I wanna be Anne Lamott. And NOT JUST because she’s a kick-ass writer. No: I covet her social-justice-beatnik-political leftist-protesting mojo. Lamott grew up with parents heavily invested in social justice. Her father volunteered at prisons, her mother marched in protests. This crap comes naturally to her. JEALOUS. When Lamott had her own kid, one of her first acts […]
Author: Heather Caliri
Memory and the Miracle of Love
Do you ever worry you are not creating enough good memories with the people you love? I do: I wonder if my time with my kids is rich enough, or special enough. Wonder if I am intentional enough in cultivating friendships and sustaining bonds with my husband. And yet, sometimes, I think we worry too […]
How I Went from Stinginess to Simplicity
The other day, my husband caught me darning my underwear. The pair had a hole near my hip. They’re a few years old, so I had thought about tossing them, but pulled out my needle and thread instead. This frugality runs in my blood. My mom grew up poor, her mother was a child […]
I Failed to Become the Perfect Spouse
The last night of my honeymoon, almost fifteen years ago, I set an alarm to wake us up for our first day back at work—and started to cry. “Our honeymoon is over,” I wailed. “Things have been so great so far, but this has been the easy part. What will happen when things get harder?” […]
I’m Ready to Lighten the Heck Up
My first time in any serious therapy, my counselor told me I was depressed. I laughed. It was kind of high-pitched, as if someone had twisted a treble knob too tight. “I’m not depressed,” I tittered. “I’m the happiest person I know! I’m happy all the time!” Thinking back to my cockeyed optimism, I wince, […]
The Biggest Hindrance to Creativity Isn’t Time
Before I had kids, I got a master’s degree in creative writing at San Diego State. I had quit my job as a technical writer not long before, and my husband earned enough that I didn’t need to work. So throughout my degree program, I had all day to write. You would think having that much time […]
Have I Repented too Much?
The book I use for daily prayer, The Divine Hours, includes a lot of confessions, like this classic: Almighty God, my heavenly Father: I have sinned against you, through my own fault, in thought, and word, and deed, and in what I have left undone. I wince almost every time I read this prayer. It’s […]
When “Career” Is a Messy, Beautiful Chaos
When I was twenty, I got a Rotary scholarship to go study literature at the University of Buenos Aires for a year. At the time, I only knew was that UBA was a public university with an excellent reputation. Later, I’d encounter its chaos: professors who chain-smoked without ashtrays in class, roving political party members soliciting […]
Revelation is Not a Guarantee
For a three-month stretch when I was seven or eight, I tried to learn how to pray. When I couldn’t sleep, I’d pull a children’s prayer book down from the shelf and move it to the crack of light that shone in from the hallway. I opened it up to the Lord’s Prayer and read […]
Endurance is Not Cold Tolerance
When I was a new mom, I read that children go through periods of equilibrium and disequilibrium that last about six months each. I kept hoping my daughter was nearing the end of a period of disequilibrium. After all, my sweet girl had been pushing all my buttons for months with expert grace, and she […]
Surrendering to Communion
“Asking is, at its core, a collaboration.” Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking It only took nine unsubscribes to undo me. I use some software to manage the subscribers to my blog, and if there’s activity—people signing up (yay!) people un-signing up (sigh!), I get an email. Lately, I […]
Are You Willing to Listen to the Darkness?
I used to have a kind of waking nightmare. It started in college. I’d be alone in the dorm bathroom, my toiletry caddy in hand, going down the aisle of shower stalls, their white plastic curtains like ghosts’ hems, all in a row. All of a sudden, the dread of what lay behind those curtains […]
The Night I Almost Stopped Being a Christian
The night I almost stopped being a Christian, I sat alone, at midnight, in the living room of the house I shared with three other women. I was twenty-two, almost six months out of college, depressed, and despairing. I’d discovered I was depressed in my therapist’s office the summer before. The revelation was like […]
Why Does Twitter Terrify Me?
Why does using my words terrify me so much? Let’s start out with a confession: Twitter terrifies me. I got my handle a few years ago. The day my friend Melissa explained to me how she manages her twitter account, makes lists, what she posts, and what a hashtag is, my heart thudded in my […]
I Did Not Want to Go to My Grandmother’s Funeral
The night my already-sick grandma took a turn for the worse, my husband asked if I thought I’d go to her funeral. “Oh, hell no,” I said, without thinking. He looked startled, there in our bathroom. We were getting ready for bed, letting our bodies slow down for the end of the day. But now […]
I thought I’d do a new friend a favor and not make friends at all
I realized Joy went to church with me on Pentecost Sunday. I sat with my parents at the special outdoor service, held in the local high school stadium. In the bleachers before the service, I shaded my eyes with my hand to see the stage. There was a girl up there. A girl my age. […]
Dead Stone Come to Life
When I think of resurrection, I think of a stone on my kitchen counter. I picked it up at the beach last year. It’s smooth and gray, like most of the rocks on the beach, with one difference: The holes. One hole pierces its middle. Two opened seashells lodge in another empty space like baby […]
When the Rain Does Not Come
I used to watch the summer monsoons as if they were a picture show. Our house was perched at the top of a hill overlooking Tucson. Every August, thunderheads would roll over the bluish hills and send their pencil-sketch lightning bolts down over the glittering city. I’d turn off all the lights, spin the […]