Some days my life is reduced to a pile of tiny clothing, and all of it is inside-out. It will take me hours, I am certain, to pull all of these sleeves back through themselves, to flip a thousand tiny neck holes back through a thousand tiny waist holes. On these days, my older child transforms into the human embodiment of my own inner monologue. He perches beside me, holding the pieces of whatever menial task I’ve assigned to him — a toothbrush with a pea-sized squeeze of paste or the mismatched socks I heroically procured from the depths of…
I was just a few weeks pregnant in this picture with my second son and I felt boundless, eternal, as if being pulled by my own private star. I kissed my toddler good night and held him, we held him — his inevitable sibling and me. I put on a latex bodysuit and all of my necklaces and my tallest boots and walked the streets of my city. Everyone was out, all those other inevitable people. We were all so real and alive.We had all been born already. I held my real and alive husband’s hand and laughed with my…
Last year, I joined a Facebook group for Seattle backyard gardeners. It was completely aspirational. We recently moved, and for the first time in my life I’ve become responsible for a small square of yard. I have done exactly nothing with this yard, but I do spend a lot of time reading about what other people do with their yards and staring at their photos.
As the vines on our backyard fence grew into a knotty tangle of terrifying brown spaghetti strangling anything young and green sprouting up below it, I watched the gardeners in the Facebook group post pictures…
Tonight I took a bath with three stray plastic balls, the kind you use for ball pits. They weigh, altogether, about as much as a penny, but I was too tired to take them out. I watched them float aimlessly together from one corner of the tub to the other, connected by some unseen force. They clung to one another and, like myself and my two small children, had nowhere in particular to be.
It’s hard to imagine that just a few months ago I’d rush into my son’s preschool classroom and hurry him out the door before I even…
Today, like so many millions of people around the world, my family celebrated Palm Sunday under quarantine. Of all the tiny griefs of the pandemic, knowing I wouldn’t be able to attend Holy Week services at my church has been an especially achey one for me. Holy Week is the most important time of the year in my spiritual life. Bookended by the pastel crowds of Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday services, I most enjoy the solemn and strange liminality of the less popular services throughout the week. I wash the feet of strangers on Maundy Thursday, and walk the…
“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” John 1:1
“No one’s perfect/But no one’s worthless/We ain’t deserving everything heaven and earth is/But word is good.” -Zacari, “Paramedic!”
If you are a fan of hip hop, or even a passive consumer of the genre, chances are you can relate to the experience of hearing a lyric and having no idea what a word or phrase means. Perhaps you’ve used Genius, a platform that crowd-sources and provides artist explanations of the meaning behind hip hop words and phrases. Or maybe you’ve…
Lately, my almost two-year-old has been running away from me at full speed, sometimes toward the road, other times toward a cliff. As I bolt after him, occasionally injuring myself as I twist an ankle or throw myself down a hill to grab him, I can hear him yelling to me or to himself… “COME BACK!!!” he screams and laughs maniacally as he darts away, “STOP! COME BACK!”
Is my toddler disciplining himself in some way, aware that what he is doing is dangerous and yelling at himself for it? Is he mocking my efforts to contain him by saying…
