Bereaved and Blessed

Today You Are Sixteen

October 2, 2019

I intended to start this with a line from a song that I love, called Jack & Diane by John Cougar Mellencamp. It’s about holding on to “16 as long as you can, (because) changes come around real soon (that) make us women and men.” I was going to write about how magical this time […]

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Today You Are Ten

September 17, 2019

You are here, at the start of a moment… Double Digits! A decade in this world and with our family. You reminded us last night that you wouldn’t technically turn 10 until 7:55 a.m. this morning and joked you were going to shout out, “I’m 10!” when the time came at school. You are very […]

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Fabulous News!

August 20, 2019

On Friday afternoon I got a call from the breast center with fabulous news! The results came back earlier than expected. The mass in my breast is a fibroadenoma. It is completely benign and doesn’t need to be removed. Wahoo!!! Yippee!!! Yay!!! They do want me to return for a follow up ultrasound and mammogram […]

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Brave and Anxious

August 14, 2019

I came across this edited version of a page from a children’s story yesterday (via Parenting Works). I love the idea that we can allow ourselves to feel more than one emotion at the same time. It’s okay to cry. We can feel sad and brave. Those two emotions (as well as any others) are […]

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Expect The Unexpected

August 6, 2019

I was supposed to return in 6 months. You’d think, as someone who struggles with anxiety, I’d have been counting down the days to get my right breast rechecked, to see how what they found in December, a small mostly fluid filled cyst with a bit of solid, that had a “high probability of being […]

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Reconciling Missed Potential

July 30, 2019

I wrote and shared another version of this post one year ago today. At some point since then, I found my notes from a session with an old therapist (who moved out of state a few years ago). I discovered that processing “missed potential,” and not “missed opportunity,” were the actual words she used to […]