I remember, too, the slow sink of the mattress under her weight. Her form, backlit by the hall light, sitting on the very edge of my bed after the house went to sleep and the dust of an argument with Dad had settled. Her voice was a low murmur, tucking the blankets under my chin, repeating the liturgy I needed to survive the night: You are good. He’ll forgive you. It was just a mistake. I love you.

(She loves me. She loves me. She loves me.)

Read more

While also learning about the unmet needs of my AuDHD child and staying on top of the needs of my other previously diagnosed ND child.

I had to hire a lawyer to help with Luna’s education case. I have never hired a lawyer before. Never imagined I would, unless I was framed for murder and Jessica Fletcher helped prove my innocence. My ex and I even navigated a divorce and dual custody with Google Docs and a Certified Internet Mediator who may or may not still, you know, exist in this capacity anymore. (I have the paperwork, though; I’m legit.)

Luna’s IEP and IEE review is this week. Everyone is going, plus their lawyers, aunts, and educational psychologists. I want to vomit. I am so scared. All the time. When will it truly be too much for her? Will I see it in time?

It started with random leg pain. Sporadic. Inconsistent. Not debilitating. It morphed into a deeply resonant clunk of the hip joint. A dancer’s hip diagnosis, ironic, given my alma mater didn’t allow social dancing until a year after I graduated. The news broke on CNN.

Sometimes the clunk made my ribs contract. My lower back spasm.

I struggle to navigate stairs. Driving sends nerve pain up and down my entire right side. The angle? The foot flexing? I have no idea. But it hurts and tingles and feels wrong and is too temperature (hot or cold, I can’t tell).

I have four MRIs to schedule, and a nerve mapping or something. No one can tell me what is happening.

“I would like to see a rheumatologist,” I said to my Primary Care.

“I agree,” she said. “That’s what I’m working on. We just have to prove our case for it.”

Everything requires proving.

“I recommend walking sticks,” my twenty-something PT said.

“But why?” I asked.

She didn’t know.

I almost stumbled in Target today. Twice. Leg just not agreeing to what I wanted of it, despite using available supports.

I dropped my AirPods in the parking lot. I managed to collect the case, but didn’t see where each earpiece skittered off to. I tried to get down to look.

But I couldn’t.

I am not ready to be disabled. Well. Physically disabled.

I know, without a doubt, that so much of what I am experiencing physically is exacerbated, if not directly caused by, stress. But I also know that my current stressors are not going to just disappear because I acknowledge them.

I am running on empty. On fumes. I am stalled on the side of the road and sprinting towards the finish line.

With walking sticks I don’t know how to use.

I’ve said it before, but it never landed quite the same, even to me: I was ten years old the first time I tried it. I just wanted an escape, even if it likely came with eternal punishment or even just another spanking. Trauma not only warps your sense of safety, but also your sense of YOU. And the nature of being.

The fabric of reality begins to unravel.

I always knew, rationally, that ten was quite young. But I had shit going on that most ten year olds did not, so I could make it make sense.

And then later, I looked at my children and saw only the peace I never had. I thought safety was the absence of violence and violation, and because their childhoods looked nothing like mine, I assumed they were walking through a protected grove.

Read more

The last time I indirectly heard from my own mother, she had asked my ex-husband to keep my children away from my horrible self lest I further corrupt them. To his credit, he nay’d that request.

Sometimes I want to call her so badly. I want to chat. I want to tell her I finished a whole book and it is not total shit. I am working on another, and another. Maybe I can finally do the thing I have wanted since those journals she gave me: to keep my words. I doubt she would enjoy my content, to be honest.

I miss my grandma. She passed years ago, and while the grief is not fresh, her kindness remains. She loved us so much. She let me have orange juice and cocoa puffs for breakfast. She listened for hours when I told her stories about my sand sculptures at Mission Bay. She really loved the Lakers. Luna is named for her, in a way. Gramma Bevie, short for Beverly. Luna Everly, short for Beverly. She was the one woman of my family of origin who loved me until her last day.

I miss my aunt, too. It always felt like she saw me in a way my own family did not. Maybe because she had daughters and I was an anomaly among two brothers. I admired her in a shy, fawning way. She was welcoming. She did not treat me like I was stupid. She did not try to make me talk for those months I stopped. She saved my favorite Yoplait flavors and always had the VHS of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory queued up when we came over.

Read more

I’m not there.

I’m somewhere before there, but I’m also a poor judge of time and space.

I am taking my medicine as prescribed.

I am being honest with Meghan. With my new (and delightfully ND and Trauma focused) therapist. I’m trying to be honest with myself.

But when is the tipping point? When do I stop logicking.

Push through one more thing, then you’re done.

You know this is a cognitive distortion.

Drink some more water.

Sit by the blooming garden.

I do it, all of it. I focus on orange petals fluttering in a breeze. A wasp crawling under the eaves. The way Luna and Xander’s laughter amplifies as it bounces down the stairwell. How I fit just so into the crook of Meghan’s shoulder as I fall asleep.

Read more

So when the doctors nodded their solemn heads at each other and book-ended pediatric anxiety with Autism, we already knew. It wasn’t the blow they thought it was.

But he was Xander. Always Xander. Fully delightful and fully himself and not ever lacking in any way. He read at 3. He counted to 100 before 3. His ginormous eyes, the warm brown of a creek bed, took everything in.

Always.

“Oh, an octagon,” he said at 20 months at stop sign in front of the cupcake shop.

Clearly, I understood what Autism meant. What neurodiversity looked like across all genders and spectrums and presentations.

And then came Luna.

All smiles and desperately wanting friends and typing scripts out for Starbucks orders and feeling “other.” Knowing she missed a social cue but not knowing how. Or why. Reading the tone of a room but not understanding her place within that tone.

Wanting, so earnestly, so desperately, to make everyone around her happy. Because she knows, you see, that she is a half beat behind. Looking at me across the dinner table when a silly joke turns sour and stiff silence followed her attempt at connection.

“She lacks grit,” they said at her student support meeting. “She doesn’t value learning. She doesn’t value education.”

I put my hand over her trembling pant-leg, grasping what I hoped what her shin beneath enormous swaths of denim.

“What do you think changed, Luna, that your grades are where they are?”

She positively vibrated next to me. Pink and blue hair trembling just within my periphery. Foot bouncing an unpredictable staccato against my leg.

“I think I got tired of faking, maybe?”

The district faces blinked at her, at me, at the Zoom camera. “So, that means you CAN do it.”

The weight of their words, of their nuerotypical adult expectations on my barely thirteen year old AuDHD child, settled beneath my incessant need to please. To acquiesce. To agree.

Hot and prickly and unignorable.

Relentless.

I scribbled on the hall pass on the table in front of her, “You OK?”

She took the pen and hunched over the small rectangle. “They all just deny me and think I’m stupid.”

I tasted copper and rage and the sulfur of a struck match.

“We need to stop.” The words fell from my mouth. I found myself on my feet. “That’s enough for now.”

My fingers curled around Luna’s slender arm. Pulling her. Removing her. Claiming her.

My voice felt tight and thick. Too fragile to hold the solidity of words.

Somehow, I don’t recall the breakdown of steps, we found ourselves outside the portable classroom, standing on the ramp leading to the parking lot.

Heat stung my eyes.

Your’e not, your’e not, you’re not, I whispered into her hair, tears spilling, unbidden, down my cheeks.

“It’s OK, Mommy,” she whispered, and in that instant I saw her toddler self, fingers clinging desperately to a broken egg shell found on the sidewalk.

“Let’s save it,” she’d said, eyes wide and an impossible shade of gray-green.

Moments later, after just a few steps, the shell had fallen and shattered. Brittle shards of robin blue splintered around us. Fat tears wrapped her eyes and streaked down her face. “Why couldn’t I help it?” she pleaded.

But now, now she comforted me. “You’re doing your best.”

And I am. Every day. Every second. Every breath.

But that is not her burden to bear.

I pulled her from school on the very day of that meeting. I wrote the district: “Luna will suffer if she stays.”

She doesn’t lack grit. She doesn’t need a planner. She doesn’t need to fake it just because she is capable of doing so.

She needs people to listen. To hear what she’s saying. To believe her.

Walking one of my dog-clients later that day, my phone buzzed against my leg.

Luna: I don’t wanna be dumb forever.

My lungs filled as I sucked in all the oxygen around me.

My fingers hovered above the keyboard.

You are everything. You are stardust and life and rivers and mountains and everything everywhere always all at once.

You contain galaxies.

I love you, my fingers typed.

My phone pinged with her reply. A .gif of an otter fighting an octopus.

I love you too, Mommy.

Luna has smiled more in the past 36 hours than she has in time that can only be measured in months. She is lighter on the earth; her shoulders no longer touch her ears.

She spoke. And we listened.

We will always listen.

Children tell the truth. They tell us the why. We just have to believe them.

One. I’m going to a membership model. But it will be cheap and have amazing extras! (Like website organization! New content! EDITED CONTENT!) (Don’t get too excited.)

Why? Well, one is for Betty. Betty is my anxiety brain and we Do Not Like Her. She tells me I’m a fraud and shouldn’t even spend money on submission fees because I’m not worth it. Making my Substack paid shows Betty I’m legit and tells her to shut the fuck up. (Oh, new or edited content won’t erase swearing.) Also, anything I make from Substack can directly fund those submissions!

Speaking of submissions, here’s some fun news! I have been accepted into three separate anthologies due to come out this summer! I do not have links or exact dates, but I will share once I do. (One nonfiction, one short story, one poetry selection).

I feel a bit like Mary Tyler Moore throwing her hat into the air.

And finally, my name. I’ll be using a pen name (same initials) going forward, and trying to basically separate my personal chaotically rambling self from any version of professional writer I’m able to assemble with duct tape and cardboard tubes. I know it won’t be complete anonymity, and I am OK with that. I have my reasons. (Also I get to use my kids’ names AND keep initials so I’m thrilled.)

I don’t have a solid timeline for the changes, but I know they’ll be awesome. Lit. Fire. Groovy. All that and a bag of chips. Bet. Whatever.

Stay tuned!

In Kindergarten I answered Miss Winters’ prompt honestly and eagerly and announced at Circle Time that I would be a butterfly when I grew up.

Andrew Clark laughed at me, “Dummy! You can’t be an animal!”

So I changed my mind.

In third grade I dressed up as Amy Grant for Career Day. Not just a “singer,” but her specifically. Mom wouldn’t let me perm and dye my hair, but I made a microphone out of an empty toilet paper roll and mentally played El-Shaddai on a loop the entire day. (I wasn’t the joke this time because my 5 year old brother had dressed up like a Monkey, complete with a banana. My older brother wandered around his adjoining middle school in a Hawaiian shirt, carrying the previous night’s empty pizza box.)

Read more

Read more

But Julian had a secret: he lived in a world where gravity was me…

Read more

That isolating echo is all the confirmation we get: a hollow sound in a vast, empty space. We’ve done the work, meticulously compiled the evidence: the broken laws, the systemic harm, the undeniable injury inflicted upon people. Upon women. Children.

We laid out the proof, clear a…

Read more

Later, the day settles into the rhythms of home. I sit on the sofa with Luna, watching silly animal videos on a tablet: red pandas falling over, kittens discovering their own tails. Our laughter is easy and uncomplicated. On the weekends, Meghan and I head toward the water, scanning the surface for the sleek, dark heads of seals bobbing in the bay. These are the deliberate stitches of my life: the smell of the salt, the hum of a folk playlist, the quiet satisfaction of mixing pancake batter for tomorrow. It is a life made of peace and tiny, bright joys.

But the light is landing differently elsewhere.

While I’m waiting for the perfect sunset over the estuary, a mother in Minneapolis is being taken from the world. In Minnesota, the air doesn’t just move; it bites. It is a sharp, predatory cold that finds the gaps in your coat and settles in your bones.

I know that winter light from my years in Chicago. It is flat and unforgiving, turning the snow in the gutters to a rusty sludge. I think of the heater humming in a car, a small pocket of borrowed warmth against the freeze. I think of her van — its glove-box now a graveyard of stuffed animals.

I think of the sound of the shot. In that brittle, frozen air, sound carries differently. It’s a sharp, metallic crack that shatters the everyday into a million pieces, echoing off the ice until there is nothing left but the wind.

How do we hold these two things at once? How do I frame a glowing sunset on my screen — perfect, preserved, safe — and not see the faces of families whose lives have been splintered? The geography of home has shifted; the grocery store has become a trap and the school run a gauntlet.

We chase the light because we’re desperate to believe it touches everyone. But right now, the light is hitting a wall. And until we find a way to tear it down, our small joy: the photo walks, the laughter, the search for life in the water — will always feel like something we’ve stolen from those left in the cold.

It was the chaotic theater of the family Christmas Eve party, where cousins blurred into streaks of motion and the gifts piled high felt like proof of a boundless, easy generosity. I remember the heavy gravity of the rituals — the velvet hush of the Advent wreath and my own brief, terrifying moment as the Head Angel. Elevated on a rickety wooden plank above the baptismal pool, I believed, wholly and sincerely, that the air was mine to claim.

But time eventually strips the stage bare. The magic framework of childhood is often revealed to be the brittle skeleton of a story you have to outgrow. I don’t mourn the loss of the illusion: the realization that “generosity” was often as fickle as the winter rain. Nor do I miss the alienation of returning as an adult, a ghost at the same feast, watching rituals that felt like a hollow, ill-fitting costume of belonging.

This year, the hollowness has a sharper edge. This is the first winter since I severed the cord and went no-contact with my parents. It was a necessary, self-preserving break. The final straw was that whisper of malice, urging my kids’ dad to “be careful” lest I somehow manipulate Luna and Xander into embracing queerness. That moment didn’t just break my heart; it crystallized the truth. Their love was conditional. Walking away wasn’t abandonment; it was the fierce protection of my children’s actual, fragile reality.

Last December, I tried to reclaim my place in a holy building. Meghan and I slipped into a Christmas Eve service, reaching for some echo of comfort. But the air was too dense with unforgiven history. When the organist released that first wave of sound, it crashed over me like surf dragging me down. The handbells chimed in a frantic, metallic harmony that sounded less like a celebration and more like an alarm.

Everywhere I looked, the crosses felt like symbols of judgment rather than salvation. The space became a tightening in my throat, a crushing weight of toxic devotion. I couldn’t breathe.

We fled, Meghan pulling me along, leaving the car’s cold leather seats as the only safe altar in the night. The panic attack was the sound of a spell shattering; a painful, full-throated acknowledgment that the old structures could no longer hold me.

Yet, the miracle of now is this: the mystery didn’t vanish, it simply moved. The true light persists, anchored not in nostalgia, but in the present. It shines in the fiercely independent glow of Luna’s bright pink hair and her giggles over a squirrel in the yard. It lives in the earnest liturgy of Xander listing his favorite Sleep Token songs.

It is the simple, honest ceremony we choose: the lights on our tree and the clean, ritualistic scent of pine. Most of all, the genuine magic is in Meghan’s steadiness — the year-round commitment that shows me what an unconditional anchor looks like.

The spell of the past is broken, but the life-giving light remains: built not on old beliefs, but on trust, fairy lights, and love.

I didn’t understand, until I became a mother, how much of parenting is just a slow unlearning. People talk about breaking generational cycles as if it’s one heroic moment, but for me, the work is quieter. It’s the small, daily choices: the way I answer a question that would have once been met with shame, the way I kneel instead of looming, the way I bre…

Read more

Even now, when I smell hay or stale beer, my body flinches long before the memories surface. Then comes the old reflex: the quick apology, the prayer for forgiveness that no longer has a target. My brain still speaks fluent scripture.

Some afternoons, a breeze pushes dry leaves across the patio, their soft scraping reminding me of the whispers children m…

Read more

My chest tightens, a quick, familiar clench, and for…

Read more

Read more

My therapist asks if I feel safe now. I tell her, mostly.

She nods, waiting. I fill the space between us with word…

Read more

It’s not defiance or laziness or some quiet protest against responsibility. It’s a truth of capacity: a boundary my body and brain draw without permission. The words sound small, but they contain entire ecosystems of exhaustion: the prickle of overstimulation, the speeding heartbeat of anxiety, the haze of depression blurri…

Read more

Read more