“On plane with temporary wife.” This is the text my husband almost sent, seconds before takeoff and a 13-hour communication vacuum. He caught autocorrect just in time. Lucky for him, or he would have found his earthly belongings strewn across our driveway as a welcome home. Wi-Fi to Wife is not much of a semantic […]
perfectionism
I Won’t Say I Read Trashy Books Anymore
My friend Melissa has a way of being kind that also makes me think. We were out for coffee, talking about books. Specifically: about my anxiety about wanting to read more. By most measures, I read a lot, but with the advent of smart phones and parenthood, I read less then I used to. Recently, […]
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?” […]
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 […]
The Missing Pieces
The owners of the vacation home we’d rented clearly liked puzzles. On our first day there, I pulled a used one down from a shelf and started it. On the last night of our stay, a few of us worked late trying to finish it. But we couldn’t. Three pieces were missing, and though my […]
When You Think You’re Too Good for Hope
I used to think of hope as wishes, as little bubbles that floated away from you and popped on the way up to some genie in the sky. Hope seemed ephemeral, insubstantial, the sort of thing you rely on when you’re at your wit’s end. And I made it a point to never be at […]