Lady So and So

Sep 19, 2018

It’s Always My Year

Today is my birthday. Every year on my birthday, I take the day off work to reflect on what has gone wrong during the past year and what I can do to make it better. After some contemplation, I then resolve to make this next year my year. It’s a term we millennials use to say that we are going to do something that resembles living our best lives now during the next 365 days. When I say it, it means I am going to find a way to stop feeling like I’m trudging through life, and feel like my steps…

Jun 20, 2017

Losing Your Peak in Las Vegas

I am finally starting to realize that I have already peaked. I guess peaking is something you don’t know you are doing while it is going on. But like one of those rollercoasters that start on the top of a hill, you don’t know you are going down until the down is already going. These things are hard to notice, at first: An extra line here, a new set of cellulite there. Sometimes it is easy to talk away. “I’m still cool, I just know I am! I’m only 32! Nobody peaks at 32! This means I’ll be dead at…

Mar 02, 2016

Swallow Darkness Whole

So-and-So I decided this one time three years ago to go to nursing school. Because my first degree was in art and communications, I had no science prerequisites, and so it took me three whole years to finish. These years have been the most trying I have been through so far. There have been so many things going on outside of nursing school that have been so trying, in addition to the difficulty of school itself. My toddlers have grown into children, we moved, our extended family has dealt with cancer and marriages, and we had another baby (because there just wasn’t enough other things…

May 12, 2015

“THIS” Ain’t All

There are certain moments that you will never forget. They follow you around like the smell of day-old perfume on a shirt you forgot to wash. Every once in a while, if you turn your head a certain way, the aroma hits you again, and there you are: days, months, years back in time. Tonight, I got a whiff of August 2014. It is August in Alabama. The heat and humidity feel heavy and yeasty like standing inside a loaf of baking bread. I am perched in a storage shed, covered in grime, looking at the frail frame of my 86 year old grandmother. She looks like…

Jan 01, 2015

Small, Dense and Whole

It’s 1am on January 1st, 2015. I’m alone and blogging, which is always how I blog because if I open my computer for more than two seconds, someone under the age of five is automatically scaling my legs and asking to watch YouTube videos of Yo Gabba Gabba and a Baby Monkey Riding on a Pig. I did not write anything in the year of 2014. I sat and stared at the same screen over and over again, trying to formulate words to accompany what was happening. There was no space left inside myself for words in 2014. They would…

Dec 21, 2013

The Lysol Repertoire

I was in the car with my dearest husband yesterday, going to Home Depot. The children are spending a few days with their merciful grandparents, and we had silence to fill. I started a conversation about another couple we know, and how I felt they were “out of touch with reality”. My words said “out of touch with reality” but my heart meant “they seem to always get what they want and I don’t – their life must be a fairy tale”. Because dearest husband knows me so well, he knew exactly what my heart meant and took the opportunity…

Sep 26, 2013

White Box Universe

Imagine the universe is a big white box. White walls, white floor, white ceiling. The whole bit is brilliant, blinding white. Then people come along. And we, in particular people fashion, have decided to claim little squares of this white box for ourselves. For generations, we have carefully taught one another how to mark our respective territories, scratching lines like frames into the white box to define a piece of what’s rightfully (such a relative term) ours. We have no tools, no art supplies, nothing to create with except our worn down fingernails, but scratch we must until we carve…

Sep 19, 2013

AAAAHAHAHAHHSJKHDKJHFKJHDPF!!!

It’s my birthday. Which is probably the only reason I am giving myself time to sit and write anything, when there is so much to do. I’m 29 now. Yesterday I was 28. Yesterday, and the 364.3 days before yesterday, also known as my 28th year of life, has ((hopefully)) been the craziest one of my life. I’ve been so busy, busted up, scattered, fearful, joyful and tired that I haven’t been able to formulate a story from it. There have been no nuggets of wisdom, no cutesy headlines or main ideas from all of this. I can feel myself…

Jan 13, 2013

The Polar Bear Clown Car Driver

For our family, the holidays are crazy. When you live in one town and ALL of your family on both sides- mine and Chris’s families- live all together in another town, things get crazy. Everyone wants to see you. Everyone wants to have a special audience with you and your children. It’s really nice to be loved that much. It’s really nice to have people want you to be with them, but scheduling in all of those visitations and gifting and eating makes for a crazy existence. Factor in some divorced parents, several sets of aunts and uncles, and a sprinkle…

Sep 20, 2012

The Antiachlogger Manifesto

I don’t understand some blogging moms. Most of them are full of crap. Seriously, what kind of sadistic over-achiever has time to actually sit down and blog about the exploits of homeschooling her 6 children!?!? “God is so good to us”, she says. “Here is a collection of prosumer-grade photos of me and my six children under four making bird houses out of trash that we all picked up from the side of the road! Aren’t Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Elijah and Rebekah all so cute in the new outfits I knitted for them out of our pet Alpaca’s fur…