Posts Tagged ‘parenting’
I Have No Idea Where I’m Going
September 7, 2016
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing…
Read MoreMaybe the Kids Will Sleep in Tomorrow
August 3, 2016
The kids are home for the summer, but my husband has remained on the same schedule under which we operate during the school year, up at 6:30 a.m., fumbling around the room in the dark, until it seems the thought of me still sleeping is just too much to bear, so he turns on the…
Read MoreGod Ponders the Heart
June 23, 2016
In Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth, the writers frame the story in such a way that the common motivations are nested within, or are born from, a new one: the story opens upon a Scottish heath—damp, cold, and windblown—where the Thane of Glamis (Michael Fassbender) and his Lady (Marion Cotillard) stand at the graveside of their young…
Read MoreFifty Shores of Grief
June 14, 2016
I write this the evening of June 12, 2016, the day forty-nine people died in the worst mass public shooting in recent US history. A few hours before hundreds of people faced unspeakable terror, my husband and I finished the first season of Justified, a series about Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), a U.S. Marshal who returns…
Read MoreWho’s Your Daddy?
June 6, 2016
Adoptive parents develop radar for insensitive language and story lines pretty quickly. Wes Anderson’s simplistic treatment of adoption in The Royal Tenenbaums (We’re not biological siblings? Let’s make out!) stuns me. Arrested Development, usually brilliant, employs a similar incestuous twist between adoptive siblings at the end of the series, implying that adoption just doesn’t “count”…
Read MoreThe Tyrannical Self-Gaze
November 24, 2015
I’m doing most of my walking after dark these days as night comes a little earlier. Night walking always makes me feel lighter, almost weightless, so it seems like I’m walking faster than I do in daylight, and since the scenery no longer differentiates one day’s walk from another, my thoughts are in a tunnel.…
Read MoreBlessed Are the Tentmakers
October 22, 2015
For my daughter, Evangeline Sofia, who celebrated her first birthday on the second day of October. “Can you build me a tent in the living room when you get home, Chad?” My wife Becki made this request via Google chat. “A tent?” I replied, laughing. “In the living room? What?” When we were children, my…
Read MoreLet Me Die Like This
September 21, 2015
When I die, Lord, let me go in a plane crash, spiraling down, earthward, earthward, apportioned enough time to pray but not nearly enough to forget what we’re all prone to forget: that the end comes, it rushes up to greet us, every one in flight. What I’d pray in my downfall is: forgive, sweet…
Read MoreSeeking Refuge
September 11, 2015
I’d just put my two young sons to bed when I opened the computer to see the picture of Aylan. My sons are two and five, and the youngest has round soft legs, like Aylan, and little shoes, like Aylan. I saw the picture of Aylan and felt my blood go cold. That day I…
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