doesn’t mean it gets easier. It just means I know what hard feels like, and I keep showing up anyway.

Maybe there’s a part of me that’s a glutton for punishment. Or maybe in my wildness I was just born to seek more. The next challenge, the next opening, the next thing that asks something of me.

I have to trust my own judgment about what's ready, what's true, what's safe enough to both say and share in my writing. I find it somewhat amusing that the space I created to explore and grapple with the middle place has become one of its own. When I was a girl writing with the sharpness of a new point on my push pencil, I felt as fierce as if I were adept with a sword.

Where is she now?

I hadn’t been able to find my father’s eyes since his cancer diagnosis five months prior, and today was no different, his blue eyes dull and fixed somewhere in space. My mother and my sister sat with us, waiting.

My 57-year-old father needed help walking to the exam room; I can’t remember if one of us rolled the oxygen tank, but it’s likely, trying to keep it steady so the nasal cannula didn’t slide from his nostrils. By this point, he was void of both kidneys, every-other-day dialysis keeping him alive since his removal surgery, and had recently learned that his cancer had metastasized to his liver and lungs.

While we waited for the doctor, I wanted to cut into the silence with, Dad, we don’t have to do this, but instead, I was quiet, an accomplice in his attempt to hold hope captive, his rib cage a jail cell to his pleading heart.

I wanted to walk backwards to find him, to find my father whose blue eyes sparkled, who took us sledding, who cut farm-grown strawberries and stirred them with sugar until syrupy for the airy angel food cake, who brought us up to the tallest water slide at Dorney Park under a blazing summer sun, who salted his pizza crust and ate it salt-side-down, who stood on the sidelines of every single one of my field hockey games, whether home or away.

The doctor was an old man, white haired, white bearded, white coated, like someone had assembled him from the idea of a doctor. He leaned against the counter and looked at my father in a way I couldn’t quite discern. He directly met his eyes, but there was something performative about it, something that felt off.

There is a drug, he said. Sutent. Chemo-like, but not chemo. It could give you several more years.

My father’s hands were folded in his lap, those tender hands I’ve since mapped and memorized, and I watched his face open the way it does for hunger, not for food, but for life. All he needed, amidst the fear and pain, was hope for a few more years, and he said, Yes.

While we walked to the car, elbows linked, his steps a shuffle, I wanted to feel lofty. I wanted to feel hope. I wanted my hunger for my father’s life to live in me like a physical thing, an undeniable vacancy in my belly. But all I felt were waves of nausea.

Once we had deposited Dad safely into the passenger seat and the rest of us had settled in, my mother began to back out.

Hold on, I said. I forgot something. I’ll be right back. I got out before she could ask what.

I jogged back through the waiting room, toward the glass partition that separated health from disease, and asked the receptionist if I could speak with the doctor.

She raised her brows. He might be with another patient.

I just need a minute, I said, and I could already see his white coat down the hall, so I helped myself to the door. I walked, without hesitation, my typical peacekeeper identity shed in layers down that hall like flaking skin after sunburn.

It was time for a confrontation.

I waited until he was finished talking to a nurse, waited in the dizziness that swirled in my head. Waited with the smells of rubbing alcohol and someone’s microwaved lunch. And then it was just the old doctor and me.

He didn’t look surprised to see me; his affect remained even, aside from the slightest raise of his bushy brows as if asking me, What do you want?

How long does he have? I asked. How long does he really have? Truthfully.

He didn’t meet my eyes. A few weeks. A month at the most, he said.

He may have said more. It’s fuzzy now, but I seem to remember some attempt at justifying the hope he’d just pushed through my father’s body in the form of a small yellow pill that would actually kill him faster. I don’t remember if I thanked him; I don’t remember saying anything in that moment. It would take months to revisit this moment and feel anger toward the doctor and many, many more after that to feel forgiveness.

I walked back down the hallway with heavy legs, left the office, and made my way across the parking lot to my mother’s idling car. I could see Dad through the passenger window, curved, quiet, his eyes closed.

I got back into the car and said nothing the entire drive home. I couldn’t have spoken if I’d tried, my heart was too loud, blood moving the truth through my body. When we got home we tucked my father into bed, and I told my sister. Then my mother. They made me repeat it several times until I began to wonder if I had heard the doctor correctly.

A month at the most.

The next day, without telling my father, we sat with hospice in my parents’ living room.

This was one of the many endings I’ve faced in my almost-45 years of life. And it sure was a brutal one. It will be 15 years in July since my father died just like the doctor told me, not like he’d promised my father.

I’ve been reading and journaling and thinking about grief the past few nights before bed by candlelight with my window cracked, last night to hear the rain in its steady pour, and tonight, watching a spring snowfall that has already closed schools tomorrow. April marked two years since my relationship with my former partner ended. May is the month that A. and I separated over a decade ago. July is approaching. And of course, there is more.

There is something so profound about the awareness I’ve developed over the past few years that allows me to recognize certain thoughts, states, or emotional experiences as grief. Not as problems to solve or signals to act on—just grief, doing what grief does. Moving through.

I’ve learned, slowly, to resist the pull toward meaning. The mind wants to build something from the feelings, to turn the ache into insight, decision, message, story. To let it mean something about who I am now, or what I should do next. But I’ve found that when I can simply name it as grief and stay with it instead, write into it rather than out of it, something shifts by morning. Not resolved, exactly. But passed. And I am still here, more myself than I was the night before.

What was will never be again. There is a strange comfort I feel when I connect with this reality, like I’ve stepped through a portal and arrived more wholly into the present moment.

The loss of my father was my first massive loss. And it taught me more about grief than I realized at the time. It took more losses to solidify a sense of inner trust that I could handle grief; that in its pain was also something undeniably fertile.

I think now about that moment with the doctor when I demanded the truth.

My father could make his own choices, but I believed in my right to grieve. I wanted it. I was hungry for it. I did not want to bypass, to be duped, to stay in denial. It was grief that brought me down that hallway toward confrontation. Grief that ultimately set me free.

Last summer during a writing retreat in Maine was the Perseids meteor shower. After watching for them solo one night, the next, I rallied two friends and we drove down to the harbor, parked, and climbed up onto the hood of the rental car, the three of us laid out like lounge chairs against the windshield, the water lapping below us. In the quiet stillness, we waited, every now and then gasping with wonder and pointing toward the dark sky.

One was like a fireball soaring across the sky. I’d never seen anything like it. Of course I wondered if it was my father, a sign, an honoring of some kind. I’ve always wondered if he knew I’d hold the truth so he didn’t have to.

I knew, right away, that first on my list would be the lilac.

The lilacs are blooming early this year, mid-April, and at their peak bloom which usually happens in May. I’ve been on several missions, by car, foot, and bike, to forage (or more accurately, thieve) lilacs from places that don’t seem to be someone’s private yard. I’m a person who now moves to-and-fro through daily life with a pair of kitchen scissors close by. Using my water bottle as a temporary vase for the drive home, my hiking backpack a foraging sack, or pedaling toward home with a branch loped over my handlebars, this is how I roll during lilac season.

Lilacs, from my memory, were my mother’s favorite flower. I do not have conscious memory of my mother sharing with me the names of the plants, flowers, and trees we meandered by when I was a little girl. But my own unexpected depth of plant knowledge is proof enough, even if I'll never quite reach her level.

I know that the sunshine yellow forsythia likes to lean against fence posts, that willow grows near creeks, daffodils bloom before tulips. I can smell a hyacinth from a distance, suck the nectar from a honeysuckle flower, and swoon over pink azalea bushes. I can tell a birch from an aspen, a Douglas from a Fraser, and chamomile from daisies.

This spring, I’ve foraged lilacs on a few occasions already and brought them to my kitchen. Plucking a few blossoms and popping them in my mouth, closing my eyes and tasting their sweetness, mild perfume aroma-on-the-tongue, subtle citrus aftertaste. A lilac simple syrup for a gin fizz served extra cold in coup glasses. A carrot cake for Easter (which in my house is a celebration of spring) decorated with lilac blossoms. Lilac-infused honey on the cheese board. And an extra large Mason jar of spring water with lilacs infusing the water with their essence.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about self- and co-regulation. After my relationship ended with my former partner, I chastised myself for being too much. In some ways, sure, maybe I sought too much outside myself, didn’t truly understand what it was to self-attach. I spent a long time focusing on this work in my therapy and other self-work paths. I made it my mission to learn how to self-soothe and to come home to myself.

And I did. I learned it. But somewhere along the way, I internalized a story that needing anything outside of myself was a weakness and that the goal was to become so whole, so resourced, that I would never have to reach outward again.

What I’m only now beginning to understand is that this was never the full picture. We are not meant to regulate alone. Co-regulation isn’t a crutch or a sign of unfinished inner work—it’s a biological need, woven into us from the very beginning. We learned to feel safe in the world first through the nervous systems of others. That need doesn’t disappear when we grow up. It doesn’t disappear when we do enough therapy. We are not meant to live this life in solitary.

For a long time, I thought co-regulation could only come from a person. A partner, a close friend, someone whose presence could settle something in me. And so, when that relationship ended, I turned inward, convinced that was the only safe direction.

Nature, however, in all of her mystery and grace, has been teaching me otherwise. She’s not the only co-regulator in my world today, but she is a profound one.

There is something that happens when I press my nose into a cluster of lilac blossoms, when I taste its essence in a dollop of honey, when I take the first sip of lilac-infused water. My breath slows. My shoulders drop. Something in me that has been braced, releases. It’s as if my nervous system is in genuine connection with this plant.

I love the invitation to deepen relationship with a flower, plant, or tree, and I’m so grateful for my homesteading community for bringing this idea forward. I’ve been noticing so much in my relationship with the lilac. My desire to be close to them, just like the people I love. How every flower is different, just like those in my innermost circle. My friend and I walked by a whiteish-purple bush the other day, and oh how I gushed. There are the deep purples, the lavenders, the darkest, almost like midnight.

And then there’s this: the lilacs are already on the cusp of their leaving. They will likely be gone by the time in May when they typically bloom, just before my birthday. They’ll brown at the edges, smell of the slightest rot, and droop on their stems. The bush that remains for the rest of the year, dare I say, is quite nondescript.

To be in relationship with a lilac is to practice impermanence in real time. To show up for something knowing it will leave. To let it regulate me anyway. To inhale the blossoms while there are still blossoms to inhale.

The other night after picking up 15-year-old L. from a late theater rehearsal, we pulled into the alleyway. My neighbor’s lilac bush, perfectly periwinkle, was spotlighted by the car’s panning headlights. Before thinking about what I was actually doing, I told my son to hop out of the car and snag one of the flowers from the neighbor’s bush. His eyes dancing, he pulled his hood up, and hopped from the car without hesitation, as I just as quickly changed my mind, my omg-be-a-reponsible-mother kicked in, and I started whisper shouting, No, no, no, nevermind!

But it was too late. He snapped a flower off its branch and passed it to me. I took it inside, put it in a mini vase with water, and swore I’d ask the neighbor next time.

Turns out, impermanence only affects the flower.

A few days later, when my son was out on Pearl Street shopping with a friend, he sent me a photo. Purple stars against a blue April Colorado sky. No words. He just saw them and knew I’d want to see them too.

My mother taught me without teaching me. Maybe, so am I.

On this particular Sunday in late-March, the rosy peach blossoms and the lilac buds, the color of a stormy sky, in their tight purses are leaping. The warmth of the sun is balanced with the cool morning air, and the faint smell of wood chips and myrrh incense burning on an altar mingles with wafts of farm life.

I don’t own land. I don’t have an in-ground garden. My HOA won’t allow chickens, and forget the idea of goats. So, on the surface, I guess you could say my options at the current moment in time to adopt this lifestyle are limited. But when there’s a calling, there’s a calling, and I’ve been listening to that calling since I was a little girl. Get out in nature, it says. Learn how to co-regulate with this Mother, it says. Slow cook, meander, bathe under the trees. And use this connection, this relationship, to be of service to others.

Spring has arrived early here, and everyone is talking about it. Of course it’s confusing and scary. And on an energetic level, it feels strange to have missed winter, to be seeing everything shoot upward into that lime green and splay open into flower blooms. It is wild, as a self-identified non-winter person, to say I wish we would have had more winter, but here we are, and I’m melting into spring.

This melting doesn’t come without some worry, specifically about my neighbor’s peach tree. Its flowers instantly transport me to last summer in Palisade and Paonia, the taste of that perfect August peach on the western slope, juices running down my chin. There is no better fruit, in my opinion, than the ripest peach.

I brought my fear to the homestead, their little sprig of a peach tree so vulnerable and tender, it’s very few blossoms quivering in the breeze.

What if we have a freeze?

Stone fruits are harder to grow here in Colorado. Our springs are warm enough to coax out the blossoms, then cold enough to kill them. Apples are easier to grow, leafing out before they flower. But a peach goes all in, and sometimes loses. When it does, when there's no fruit to grow, the tree turns inward. And it devotes all the energy it would have used to grow fruit to strengthen its roots instead.

The homesteader said it like it was not good nor bad, just a fact of nature.

It made me think about how sometimes, we won’t get what we think we want, but in that disappointment, there is also opportunity.

You see, I’ve been struggling lately with the very thing I write about: transition as an inevitable aspect of life.

I spent most of spring break with my kids in Santa Fe, and came home quietly gutted by this realization: two years until my oldest leaves for college and my youngest is a high schooler. Three more summers with L. at home, if I’m lucky.

I don’t know what to do with that, but I’m slowly (very slowly) learning that I don’t have to do anything with it.

One of the women in our homesteading group mentioned an attachment parenting idea called crying-in-arms—the notion that sometimes a baby cries not because something is wrong to be fixed, but because they need to feel something all the way through, just like we adults do. The practice is just to hold them. Bear witness. Let the crying be what it is.

And now, as life creeps closer to the-moment-when-everything-will-change, I’m acutely aware of the grief I will face and have been thinking about what it would mean to do that for myself. To let the grief about my kids’ growing up just move through me without rushing to reframe it, or silver-lining it, or remind myself of the freedom coming. This week I’ve been weepy on walks, weepy in quiet moments, and I’ve let myself be held by friends who didn’t try to fix it either. That felt like something.

Maybe that’s what the peach tree does. When the freeze comes and the blossoms die, it doesn’t mourn the fruit. It just sends everything it has downward, into the earth, into the roots.

I’ve been listening and paying more attention lately. Accepting opportunities to learn and grow, to plant the seed of my own intention to live one day with more access to land and animals and a community that lives and works alongside one another. I don't know exactly what that looks like yet. But I'm not sure I need to.

And for three days in a row, a hawk appeared at the top of a tree, watching. A reminder to take a wider view, to stop fixating on details and spiraling into worry about a future that hasn’t arrived yet and come back to what’s here.

This spring. These blossoms. These kids, still at home, still shirtless at the kitchen island thanking me for making salmon and salad for dinner.

It’s such a timely production, which hopefully will be clear after a brief synopsis for those who haven’t seen or heard of the show. (Warning: spoiler alert.) The musical is set in a more modern world, though its characters and storyline are rooted in Greek mythology. Hades, ruler of the Underworld—called Hadestown—and his wife Persephone rule over a polarized divide between those above ground and those below, where workers labor endlessly building walls that promise security but deepen their confinement and disconnection. (Sound familiar?)

Threaded through their story is the love story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus is a songwriter convinced that music and beauty can soften the hardest hearts, even the one belonging to Hades. Eurydice is more wary of a world, believing it to be cold and unforgiving. When desperation leads Eurydice to the Underworld, Orpheus follows, determined to bring her back.

Hades eventually agrees to let her return with him, but on one condition: Eurydice will walk behind Orpheus on the long journey back to the surface, and he must not look back to see if she is still there. If he does, she will be lost to him forever.

The tension of the story lives inside that walk, and watching it unfold on the both the Broadway stage and my teenage son’s Actors Academy stage gave me instant goosebumps. One character in front of the other. The music, the song, the movement, the deliberate space between.

It is in the walk that the audience is invited into the very real human emotions of trust, doubt, hope, and fear. The mind’s relentless urge to check, to confirm, to control what cannot actually be controlled.

And if you know the myth, you know what happens. Orpheus looks back.

In a recent meeting I was part of, someone asked a question that caught my attention:

What was your problem six problems ago?*

I tried to remember.

I couldn’t. Or at least not with any clarity.

But this was the speaker’s point. Very few of us likely remember what our problem was six problems ago, and I am no exception. I am sure there was a thing that once consumed me, that felt like the axis upon which everything turned, a thing that has either resolved, or evolved, or become part of the story rather than the whole story.

I understand the type of problems I’m referring to may not be the massive life-altering ones. The ones we tend to remember in what sometimes feels like an unfortunate amount of detail. But even those, like the end of a relationship or a difficult rupture or the loss of a loved one, have a tendency to soften with time.

I remember writing, after the end of my ten-year relationship, that I didn’t trust my own hands to soothe myself. And, in the beginning, when the grief was in its most raw form, my hands didn’t offer much comfort.

Yet, still I tried, laying in bed, resting one hand over my low belly, the other over my heart. Breathing into the warmth, sometimes never quelling that vibration that hummed just below the surface of my skin. I remember being in Taiwan that first summer, sitting under rainfall in Beitou at the hot springs, desperately praying for the water to wash it all away, to fill me with the ability to meet myself.

My therapist explained that there are very young, attachment-based reflexes that live inside the body—movements we learn long before we have language. One of them is the reach: the instinct to extend ourselves toward another when something inside feels unsteady. The reaching itself isn’t the problem. In healthy attachment, someone meets us there. They gather us in, and our nervous system settles. This is what I’ve tried to offer my own children, as best as I can, from the very beginning.

But sometimes in a lifetime, that reach goes unanswered, or answered inconsistently, and the body learns something else. It learns to either keep reaching to no avail or to stop reaching altogether, also to no avail. In my former relationship, I didn’t know anything different, partly because of our dynamic and partly because I hadn’t yet learned how to come back to myself.

The counter-movement, my therapist told me, is the yield. The ability to let the body settle back into itself, to feel the support beneath us, to trust that something inside us can hold what is rising.

No sudden cleansing at those hot springs arrived. Instead, something quieter began to take shape in the weeks, months, years that followed. Showing up with consistency over time, I began to notice a difference. At first it was slight. Maybe my body could rest just a little heavier into my mattress or yoga mat. Or perhaps during a hike, when I did the same—one hand to belly, one to heart—I’d experience the felt sense of expansion, like my chest was splitting open and light could come pouring out.

I learned something absolutely invaluable: not only how to reach toward myself but also that I had the capacity to yield—to self-soothe.

The “six problems ago” question came forward in the context of a conversation about what happens when we stop trying to exert our will onto how we think things should go in our lives and turn our life over to a higher power. It made me think about Orpheus, and how his turning around was such a natural human tendency. The pull to check, to make sure, to confirm that what we love is still there.

I know, it sounds a little woo, but surrendering to something greater than myself is what I’ve been attempting now for the past two years. “Higher power” is a tricky concept for me because it carries a “God” connotation, and I do not consider myself a religious person. I am, however, spiritual, and my higher power is the universe, nature, writing, a Gregory Alan Isakov song, the first bite of freshly baked sourdough, an intimate moment, acorns, the moon, oysters, being of service. It doesn’t take one form, and it isn’t in any church aside from the one under the pines.

When I keep walking, breathing, bringing my hands to my skin, I am completely anchored in the present moment; I’m not looking back ruminating on what was or looking forward fixated on what will be. Let me be clear; I do not have this completely dialed in by any means, but I am committed to the practice.

And for now, that’s enough.

*The person who asked the six problems ago question said it came from their favorite author, but when I Googled, I couldn’t find the source. Would love to know who originally said it, so if anyone knows, please leave the author’s name in the comments.

As the year of the Wood Snake comes to a close, I’ve been drawing my attention to any shedding I’ve left. A good student of life, I would like to step into the year of the Fire Horse ready for the momentum it promises. I do not want old layers, flakey strategies, and dead patterns to weigh me down. Now is the time to be nimble, free of self-limitations, ready to fucking fly.

This weekend spending time in nature in Tenderwild (my camper van), I fell asleep and woke up to the creek gurgling beneath a sheet of thick ice and a dusting of snow blanketing the ground. I breathed into the present sweetness around me, the air cold and alive. Just like the pup, with his ears back, fur bristled, bounding, leaping, sprinting across the forest floor, I felt my wolf energy. I realized that shedding isn’t only about letting go of what no longer serves us. It’s also about releasing whatever blocks us from remembering what is true.

And yes, truth can be a slippery word. There are collective truths, universal truths, and deeply personal ones. Still, I’m going to go out on a limb and name it deliberately: not my truth, but the truth.

That nothing essential is missing. That beneath the layers we shed, we are already whole.

My efforts to shed, to unburden myself of inherited stories, old attachments, and ways of being that no longer fit, are part of what I think of as rewilding. Rewilding is the practice of coming back into relationship: with the earth, with our bodies, and with our own untamed nature. It means stepping outside overly structured ways of believing and remembering that we belong to the natural world. In that remembering, the illusion of separation begins to dissolve.

Rewilding asks me to slow down, to find calm and gentle ways of tending to my body through touch, temperature, intentional movement through the trees. Rewilding is sensual, and it taps into primal instincts, sexuality, and psychic intuition. It is the deepest kind of unshakable self-attachment, the embodied experience of healing from the inside out instead of seeking from outside myself to feel safe.

It asks me to be an environmental steward and negotiate the tension between the modern luxuries that arrive on my doorstep wrapped in way too much plastic and being mindful of waste. To notice the litter. To pick up what isn’t mine on a stroll down Main Street. To remember that reverence for nature is a daily practice, not a one-off.

Rewilding is play, touching the earth, swimming in the lakes, up-turning my face to a desert night sky. It is deep rest and retreat. It is inviting impermanence into my relationships with the people I love, allowing and celebrating their growth and evolution, understanding that connection grows deepest when we open to each other changing.

I think about the little girl within me, the one I’ve been tending to in therapy, especially over the past year and a half, once it became clear she needed more from me. When she’s activated and anxious, she lets me know, sending vibrations through my entire body.

She is not someone I will ever shed, nor would I want to. And I don’t know that I have the power to shed her anxiety for her. But I do know this: the more I rewild, the more my body receives the message that it’s safe enough for her to loosen her grip, safe enough for both of us to soften. And coincidentally, when I ask her where she’d rather be than quaking with anxiety, she unfailingly chooses nature every single time.

I remember being young, maybe five, and arriving home from church one Sunday afternoon to the wind tearing across the fields. The dry cornstalks moved in unison, like a sea of concertgoers swaying to the same song. Driven by the wild inside (Dorothy, just before the tornado that sweeps her to Oz), I ran across my backyard, up the hill, to the sour cherry tree. I kicked the dirt and watched it rise in dusty plumes, felt the skirt of my dress whipping my calves, and connected with my essence.

In August of 2024, at the beginning of my more recent shedding, I engaged in a process that started with literally laying down everything that wasn’t mine but that I had been carrying anyway. In the forest, it became a quiet ritual of rewilding, each stick representing something I’d been holding that was never mine to hold. Afterward, I tapped out this scrappy lil poem on my phone when I needed to remember who I was beneath the stories I had taken on.

I am the woman who plays.
I am the woman who turns her hat backwards on Big Thunder Mountain.
I am the woman who hikes off-trail and comes home with feathers in her backpack.
I am the woman who feels everything and stays anyway.
I am the woman who skips the dryer and walks out of the bathroom with wet hands.
I am the woman who tells the truth, even when her voice shakes.
I am the woman who loads the car.
Who loads the bikes, the trailer, the camping gear, the paddleboards.
I am the woman who cracks ice with a rock just to hear the sound.
I am the woman who eats the last peach over the sink, juice running down her wrist.
I am the woman who forgets the recipe and trusts her hands.
I am the woman who drives with the windows down.
I am the woman who swims out past where her feet can touch.
I am the woman who loves a good cold plunge.
I am the woman who says I will do better next time and means it.
I am the woman who brings her friends coffee.
Who picks up the food and drives people home.
I am the woman who tends to the fire.
Whose face is still warm in the dying light.

The Fire Horse energy is already building, bringing new opportunities to step into while preserving space for the ones that are ready to grow.

I just need to remember: beneath what I have shed, I already am.

I took this photo on my first day at an ashram in India, about an hour north of Rishikesh, after crossing the Ganga into the Himalayas. I was 34 and as exhausted as I look. Before I left, I mailed my ballot, casting my vote for who I hoped would become America’s first female president. I wrapped two sets of 15 small presents—one for each day I’d be gone—and laid them out across my bedroom floor for my five- and three-year-olds, knowing they needed something tangible to understand the length of my absence.

Goodbyes were hard. In the year leading up to the trip, A. and I had separated, moving in and out of short-term rentals while the kids remained in one home. The coming and going was difficult on their small nervous systems, despite the care their parents took, but I’d argue that it was most painful for me. All of this change was my fault, at least that’s how I viewed it at the time. And still, something about the trip tugged at me. More than anything, I needed space to be with myself.

The circular outdoor temple with a shrine was devoted to the Hindu deity Shiva, the Lord of Destruction, and during the initial ashram tour, I was instantly drawn to the space. I have never really shared my writing about my time in India. It has been uncomfortable to own this chapter of my life, this period spent across the world from my home in Boulder, Colorado, as holding deep meaning. Any meaning I found there was inseparable from the privilege that made my presence possible. I carried the expectation that spiritual clarity might be found in a place that held far more weight than my own life ever had to bear.

That said, in the jungle on the side of a mountain overlooking the mighty river, where monkeys danced across vines in the treetops, jaguars with pooled yellow eyes stalked the midnight undergrowth, and huntsman spiders the size of my open palm splayed themselves against the walls of buildings, both outside and in, something deep was shifting.

Like the jungle surrounding me, I was filled with dense unknown. Over the past year, the same friend had given me Pema Chödrön’s book Comfortable with Uncertainty twice, for two different occasions, without realizing it. Each time, she had handwritten a note inside about how brave I was to linger in some of life’s biggest questions. In truth, I did not feel brave. I felt over it. I was in this jungle longing for completion, for an ending, for certainty.

I never felt settled with the idea that I was closing my marriage purely for someone else. I wanted to be doing it for me, to honor myself and an unexplored aspect of my identity, but my former partner’s presence complicated matters. How was I to discern what was what without some space?

During my time at the ashram, we participated in three days of silence. Those days were filled with meditation, asana, long stretches of being alone, and a five-mile hike through rural villages scattered through the jungle, carrying dosas wrapped in foil and lovingly prepared for the journey.

I journaled often during the silence and found enough quiet to begin noticing all the ways I used my voice as a mother, a wife, a lover, a friend, a human. I started to see how much I relied on the words of others to validate my next step, how I clung to conversations and replayed them for days. It was not that these exchanges were wrong or harmful. Somewhere along the way, I had simply lost track of my own truth.

On the final day, just a few hours before we would gather to formally end the silence, I found myself sitting beside the garden. I breathed in the smell of earth and mineral-rich water, with the occasional trace of nectar. Birds chirped and garbled overhead as yellow, pale purple, and white butterflies flitted from flower to flower. Nearby, in the middle of a garden sprinkled with marigolds, a clothesline held sheets and towels, slowly warming in the day.

I wrote and wrote and allowed my thoughts to flow onto the page. I journaled my way back to my own voice. At some point, my writing shifted and took the form of vows. I did not set out to write them. They emerged through surrender to the present moment and deep listening to my own process. I realized I was writing commitments, marriage vows, to myself.

The temple formed a circular mandala, stones arranged around its perimeter for sitting. A path ran through the center toward an altar, where Shiva stood with his trident, one leg lifted in dance. From above, the temple would reveal a perfect circle, a representation of time without end, the constant cycle of life shaped by impermanence and growth.

I knew this was where it would happen, the ceremony I had been quietly designing over the past few days.

I had dreamed of a similar moment months earlier, though in my dream it took place at the edge of a lake, and I wore a white dress. What was a wedding without a white dress? I had not packed one, so I settled on yoga clothes and walked myself to the outer edge of the circle, holding my journal against my chest.

I closed my eyes and slipped off my sandals, feeling the grass, sweet and soft, between my toes. Nearby, a plump bird perched and called out in a steady song. I thought of my father, of walking arm in arm with him on my wedding day ten years earlier. The next time we would be surrounded by that many family and friends was five years later, at his funeral.

I thought about what I was leaving behind. The chapters of love and innocence, hurt and pain, of influence and inheritance. I turned my body, as if facing my father, and with my eyes still closed, let go once more. Tears had begun to gather at some point. Now they fell freely, warm and salty and true.

This time, I would walk the aisle alone. I would recite my vows alone. I would say everything I had to say about love to one person.

To myself.

Because my vows and my ceremony were mine, for me, I won’t share them here, but when I turned back around, after saying it all, after naming my devotion and making promises I intended to keep, I knew something had ended.

I could not yet name what had been destroyed, or even what had been released. But I could feel my body turning toward a new beginning, holding the quiet truth that the cycle never stops. It would never be fully clear or fully certain. It would never be done. The only thing to do was to trust myself and continue to move forward.

I’ll never forget the sounds of several of the women in my group wailing when later that evening, after emerging from silence, we discovered that Trump had won the election. I remember calling home, talking to both my former partner and A. about how terrifying it all felt. How eerily quiet the streets of Boulder were. How unsafe it felt. That night, I slept twelve hours straight and dreamed of leaving my three-year-old out in the snow.

I’d like to say that in 2016 I self-attached and never let go, that my commitments were unwavering. But the meaning of the cycle itself is that this is lifelong work. This relationship with myself, where love is both freedom and connection, needs constant tending.

I think about all that’s gone down since 2016, and even though some of it has brought grief and pain, I can say that I hold very few regrets. My now 15-year-old made a vision board this year, and the thing is chock-full of self-love, his own vows to himself. And my 12-year-old has been setting his alarm to wake ten minutes early to do push-ups in preparation for basketball tryouts because he really wants to make the grade-level team. These kids, my mirrors that the year of the Snake is coming to an end, and maybe it’s time to renew my vows.

There was so much I didn’t know ten years ago about what today would look like. Of course not. How could I? (Another Trump presidency, for fuck’s sake?!)

But I guess I did know one thing: that I would never leave myself.

It is a Shiva mantra that I feel very grateful to be borrowing from the Hindu religion. One that is tattooed on my body in symbol, one that I repeat to myself as a steadying force amidst change. Om Namah Shivaya. Om Namah Shivaya. Om Namah Shivaya.

May endings give way to new beginnings.

• This post was inspired by Molly Wizenberg:

I've Got a Feeling

In 2016, I blew up my life

Paid subscribers, mark your calendars for the next Write-Along…

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9 months ago · 163 likes · 7 comments · Molly Wizenberg

• And Hallie Bateman:

HALMAIL

In 2016, I had an eating disorder

The same night this photo was taken, I sat alone in a Manhattan Starbucks and ate six nuts. That was my dinner…

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9 months ago · 197 likes · 31 comments · Hallie Bateman

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The first image that popped into my mind was a lotus flower.

I can make that, he assured me. He had four colors of filament on spools and apologized for the limited choices, but I was happy with red.

So I watched, through the glass window, the machine whir as the lotus emerged, one thin red layer at a time. It was still warm when K. placed it in my palms, and together, we marveled at how something can move from an idea into shape and form in just four hours time.

Holding it in my hands, I felt the familiar pull of the lotus metaphor. A reminder that transformation is not sudden or clean. It is layered, slow, and shaped by the conditions we emerge from. I didn’t explain why I chose a lotus, not to K. and not to myself at first. But the truth is, I have long been drawn to what the lotus represents: beauty that does not bypass difficulty, growth that requires depth, not escape.

Sometimes, I look to something outside of myself, like this symbol of the lotus, as a focal point. Pulling my energy toward it to access to aspects of self I've disconnected from.

There is a myth of Lakshmi, ascending from a churning, trash-filled ocean, on a lotus flower after darkness comes over the land. In her hand, she holds an elixir of eternal abundance, and it is made of kindness, light, and service.

The lotus, as it turns out, is not a symbol of purity in the way we often imagine. It rises from murky water, roots anchored in mud, blooming not in spite of that environment but because of it. It reminds me that when I show up “eh,” I’m missing moments so potentially wild and unexpected. It also reminds me that what I’ve lived through allows me to be of service in ways I couldn’t before.

We are all existing inside a nuanced mystery called life. Anyone who claims to feel at ease with that, I’d argue, is either lying or in denial. Nuance can destabilize. Mystery is challenging. Not knowing is hard, and yet it is the only place we ever truly live.

There is something wild about the lotus. Not necessarily this red, plastic one that is now home on my bedside table. But the flower itself. It’s ownership of the muck. It’s insistence on emergence. It’s aliveness somehow asserting that nuance is always more truthful than certainty or polarization, and that mystery is magic.

What brought me through my father’s death, the end of my marriage, and the closing of my decade-long relationship? How am I blooming today in ways I couldn’t have before? What parts of myself are finally able to rise, even when the water is murky and uncertain?

It’s dark outside, and I’m sitting at my writing desk in an oversized sweater. The Christmas tree in my room is lit up in its pink glow. There are two double-walled empty glasses of what was turmeric ginger tea and a half-full Hydroflask of watermelon-flavored electrolyte water in front of me. I’ve been going at this attempt for a post all day now, and my forehead is wrapped with a fuzzy warmth.

K. gets home from basketball practice, dropped off by his friend, pours a bowl of cereal and hops in the bath. It’s late, around 10pm. He is still warm from his bath when I tuck him into bed.

I’m working on my writing, I tell him.

Oh yeah, how’s it going? he asks.

I’m writing about the lotus flower you made for me.

Oh! That’s cool. Then he smiles. Let me know what else you want me to make for you, he says, his chin poked out of the covers. I see him lying there, this 12-year-old bundle of awesomeness and squishy love, and I honor silently how his little roots are working through their own muck these days. And yet, I’ve already seen so many glimpses of his bloom. I don’t have an answer for him yet, so I wish him sweet dreams with a kiss.

I’m back in my bed with my laptop considering the final sentence of this piece. I close my eyes and breathe into the hand I place over my heart space.

The muck is not shame, and emergence is not permission. It is simply what happens when I tend to my roots, honor my process, live in integrity and grace, and claim my life, one layer at a time.

Around the same time, I was also reading Pixie Lighthorse’s The Wound Makes the Medicine. The book grew out of the author’s stream-of-consciousness notes, journaled during her personal heartbreak and grief and later woven together to support others as they navigated their own journeys. Sometimes the most painful paths—the ones we spend our lives trying to avoid—end up being the ones of deepest service to another human being.

I remember wondering if I’d ever be on the other side of the grief far enough to turn my own raw notes into something that might help someone else. Everyone told me I would be there eventually, but I questioned whether this was true. And that’s the thing about grief processes: they are all so unique. Resistant to timelines and assurances. And even though I grappled with my own unknown future, I found some level of comfort in the convergence with another’s lived experience. A place where I didn’t have to feel so alone in my own.

My brand of grief is probably one I will carry with me my entire life. I can’t imagine not feeling surges of emotion when I think about the great losses that shaped me. But something does seem to happen over time. Not a clearing, exactly, but more a softening around the edges. A way of staying with what is, rather than bracing against it.

I’m careful not to assume this is true for everyone. I only know that, in moments when my own future felt impossible to picture, I kept returning to the page. Not to make sense of things, but to stay connected to myself while everything else was shifting.

It is now a new year. 2026. I tend to give myself the space between the Gregorian New Year (January 1) and the Lunar New Year (this year, February 17, the year of the Fire Horse—a potent one) to listen more closely for what wants my attention.

Last night, I took an evening walk around the neighborhood to pick up some litter and breathe the cool air. I was gifted with capturing the precise moment when an owl, in its vast wingspan, landed on the top branch of a tall pine. Then, just minutes later, geese flew overhead, briefly arranging themselves into a perfect composition for a hasty photograph. Small moments, ordinary and unmistakably alive.

Later, I lay in bed sifting through my journals, both on my phone’s notepad and in the six watercolor paper notebooks I’ve filled in the past year-and-a-half. The entries move back and forth in time, each one written without knowing what would come next. And today, I sit at my desk working on this post and see several of the many Post-It affirmations I wrote during the deepest ache.

I love how you laugh.
You are so intuitive; trust yourself.
Hold lightly and adapt.
You get to be exactly who you are and be loved and accepted, and you get to love and accept others for exactly who they are.
Let go of what is not yours.
You create magic so others can experience joy and light. This is a beautiful way of connecting.
You do not have to be good. (Gotta give Mary Oliver credit for this one.)

Reading them now, I’m struck by something I couldn’t see then. The voice in these notes is steady. Kind. Unmistakably wise. In my most unraveled moments, I was closer to myself than I realized. The grief stripped away performance and pretending, and what came through the writing was not confusion, but clarity. Messages written by me, meant for me.

I realize I’ve been walking backwards. I am visiting my past self in order to locate my present one more clearly, so she can guide me forward. An instinctual, quiet knowing that sometimes backtracking is what allows me to move ahead with intention.

I’m reminded of a book I once read about wilderness survival. When lost, people rarely turn back. Instead, they keep moving forward, mistaking motion for progress. Some people will even conjure a mental map, imagining landmarks are just ahead, ones that feel familiar or reassuring. Many times, even when skilled, smart, and prepared, people get lost and do not survive simply because they refuse to retrace their steps.

Sure, walking backwards to revisit the past might mean dealing with some cringe moments. But mostly, I find myself softening with compassion for who I was then and pausing in awe of the wisdom that came through during such a devastation.

Over the holidays, I attended a gathering with some old friends. We’d connected in life over having newborns at the same time. And now, many of our first babies are fifteen. As we stood in the kitchen, someone reflected aloud, “We’ve all been through so much.” And then added, “Especially the three of you.”

At first I wasn’t sure how it felt to be one of the three who has been through a lot in the past fifteen years. I’ve always thought of myself as a steady person, an introvert at heart, a lover of the simple life.

Maybe these aspects of self helped carry me through the tumult and uncertainty. The same survival book asserts that the people who survive wild, unpredictable terrain are the ones who create some kind of rhythm for themselves. Some chant. Some hum. Some walk in a steady beat that they can rely on. Their bodies find a pattern, and the pattern becomes a rope back to themselves.

I’ve been thinking about my own ropes: yoga, weekly therapy sessions, Al Anon meetings, conversations with friends and family, hiking miles through the woods in all weather, slow cooking, parenting rituals, and always, always writing. Over the next few weeks, as I continue to walk gently toward myself, I hope to arrive not at the answers but at the next questions that ask me to listen more closely.

This year, I will be focusing on creating more content for my paid subscribers. Journaling prompts, memoir excerpts, and other extra treats!

Last week we had our first snow, and I managed to get out the next morning while it was still coming down. By the end of my hike, the flakes had turned into lazy little floaters, but they never gave up and clung to my brows and lashes, soaking into my hair.

On warmer mornings, my steps splatter through slush and wet mud that is such a rich brown I might call it red. My hikers sink and stick until the suction breaks with a thwup. If I’m in my Diamond Grip Yak-Traks for those few patches of stubborn ice, they are caked with the clay by the time I make it to my car.

Down in the meadow, beyond the big rock where I sit for a while if the temperature doesn’t warrant mittens, sometimes the turkeys roam. Just before Thanksgiving, there were so many of them, and it made me laugh, the absurdity of it; like somehow they knew.

I like to trace the deer trails in the snow on the mountain across the valley until I spot movement between the trees—a red-tailed hawk mid-flight, maybe a young buck and his downy antlers. The bears are gone, to wherever bears go, the taste of a million late autumn crab apples sustaining their slumber until spring. The birds twitter and peck, storing their seeds for deep cold. The trees fold over the trail in some places offering a portal to another world, one where sappy resin snaps into woodsmoke.

This is the start of a winter time I no longer dread, but revere. Last year was the first time I can remember falling in love with it. I thought maybe it was the grief that had taken my vitality. The grief that sent me searching for warmth in the pink glow of my bedroom Christmas tree, in my overpriced Irish hand-knit sweater, in the solstice-inspired whiskey drinks with my sister and brother-in-law, the endless journaling by candlelight.

But my time out on the trail reminds me that winter is my sacred space, my sanctuary. It doesn’t need grief to be holy.

It is the permission I offer myself to slow down, to breathe, to metabolize and feel, to just be. Over the course of the next few months, I will walk this same trail in all weather, all temperatures. I will process a thousand things I wish I would have done or said and a thousand I wish I hadn’t. I will give space to imagine and dream, to innovate and create. I will love, and I will grieve. I will rage and spiral and soar. I will surely grapple and dictate poems into my phone. I will be startled by a bird in the brush and worry about mountain lions. And by the last stretch, every single time without fail, I will have found my way back closer to home within.

There is so much constantly pulling and tugging at my attention these days, and I think the universe must know that I’m in yet another transition (do they ever really stop coming?) because she’s gifted me, just in time, with winter.

Light the fire, slow the fuck down, get under the blankets, bake that bread you obsess over on your Instagram reels, make some art, take winter camping trips just to read a book and drink coffee all day, nourish the people you love but don’t forget yourself too.

This winter brings a quiet middle space asking me to review my life again. To decide what stays, what goes, what I’ve outgrown, what wants to bloom.

I know how a life can unravel and still reveal wholeness underneath. How identity, grief, love, and loss can rearrange me without destroying me. How self-attachment becomes the home I finally stop abandoning. And this winter, it feels as if I’m being asked to practice all of that knowing again. As if it wasn’t enough to live through it once.

Maybe that is the nature of healing. It circles back, like seasons, asking me to show what I’ve learned in quiet, steadier ways.

Last winter cracked me open.

This one is asking for something different.

Not survival. Not reinvention. Something more like integration. A kind of everyday devotion to myself. A willingness to sit inside the life I am building and trust that I belong here.

In the spirit of winter and the holidays, and because I’m currently playing a blue-nosed reindeer in a theater production and have limited time, I’ll be taking a short pause on my Substack until the new year. I’ll see you on January 7. I’m so grateful for all of you and your support of my writing, writing I began last winter when, of course, I was tromping through literal and metaphorical mud and ice, just as I continue to do today.

Or, worse yet, was this something I unintentionally caused? When they were toddlers, they would wail, and it was often loud. Squaremouth, I called it, as their mouths opened and formed little squares. (Apparently this is genetic because if you’ve ever seen my ugly cry, you know that I too possess this feature.) Anyway, I shushed them, I’m sure, beyond the soothing kind. For every time I let them stomp away or yell with full vocal capacity, there were probably a dozen when I did my best to contain.

It’s possible I’m overanalyzing all of this and shushing one’s parents falls in the realm of typical teenage behavior, but I’m also wondering if it is connected to something they feel or see in me, especially lately, as I traverse more deeply into myself.

Some of this traversing has been messy. In the last year-and-a-half, my kids have seen more of my mess than I ever expected to show. Not because I intended to reveal it all, but because I’m not built to hide the truth of my reality. They’ve witnessed the grief, the heartache, the mistakes, the regret, the searching, the wild, the joy, the brand new.

Years ago, I sat in a therapist’s office and noticed red handprints smeared across one wall. I didn’t know what had happened there, but I remember feeling a tug inside me. A wish for a space like that, a place where I, too, could roll in paint the color of what pulsed in my veins and press my whole body against the wall. To leave a mark. To be uncontained. Wild.

What does it mean to be wild, anyway?

Not reckless or feral or out of control. I mean the wildness that lives just under the skin—the instinct, the truth-teller, the unedited self. The part of me that existed long before I learned to manage my edges. The one who moves in rhythm with the earth, who is sensual and awake, who understands the language of trees, water, and animals without having to translate. (And to think I ever believed I wasn’t a dog person!)

A few years ago, I had the privilege of experiencing something called The Dig. The Dig, in Erin Weed (Dig Founder)’s words is an experience that helps truth-seekers and change-makers uncover their life purpose and distill it down to a single word: your Dig Word. Your Dig Word is your life purpose, your greatest superpower, and the message you’re called to share with the world.

Over the course of a few days, our little circle of Diggers worked toward naming a single word for each of us. I kept stumbling on mine, wanting a word that could hold both my tender, soft-hearted nature and the fierce, wild spirit that has always tugged at me. To allow myself to be all of one without the other felt like a betrayal of something deep within my core.

So bless her soul, Erin, (whose own Dig word is Authentic), allowed me to be authentic and invent a brand new word.

Tenderwild. (Check out Erin’s latest newsletter where she features my story!)

I spent the better part of this past year-and-a-half living from my tender self, grieving the end of a decade-long relationship. So much of that time was about softening and allowing myself feel everything, even the most uncomfortable. But somewhere in all that tenderness, I knew I also needed to make space for my wild.

So, I’ve been expanding into this felt sense. Slipping my feet into cold creek water. Letting the wind whip through my hair on hikes. Playing how-fast-can-you-run on the beach. Buying flowers just because. Touching my own skin more slowly. Listening for desire before logic. Sleeping with the windows open. Saying yes.

This is the wild I’ve been trying to reclaim. Not a performance, but a remembering. Reconnecting with nature, my body, my pleasure.

I felt this wildness as a girl: laying on my belly in long grass and inhaling deeply, tearing through cornfields with stray cats following behind me, playing outside from morning to night, in all weather. My body knew what it wanted long before my mind began to respond to fear.

And yet even then there was already something happening inside me. Back and forth between aliveness and safety. Between the impulse to leap and the instinct to stay put.

I was probably twelve, hiking with my friends from the neighborhood toward Pineview Dairy, wandering through cornfields and past a rusted ice cream truck riddled with bullet holes, an orange Volkswagen Beetle (Punch buggy orange!) with no doors, and a graveyard from the 1800s. We slipped our pre-teen bodies under the barbed wire fence into a pasture where a narrow creek cut the land in two.

My friends crossed easily, turning back to cheer, You can do it! Just jump!

My body surged forward, then pulled back. Forward. Back. Forward. Back.

I couldn’t do it. I didn’t cross the creek that day.

Eventually, we turned back, my friend soaked from her misguided attempt to make her body a bridge for me, all of us singing We Are the Champions as we carried her jeans tied to a stick like a flag.

So many years later, in the summer of 2015, a few months into my separation, I found myself again standing in front of moving water, this time in the James Peak Wilderness backpacking with friends. Snowmelt rushed beneath a narrow log bridge, my pack heavy on my hips, my breath unsteady.

Each of my friends crossed ahead of me, sure-footed. When I hesitated, someone called over the roar of the river, Do you need help?

I thought of all the hands I’d taken over the years, all the ways I’d chosen safety over risk, containment over expression. How often I’d believed I needed someone to guide me through anything scary or alive or demanding.

I’d searched outside myself again and again through past-life regressions, intuitives, trips to India, to Iceland, to Illinois, trainings, certifications, endless hours of therapy and endless conversations with friends who, thankfully, stayed. And while I know all that seeking had a purpose as it did bring me closer to myself, it was only when I finally dropped into deep quiet that I could hear the voice who already knew.

Pine in the air. Sun on my shoulders. Dried sweat salty on my lips.

My friend called over the rushing water again, Do you need help?

No, I said.

And I took the first step.

Maybe my kids shush me not because I’m too much, but because they can feel me stretching and growing into a new version of myself right in front of them. Maybe the shushing is their way of holding onto what feels familiar. Or maybe it’s their gentle attempt to keep me tethered while I relearn how to live in my own skin.

It’s funny…I see what they’re doing because I’ve learned so much about this myself. How difficult it can be to allow other people to be who they are. Or who they are becoming.

Kids don’t always know what to do with a mother who is still becoming. Hell, I don’t always know what to do with that fact. Am I really growing up alongside my kids? It wasn’t so apparent until they hit teenage years. When they were little, it was clear, despite the changes I traversed, that their little faces looked to me as the one who knew more.

But still becoming is not something I can pretend away. I cannot act the part, perform a sense of one who has achieved.

I can only be myself.

I like the idea of shifting the contrast between wildness and safety toward tenderness. Sometimes real safety comes from pausing, softening, letting the heart crack open enough to love and feel and be.

Tenderwild.

The middle place I write about is where I am learning, fumbling, circling back, making amends. Where wildness meets responsibility, and tenderness meets edge.

Maybe the forms of my life—mothering older kids, work shifting, relationships evolving, writing deepening—are not asking me to choose perfectly, but simply to choose honestly. To stay in the flow of life is both a tender and wild endeavor. To discern and allow for change and new growth is the whole point of the middle space.

I used to think good parenting meant minimizing the mess, protecting them from anything that rocked the boat. I don’t know…sometimes I still get caught there. My own inner critic shushing me. But something tells me that the whole point of the middle space is to recognize the self I’ve been slowly returning to. And I hope that as they watch me build home inside of my own being, in real time, it will help them create home within themselves too.

Both of my paternal grandparents died before I was born, and my maternal grandmother developed Alzheimer’s when I was in middle school. So, Pop-Pop was my only grandparent, and that fact shaped the rhythm of my childhood and early adulthood in so many ways.

In 1925, when my grandfather was in the womb, his 24-year-old mother, swelling with new life, watched as a car hit her husband, my grandfather’s father, midway across the street as he attempted to catch the trolley for work.

The newspapers the next day read across the front headline, Lancaster Girl Sees Autoist Kill Husband on Pittsburgh Street. The journalists said that Louis J. Bittner was a victim of a tragedy, a 22-year-old father-to-be taken out of his lifetime with a swift and unexpected blow.

My great-grandmother Josephine, a pregnant widow, sought comfort in a past lover whom she had been forbidden to marry due to a difference between Protestant and Catholic faith. This man stepped in and adopted my grandfather as a baby, raising him as his son.

They named him Louis, after his birth father.

When my grandfather was eighteen, he signed up to serve in the Navy and stepped onto a giant battleship, the USS Wisconsin, in the midst of World War II. Spending two years on the ship, he witnessed many of the horrors of war at such a young and formative age.

Like many men of his generation, later in life, he wore the swag with pride, donning his Wisconsin cap and windbreaker without fail. He attended all of the reunions and kept track of the lives of his friends who sailed with him. Even when my grandmother had progressed in her Alzheimer’s decline, he took her to Philadelphia for the 50th Anniversary Reunion.

When he got home, he presented me with a blue velvet case. Inside was a silver coin in protective casing, an embossed battleship and the words, WWII - Korea - Persian Gulf, USS Wisconsin BB-64.

The coin was special to me because I could feel how special it was to him. Beyond the item itself, was the memory of a time that reverberated through all other times. It was never the birth of his children or his wife’s disease that dominated his conversation through his life, but it was the two-year stint of being a sailor. Those early experiences of loss and service shaped a man whose presence would become a quiet anchor in the lives of those he loved.

My grandfather’s face displayed the dark shadow of a beard even when he had just shaved. He was playful but stern; maybe the war had hardened him in ways I could never begin to understand. I both adored him and feared him, but mostly, he was all bark and no bite.

Around his grandchildren, his sternness melted into play. He’d walk with us up to the playground near his apartment complex. If we brought one of the only stuffed animals he owned with us, a sock monkey, he’d tie it to the swing and push it like it was on a joyride. A cigar poking sideways out of his mouth, and his cap perched on the top of his head, he’d make silly faces until it was time to go home, and when we inevitably wanted to stay longer, he’d yell at us to get moving.

The most precious possessions my grandfather owned were the few letters that his adoptive father sent him on the ship. The letters were dubbed The Christmas Letters because his father had written them on Christmas Eve, quietly, I imagine, sitting in the parlour with its fresh paint, perhaps fireside at his typewriter, thinking of his son.

Every Christmas Eve of my childhood and adulthood with my grandfather, he’d unveil the letters and pass them around to each person in the room, yellowed at the edges, the creased folds of paper worn thin. Glassy-eyed, sipping on an Old Fashioned, he’d slowly read the words of his father, words that must have brought him so much warmth during a time of his life that was so cold.

As we all read, there was some unspoken knowing that filled the room, a shared experience that somehow helped to honor my grandfather for those years he spent at war.

I’m not as diligent about bringing the letters out these days, but this year, I plan to share them with the people around my table.

It’s never too late to resurrect a ritual.

When I was a teenager, my mother told me that her father, my grandfather, had never once said, I love you to her. She said it matter-of-factly, like it was a given, like I should know this about my grandfather because after all, it’s not like he was expressing his love for me. So, my sister and I joined forces to try to get our grandfather to say those words, probably because we already knew he felt them.

We started with the abbreviated version.

One evening after having dinner at our house, my grandfather was on his way out the door. After plopping his worn USS Wisconsin hat on his head and slipping into his navy blue winter coat, my sister said, Love you, Pop-pop. My grandfather’s eyes constantly watered, a malfunction of his tear ducts later in life, so I couldn’t tell if the mist in his eyes pooled around the love or not, but he gently drew her into an embrace, leaning into her, a little unsteady on his feet, and said, Love you too, kid.

From then on, that’s how we said goodbye.

When my grandfather met my grandmother, they fell instantly in love. He met her before he went to war, and the absence only strengthened his adoration, so he proposed to her one day while he was home on a leave. I don’t think there was ever a more loyal partner than my grandfather. Even when my grandmother stood in front of a mirror and talked to herself like she was meeting someone for the first time, even when she hung wet socks over the lamp and almost caught their apartment on fire, even when she begged to go to the horse races only to get there and demand to go home, he stayed by her side.

Dizzy Dot he called her, with a smirk that was a mask for the sorrow he felt. But even the most loyal are also human. He loved her, but he also raged, as her deteriorating mind maddened him to no end, and yet it wasn’t until the day the neighbors called the police, saying, There’s a man in the apartment next door who is yelling at his wife, that he hired a part-time nurse for their home. It was the moment, I believe, he truly faced what was real.

Longing to see his adult grandchildren walk the deck of a ship like the Wisconsin, my grandfather asked us to pay a visit to the harbor where the USS New Jersey was docked. It was so hot that day in Camden, New Jersey, scorching, and there were so many ladders to climb. My grandfather wanted to revisit it all, the bunk rooms, the mess hall, the upper deck.

At one point, I noticed he was leaning against the side of the ship, sweat gathered on his brow, looking exhausted. Before I could ask him if he was okay, he fell to the wooden planks in a slump. His hat skewed, his knees bent so awkwardly that my first impulse was to try to straighten out his legs.

We called an ambulance, much to his protest that began the second he came to. I will NOT go to any hospital! he demanded. Do NOT put me in that ambulance! But we did, and he spent a few hours resting on a stretcher in the ER, propped up and eating chicken wings from the cafeteria.

The food my grandfather liked most was pork and sauerkraut, in the slow cooker, perhaps a memory from his German descent. He wolfed down his food, eating faster than anyone I’ve ever met. On Thanksgiving growing up, my mother wouldn’t even take her seat at the table yet, and his plate was clean. One year I had a boyfriend eating with us. Afterward, he said, “I think it’s strange that the only thing your family talks about at dinner is the food.”

The last few months of my dad’s life, when I moved home to take care of him, my grandfather came over every day, shuffling in and settling on the sofa with his pocket-held poker machine. The soft beeps filled the silence between us, a steady rhythm that somehow steadied me.

He didn’t try to fix or explain anything. He just showed up.

I remember him shaking his head once, saying softly that it didn’t seem right, that it shouldn’t have been my dad. I think it was hard for him to know he’d outlive my father. Sometimes he’d go into the bedroom to sit with him, the weight of years between them felt but not spoken. Having lost his own father before he was born, my grandfather seemed to carry a kind of inherited knowing—of what it meant to show up for a son. In some ways, he became the father my dad never really had.

Through those months, I came to understand that love doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it looks like showing up every day, holding space, and letting your presence be the reassurance.

When my grandfather died in 2016, he was 91-years-old and mentally sharp. My sister and I, both living in Colorado, flew back to Pennsylvania to see him for what we both knew would be the final time. I remember through life, as my grandfather aged, saying goodbye at holidays or summer breaks and thinking, this might be it. I could feel him thinking it too.

But this time was different because we all had a certainty that is so rare to hold. We sat with him and talked to him and told him we loved him over and over again. We propped handmade cards our children made for their great-grandfather on his little bedside tray. And when it was time to leave, my sister and I joined one of our hands with one of his and lingered there in that love for just a little while longer.

A few years ago, a dear friend of mine, a talented genealogist, started digging into my family history. Every now and then, something new pops up in her database. Recently, she sent me this.

I love it for so many reasons, but mostly because I can see him so clearly—a high school senior I never knew, yet the same grandfather I loved. And in him, I also see parts of me.

Isn’t this how it works? The people we love gift us their presence and traits we can carry with us. Pop-Pop wrote me endless letters when I was in college, knew my friends, attended my graduations, held both of my sons when they were babies, answered my interview questions for a recording I still have, allowed himself to be cracked open by the soft hearts of his grandchildren, and smiled until the very end.

Through him I learned that presence is love, that steadiness can be wild in its own way, that care and constancy can leave indelible marks across generations. His life reminds me that even amid grief, absence, and the inevitable losses we face, there is a lineage of heart and stories—sometimes even letters, poems, songs, words—that can hold us steady.

Last night, I got to see the Northern Lights in Boulder, Colorado. I was driving to pick up my older son from his theater dress rehearsal, and the sky’s tinge of purple, pink, and red made me hit the brakes and pull to the side of the road. I leapt from my car, crossed the road, and stood on the railroad tracks facing north. This is the wonderful thing about life: You can be having a pretty average Tuesday and then, boom—something so beautiful happens, and everything seems to expand and make sense.

I thought of Pop then, how he taught me that presence is its own kind of wonder. Maybe that’s what he left me: the instinct to stop, to look up, to notice what’s worth loving, even if all we do is talk about the food.

For a long time, I thought my story began when my father died. His death was the catalyst. It was, no doubt, the moment that cracked something open in me. But it wasn’t the kind of cause-and-effect event that could carry my plot. If the story didn’t begin there, then what was the inciting incident? What was the moment that set my transformation in motion?

Memoir is tricky this way because the character is not an invented one. She was me. Is me.

And to answer the questions, I had to ask what my character—what I—wanted most. To know what she wanted would be to understand why the inciting incident mattered so much. The reader would need to see what she wanted right away because desire drives story. It provides an emotional compass and a reason to care. The moment we understand what the character wants (even if they don’t yet), we start to root for and/or question them.

In the beginning of my memoir-writing journey, I followed the classic three-act structure. It’s the one we all learned in school: an inciting incident or conflict sparks the rising action, tension builds toward a climax, and eventually the pieces settle into a new order through falling action and resolution.

For years, I searched for that beginning, plastering my whiteboard with Post-its, mapping narrative arcs, taking memoir-writing workshops, writing my way into what felt like the middle only to realize: This isn’t the story I want to be writing either! It was maddening.

If I handed a reader five inciting incidents, they might say any could work. The first kiss in Telluride while a song from the Twilight movies played, the massage where the therapist rested her hands at my throat and asked if I was speaking my truth, the moment I told A. everything while he unloaded the dishwasher, the meeting with the mediator, or even my literal beginning: the day I kicked hard enough to break my mother’s water and be born just in time for lunch.

Those scenes seemed to follow the logic of the classic story arc, each offering a clear before and after, a tangible inciting incident. Something to want.

I tried them all. And somewhere in that trying, I realized there were a few problems.

First, I was trying to box up an unboxable story, a story that doesn’t move in straight lines. And the more I tried to force it into a line, the more I realized it pulled the narrative toward the wrong center, as if the story were about my character wanting something outside of herself, when really all she wanted was to exist more deeply inside herself.

Second, and likely more problematic, I hadn’t lived the true ending of my story yet. Sure, I had endings that could have worked to pair with any of those inciting incidents, but somewhere deep within, I knew they weren’t right.

Though I still appreciate the traditional story structure and know it has both its power and place in storytelling, I’ve been inclined to veer off its well-worn path. I am about halfway through Melissa Febos’s Abandon Me (the first memoir in my structure study), a collection of linked essays that weave together to form a cohesive whole. In a book about the intersections between love and obsession, I find myself both loving and obsessing over her craft choices. Her structure feels truer to how life unfolds—circular, recursive, returning again and again to the same ache until it begins to transform.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of seeing Alok perform at the Boulder Theater from the third row. If you’re unfamiliar, check them out. Alok’s storytelling, like Febos’s, is woven and alive, shimmering with queerness and truth. Someone recently mentioned (and I’ve witnessed it myself) that in Alok’s stories, all strands return to love, but not the Hollywood kind. Love as liberation. Love as deep self-belonging.

What I wanted at the beginning of my story, though I couldn’t name it then, was to be free, to be more wholly existing in my Self—to live in more Calmness, Curiosity, Compassion, Confidence, Clarity, Courage, Creativity, and Connectedness.

Love.

And to love and belong to myself in these ways meant allowing myself to live in a fuck ton of uncertainty. To stay in the circles, waves, spirals, and wanderings and allow the surges to come and go.

I remember reading once (I cannot remember where to credit the source) about the classic three-act arc as a kind of patriarchal story. A linear march toward climax and resolution. It privileges action over reflection, conquest over curiosity. I think it mirrors the way we’ve been taught to desire: to move from want to satisfaction, beginning to end, in one continuous, controlled line.

But queerness, both in form and in life, undoes that logic. It loops. It lingers. It resists closure. It is fluid and values process and experience over endpoints and results. It doesn’t mean that we are void of clarity but that we are present to the journey.

Prioritizing the inner life of my character, her desire, fear, and self-discovery, allows my story to unfold in a more flowing and organic way. External events still matter, but they exist in service of transformation rather than a rigid arc of cause and effect.

At its heart, my story isn’t about reaching answers or arriving at a tidy conclusion. It isn’t about being good or perfect. It’s about living inside the questions, about dwelling in the spaces between knowing and not knowing, moving toward who I am becoming, and learning to love others better as they move along their own paths.

I remember the month after my father’s death, when grief had my heart in a vice grip. The world around me kept its rhythm. Cars turned left, people pressed the crosswalk button, the mountains browned under late-summer sun. I was supposed to return to my sixth-grade classroom to teach language arts, to hand my year-old son off to someone else’s care, to step back into motion. But I couldn’t. I felt heavy, clunky, as if I could remember what had happened but couldn’t put it in order.

And then so many years later, in the first months after my relationship ended, I walked for miles through the forest each day. As my body slowly changed, so did my mind and heart. As I hiked, I dictated notes into my phone—stream-of-consciousness monologues, bits of poetry, occasional moments of clarity.

This is what living the questions looks like, and often change, transition, and grief will lead us there. Letting the unknown move through us instead of trying to solve it. Maybe my story doesn’t begin with just one inciting incident at all, but with that movement or with the yearning to grow.

After months of walking, dictating, and letting the unknown move through me, I went back to my phone’s notepad. The first thing I had written during that ache stood out:

My life is filled with exciting promise.

It felt like a bridge between one story and the next, a sentence that ended one memoir and quietly began another.

And yet, before any new story can unfold on my page, I have to sit fully with the one I was living before, and write the damn book already.

So I guess that’s what I’m attempting now. Finally, with some distance from living the story, to finish it, to queer my writing as I’ve queered my life, and to stay true to bringing it to take shape on the page as it was lived.

Yesterday, my therapist and I talked about wanting. What is it to want; what is it to be wanted? She reminded me that often what we most desire cannot be pinned to a page, a butterfly with its wings clipped. It cannot be entirely captured or fully named. But it lives in the questions we are brave enough to follow, in the spaces we are willing to inhabit without answers, in the moments we let ourselves feel the ache of possibility, the freedom of not knowing, and the quiet thrill of becoming.

“Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Inside, the air conditioning was set to a frigid sixty-four to keep the upstairs bedrooms cool; outside, the night was soupy, heavy, still.

I wanted to stay there, in that exact place between what was and what would never be again.

In the months before my father died, I’d moved back to Lancaster to help care for him. I sliced farm-picked strawberries, mixed them with sugar, soaked a piece of vanilla pound cake, and carried it to his bedside to watch him eat, savoring the sweetness even when his appetite was fading.

I sat next to his withering body in doctor’s appointments and was the first to see him along with my sister when he emerged from his surgery, void of both kidneys, shaking and wrapped in warm blankets.

I was able to give him the gift of his grandson, who didn’t care that Poppy had a strange tube in his nose as he crawled all over the bed.

Maybe I softened the blow of dying, allowed him to depart knowing we were together under one roof. Be here with me when it happens. Promise me you’ll be here, he said on that last phone call, on the morning of my 30th birthday, before I moved home to fulfill my promise.

After my father stopped breathing, I looked around the bedroom, wondering about his soul, how far away it hovered from his body, and why I couldn’t see it. For some reason, I’d expected to detect its shine. My father loved life, the shimmer of it. Were he a tarot card, he’d be The Sun, decorating the ordinary with beauty even as he feared his own death.

That paradox shaped both the way he lived and the way I loved him. I held close what dazzled, even as I braced for loss, living inside the tension of how his zest and love for life heightened his fear of losing it.

Lately, I’ve been circling a question—one that may have been born that night he left this lifetime behind: how much of my story is also my father’s?

It’s no surprise I’m writing a memoir. I’ve always been drawn to stories that ask how we become who we are. Lately, though, I’ve been studying them for how they’re built. I chose five memoirs (that have more unconventional structures) to read and study, hoping to understand how structure can hold what’s too complex for a linear storyline.

The process of writing a memoir is wild and often daunting. I can finally say that I’ve lived enough of the (first) book I want to write, and have enough emotional distance from it, for it to be born into the world. Sometimes the iterations seem like they will never end, and because this is my first book-length project and I’m DIYing the MFA as of now, it really seems like I’ll never have a ‘final’ draft.

My latest memoir draft moves chronologically, with bits of backstory stitched in. But I’ve always known my story won’t fit neatly into a classic structure. It’s the kind that circles back, revisits itself, and threads together what might seem unrelated at first: my father’s life and death, the end of my marriage, the reimagining of family, love, grief and loss, identity, and what it means to come home to yourself.

I want the reader’s experience to feel similar to my lived one—how healing and understanding arrive not in straight lines, but in spirals, and how ultimately, we each get to create the life we want to make, even if it defies what society calls normal.

One structure that tugs at me is the braided narrative. I love how it allows different threads, timelines, voices, themes, and even questions to move alongside one another, crossing at points of resonance without fully merging. It feels truer to how transformation happens: small loops of awareness that touch and release, touch and release.

The stories of my father and me are braided through both time and meaning, neither one whole without the other. I used to wonder if some exchange had been made on a soul level. If his departure somehow cleared the space for my becoming. I’ll never know, but sometimes it feels that way, as if one life unfurled only because another folded.

In therapy, I’ve been continuing my work with IFS (Internal Family Systems), learning to both understand and soothe my nervous system when it becomes dysregulated. My body learned early how to brace for both closeness and distance, an old rhythm that still moves through me. Healing, I’ve learned, isn’t about erasing the past, but it’s about remembering who I am beneath its pulse.

Recently, I brought forth a memory that felt like touching that essence of who I am. I was back in Taipei, sitting at a dented metal table in Di Hua, eating shrimp and water chestnut rolls wrapped in tofu skin and fried crisp by an old woman with quick hands. She slid them across the table on a small paper plate with a dollop of spicy mustard beside them. Maybe a dollar fifty. I don’t know exactly why in this moment I felt entirely myself, absent of roles and stories, just presence.

A few days later, I was lovingly reminded of the scene I wrote about my father enjoying a slice of pepperoni pizza at Mac and Manco’s on the Wildwood, NJ boardwalk.…to watch my dad bite into a slice of pepperoni pizza dripping with grease was almost inspiring. He’d fold the slice of pizza, vertically, and hold it in his hand as he chewed, shaking it just a little up and down, up and down, up and down, his eyes unfocused, almost dreamy. When just the crust remained, he’d open it up, shake salt into the little boat and eat it salt side down.

And it struck me: even in the moments when I am most me, he’s there too. Not as a shadow, but as a shimmer. The shared pulse of being alive to the world.

After my father died, I wondered if he’d left a letter for me somewhere. Or a letter for my son. The distance between us seemed infinite, and I desperately wanted a tether. At that time I was devastated to be left without a keepsake. Now I see it differently.

The braid continues—grief and love, loss and aliveness, my nervous system discovering the steadiness and presence that is mine alone. Those lives that intertwine with ours are not lost to us; they help shape us.

Maybe that’s what writing (and struggling with my memoir’s structure) is teaching me: our stories don’t begin or end cleanly. They loop back through time, through experience, through the body, offering endless chances to touch the essence of who we are. The lives that intersect with ours, or run alongside them, aren’t just backstory; they move with us, present and past intertwined, shaping the story we live even as they belong to another time.

Half of my genetic material is my father’s. I look in the mirror and see the deep elevens between my eyebrows, the forehead creases, the echo of his dimples in my cheeks when I smile.

The play, the light, the sparkle, the shine.

“We didn’t celebrate this year,” he said.

I paused, my finger marking the spot. “What do you mean?”

“In fourth grade, the leprechaun came and left us treats in our classroom and did a bunch of tricks. I saw the fourth graders today, running in the hall, following the leprechaun’s footprints. In fifth grade, we did nothing.”

K. was ten, almost eleven, with fresh braces that aged him a few years the instant he walked out of Dr. Wong’s office carrying a Crest bag full of orthodontic swag.

I set the book aside and put my arm around him. His bare skin was warm against mine, and I flashed back to the early weeks of being napping buddies, breastfeeding skin-to-skin in my bed.

“Gosh,” I said, giving him a squeeze. “That’s kind of a bummer.”

His cheeks flushed, and his eyes welled.

“We didn’t celebrate either,” he added, rolling away to face the wall.

I knew what he was talking about. For the first time, I hadn’t prompted the kids to build a leprechaun trap the night before St. Patrick’s Day.

To be honest, I had forgotten. My mind was elsewhere, circling adult problems, probably in a conflict of some kind that escapes me now. But likely, I was so focused on building a trap for myself, I forgot the leprechaun’s.

The leprechaun that visited our house usually knocked over chairs, sprayed whipped cream on the counter, spilled the vase of flowers, wrote a snarky note in rainbow colors, toilet-papered the lights, scattered Skittles down the stairs, and always, always evaded then wrecked the homemade cardboard trap.

“It’s kind of sad,” K. said. “I guess in fifth grade everything stops.”

I tried to cheer him toward Easter with, “It’s just around the corner!” But his words stayed with me.

Over the past decade, I have likely held myself to higher-than-average standards of keeping my kids plugged into childhood magic. Because I was the one who initiated the shift in our family, the impact on the boys has often felt like it landed squarely on my shoulders. The holidays, the little rituals, like setting out milk and cookies for Santa, hot-gluing felt fish scales on hoodies for costumes, and hiding hard-boiled dyed eggs around the house, became my way of holding steady amidst the change.

Sometimes I worry I am not doing enough. That if I let one tradition slip, the whole architecture of their childhood will crumble. After K. noticed, I fretted that forgetting the leprechaun trap meant I was failing them somehow. And sometimes I admittedly measure my success as a mother by how well I can maintain these traditions, how long I can keep the magic alive.

When one of them told me so-and-so’s mom put a note in his lunchbox every day, I scrambled to find the Post-Its. If I spaced on tooth fairy money, I chirped an excuse for her (she’s just so damn busy, all those teeth!) and left extra cash the next night. Don’t even get me started on the activity-Advent calendars I made and then had to stick to. Pulling the kids around the neighborhood in a red wagon to look at Christmas lights sounds delightful, but it’s really taxing in the freezing cold.

Don’t get me wrong; I wasn’t simply doing all of these things from a place of guilt or should. Part of me genuinely wanted to because I loved all of it, too. Part of me still does both want to and love it.

But now the kids are older (12 and 15), and I’m not just competing with time. I’m up against screens, social media, the glow of phones and iPads, earbuds that silence my voice, in addition to their busy schedules with sports, theater, and friends. And if I’m being honest, I’m also navigating my own needs: self-care, career, relationship, friendship, travel, spirituality. The parts of myself that can’t only be defined by motherhood.

The pressure to be the keeper of all the magic while also building a life of my own can feel overwhelming.

Lately, I am trying to relieve pressure on myself by trying to see it differently. By showing my children that family doesn’t have to look one way, that I get to design a life that extends beyond motherhood, and that we can challenge the norms we’ve been handed, I’ve also been teaching them resilience and creativity. Maybe preserving these moments of wonder isn’t just about holding back the tide of growing up.

Maybe it’s about giving them a model for questioning the world’s rules, the ones that too often lead to violence and harm, and carving out space for something kinder, braver, and more authentic and playful instead.

Maybe that is a kind of permission to wonder that I’m offering them, just by showing up as myself, even if we wait until the very last minute to carve the pumpkins, and the blasted squirrels eat them before Halloween anyway.

I know magic and play isn’t just theirs to keep. I’m pretty good at giving my own inner child the space. This weekend my friend and I stood in her backyard dancing to club music blasting from her outdoor speaker. We were trying not to fall back on our usual moves—the classic finger snaps, the hands pumping the air—and instead attempted hip thrusts and foot shuffles that felt clumsy and ridiculous. We kept cracking up, losing the beat, starting over. “No more hands!” she’d shout, and then immediately throw her hands up anyway.

It was absurd. It was glorious.

Then on Monday, I hiked a brand new trail to me (that’s hard to find!) and was enamored by the changing leaves. Autumn has always been my favorite. I’ll tell you summer, but under a cozy hoodie, my heart will whisper, the fall. The experience was pure glee for many reasons. Around every bend in the trail was more of nature’s absolute beauty anchoring me to the present moment, gifting me the ability to stay full of awe in my play.

I think about K. that night in March, turned toward the wall, mourning the potential end of something. And I think about myself dancing in the yard and hiking on that trail. There’s something in that gap, between his grief over growing up and my refusal to stop playing, that feels important.

Maybe what I am passing on aren’t the traditions themselves but the knowledge that change doesn’t have to equal loss. That play doesn’t end, it just evolves.

What matters isn’t just preserving their magic, but also letting them see me keep mine. I forgot the leprechaun trap, sure. But maybe the real trap is thinking that being a ‘good mom’ means that I am the orchestrator of the magic, that wonder is something I’m only supposed to curate for them, not live for myself.

I approached the front desk and asked for a reading. They handed me a thick binder, the pages glossy and stuffed with photoshopped one-pagers advertising the psychics on staff. A Post-It tab marked the page of whoever happened to be on duty that day.

It was a weekend, the center was bustling, and I was not picky. I simply asked for the next available, conscious that my friends would be left browsing crystals while I had my mystery meeting. It wasn’t my first time with a psychic or intuitive, and it wouldn’t be my last, but it stands out as the most memorable because of what she eventually told me. More memorable even than Donna, the phone psychic from upstate New York, who told me things about my father she couldn’t possibly have known.

At a small table, in a dimly lit room, I sat across from a woman with dyed red hair that fell to her shoulders, a plain black shirt with a long skirt, and pale eyes that caught the light. She set a timer for twenty-minutes, the length of time for which I’d prepaid.

Judging by the sparsely decorated surroundings, this was clearly a rented space, not her personal office. She asked me if I wanted to know anything specific, and I probably asked a question about next steps in my relationship. Then, she shuffled a deck of tarot cards, set out a formation in front of us, and began to speak to me. She told me many things I don’t remember now. Things that maybe were relevant or helpful at the time but since have absorbed into another realm beyond my conscious memory.

But then she said this: “You have two sons, and you will have a daughter.”

Um. What?

“Huh,” I said, stopping her. “Are you sure?” My mind reeled with skepticism. I had no plans to have more children. It was completely off the map, this declaration. Her statement seemed to invalidate everything she had just said prior. I was ready to chalk the reading up to being a scam, but she remained certain.

“You will absolutely have a daughter,” she said, leaning closer. Her pale eyes gleamed like two ghosts in her face, and I saw a fleck of gold in her iris.

“Could it be my partner’s daughter you’re talking about?” I asked. I wondered if the psychic could sense her presence in my field.

“No,” she said, leaning toward me even further, her breasts resting on top of the tarot spread. “You will have a biological daughter.”

I couldn’t fathom what she meant. A daughter? I’d always thought about having a daughter, but I wasn’t exactly an easy teenager, and I both desired and feared the challenge of raising one myself. I left that dimly lit room unsettled, a little irritated even, ready to dismiss the whole reading as a waste. I found my friends amongst the incense sticks, and when they asked how the reading went, I rolled my eyes.

Looking—feeling—back now, perhaps there was a shred of hope? Curiosity? Intrigue? I brushed it all aside as we set out to hike Cathedral Rock, and in the months and years that followed, I hardly thought of it again.

I didn’t realize that it would return years later with an entirely different weight.

It’s September of 2025, and against the backdrop of a constantly tumultuous world, I’m attempting to do my best with life. On one side, there is the normal stuff: negotiating screen time with my 12-and-15-year-olds, folding laundry, stirring soup, answering emails, planning camping adventures, leading school board work, participating in community theater, and staying in connection with friends.

And then there’s the urgent stuff: parenting my children through their very legitimate fears, doing work that makes a positive impact in the world, finishing my memoir, being kind to strangers, taking care of our hurting environment, learning how to love better, and breathing through so much content so that I can find my voice to speak on it.

A few weeks ago, I was hiking in a forest that feels like it remembers me, like it holds all the pieces of me so I don’t ever have to lose any of them. And there it was again, unbidden: the psychic’s words. You will have a daughter.

I stopped walking and closed my eyes. Why was this returning to me now? The ways of the forest can feel mysterious at first. But as I stayed with the memory, I realized something. The daughter the psychic spoke of—she was already here. Not in some future timeline, not swaddled in my arms smelling of my milk. She had been here all along, tucked in my chest, in the hollows of my ribs, in the folds of my mind.

Sometimes, she shows herself in fragments: a child with a wild mop of hair, a timid version staring out the school bus window, an angry one stomping her feet, a little one longing to please. My therapist calls them my attachment parts.

I now call them my daughters.

Right when my former relationship ended, these parts were all vying for my attention. I invited them to a campfire circle with me, literally lit a candle and named them one by one, and promised to listen.

There were so many, and they had a lot to say!

It was one of the first times I engaged in this practice of externalizing parts of myself in order to understand them better, and it was a profound game-changer in my process of healing.

Today, I sit beside them in moments of quiet, sitting with the fear, the longing, the grief. I brush hair from their faces, tuck them in, hold them to my warm body, send them off to play in the ocean, validate their anger, offer the comfort I once needed.

Through IFS parts work, I’ve started to develop a steadier Self, the only one that can truly mother these daughters, the ones who needed comfort before I had the capacity to give it, the ones who had been waiting for me to come back for them. These daughters are the ones I’ve always carried. They are the ones I am learning to love, fully and fiercely, in real time.

But here’s the truth: If you want to really see all the ways you can fuck up, become a parent. While my daughters may not be running the entire show anymore, parenting them is not easy. It makes parenting my own children seem like a breeze (and it’s not). Sibling rivalry is real. Ganging up is common. And shutting down and pretending they don’t care is among a list of favorite strategies these little ones like to employ.

Recently, I became more aware of a tendency I have in conversation to interrupt. Part of it stems from my own excitement to engage, to connect, to relate. And I imagine that part of it is one of these daughters bursting through to present time to be seen, heard, and understood.

During the summer of 2024, just a month after my former relationship came to a close, during a trip to Thailand, my younger son rode next to me in a tuk-tuk along the bustling streets of Bangkok. The night air was thick with humidity, exhaust fumes, and the smoke from street-cart grills. I was carrying my grief with me—we both were—the quiet weight of everything we’d lost and everything I’d worked to hold together.

K.’s hand, small and warm, found its way to rest lightly on my knee. I looked at him, my eyes full of tears, and placed my own hand over his. In that simple touch, I felt the steadier Self I was cultivating come forward. Even though I’d just recently started to engage with IFS practices, for years I’d been tending to my inner daughters and not realizing it. All the hours of yoga, women’s temples, therapy sessions, journaling, writing groups, even parenting. All the life. It meant something. But this new chapter was giving it an undeniable meaning beyond what I knew before.

“I think I want to be a chef,” K. said. “And my cookbook would be called Home Cookin’ with K.”

“That is amazing,” I said. “I love it. Tell me more.”

As he spoke about his plans, I kept my eyes on his face. And I saw more than just his dreams. I saw the echo of my daughters in the way I listened, fully present, without interruption, with space for joy even amidst sorrow. His excitement, his small hand on my leg, the neon lights flashing past us, they were all reminders that within each of us are little ones with hopes and grief that often coexist. A touch, an intentional moment of connection, a deep kind of listening—this is what allows our children inside to feel safe.

The daughter the psychic spoke of are the parts of me I’ve learned to mother. They are here in real time. They are my responsibility to care for. They show up in both fleeting, ordinary moments and the ones that ache. It is finally today that I am closer to understanding the sentiment that we can not truly love or take care of another (or this world) until we commit to the practice of loving and taking care of all the parts of ourselves.

My babies,

I’m right here.

I’ll never let you go.