FEATURED POST

Have you read See You Later? A few months into knowing Tom, my mother allowed me to have him on our ski vacation. It’s such a sweet bonding moment that I decided to share in my memoir. We were newly in love and dating. I had just turned 16 and he had just turned 17. Babies in 1988. We were immersed in getting to know one another and already attached at the hip. It’s the Wisconsin Dells. We skied, drank cocoa, sat in a hot tub, stole a few moments alone and roasted marshmallow

A friend’s father passed recently. She texted a few of us, then posted on social media, receiving a range of expected condolences within hours. There were comments about people feeling “sorry” for her “loss,” and others sharing they were here should she need to talk, and others simply offering support through words and emojis. The script for this kind of grief is well-rehearsed, and the world knows its role. Watching it all, I felt the familiar ache rise in my chest. Whenever

Flying monkeys show up after the abuse. They aren’t there to witness it. It could be decades later or it could be the very next day, but they will defend the abuser. There were not two sides in that house. There was a child, and there was a grown people with total power over her. That is not two perspectives, that is two people harming another person who had no way to leave, no way to fight back, and no way to even name what was happening to her. The child lived in fear and s

Watch how a woman blossoms when she finally feels safe.  My children will tell you that my home was a big box of beige, cream and beige colors and light dashes of turquoise and browns with very little bright accent colors as they grew up. My style was very Midwest contemporary and honestly it looked like my home could be anyone’s living space and not necessarily my own.That all ended about 5 years ago, after writing See You Later. It took some time to self publish and durin

It’s hard to deepen the intimacy in a relationship when we feel we can’t say stuff or there are parts of ourselves we need to hide. It’s true that different relationships “pull” for different parts of us. We’re a slightly different person at work than we are at home; we’re a slightly different person to our romantic partner than we are to our friends; we’re a slightly different person to our family than we are to strangers. But if a relationship is predicated on us being a “v

When my daughter was 4, I learned from my daughter that her grandfather was taking her into men’s restrooms. She had seen things she should not. The way I found out? My daughter began having nightmares and stopped wanting to go anywhere with her grandfather. I questioned her and she told me what she had seen. I was shocked and absolutely heartbroken for my little girl. I calmly told her grandfather that I had to ask him something, because I would not be a good mother if I did

One summer, when I was 9, I spent an entire week with my grandmother. She lived 35 minutes from my home. She is the woman who adopted my mother, but never wanted an adopted child. My mother grew up knowing her father wanted her and her mother did not. I did not know this until I was a teenager. Her father was away, 325 days a year as a truck driver. I was afraid of my grandfather, only because I did not know him. I liked my grandmother a lot, I didn’t love her, because I only