A letter from a mom to her daughters
My Dearest Daughters,
Yes, my sweet ones, you may be made of sugar and spice and all that’s nice, but you are so much more. Oh, how great this gift is to be a woman. You are pretty as a picture, but beneath your beauty lies a strength born of the driving force of women that came before you. This strength is quiet, bold, and impenetrable. Call upon it. Use it. Be the warrior that you are. Let this strength pull you up when you are down, dust you off, and propel you forward to start again.
Cry, laugh, shout…
Can suffering be interpreted through a different lens?
To watch you suffer rips my heart into a million pieces.
I am overwhelmed by the weight of helplessness.
Restrained in a windowless room,
I can offer you no relief.
I bounce from wall to wall to wall
I pound on the doors
pleading with a higher power to intervene.
How do I make sense of this?
As goodness goes,
there are none like you.
This world has its share of the greedy, the hate-filled, and the graceless,
but you are not them. …
The comfort of escaping to the simple yet complex world underneath a mango tree
I stop to rest underneath my favorite mango tree. With its sprawling branches and wide canopy, the giant tree provides perfect shade from the tropical heat. I lean back against its thick trunk and take my shoes off, letting my tired feet and legs melt into the damp earth. I hear the parakeets squawking high above and let my brain relax to their chatter.
The air is sweet and fragrant from the ripened rotting mangos that litter the grass; some split open from falling off the branches high above. Mushy bright yellow flesh oozes out from the split skins, and…
A metaphor from my therapist that helped me stop expecting others to behave as I wanted them to and accept them as they are
My therapist helped me navigate my divorce and all the crazy that came before, during, and after. She was a godsend. Through her own divorce several decades prior, she had an experience that seemed to mirror my own, and I respected her guidance immensely. One of the many impactful things that I learned from her was to stop expecting an elephant to behave like a giraffe.
For months and months, I would show up to our…
The crisis enveloping our country is a reflection of our darkest instincts oozing out into the open. We’ve collectively lifted the rock to reveal the foulness that lurks within each of us and it has slowly become who we are as a nation.
The current social and political climate in the United States is a reflection of the darkest parts of ourselves magnified and embedded into our collective national consciousness. Social unrest is certainly not new to this country and neither is violence, but I’m not talking about that. Our current national tone isn’t so much about a movement as…
Five characteristics to look for and an example of what could happen if you get in the crosshairs of a workplace predator.
We tend to think that men who prey on women look like boogeymen or live along the margins of society. However, that simply is not true. Now that’s not to say that some men who prey on women don’t look like scary boogeymen or exist on the fringes of society, but the majority don’t. Just because a man has a high position in a company, is clean-shaven, wears an expensive suit, and carries himself with boyish charm, doesn’t mean he can’t be a predator.
On the contrary, he can be the most cunning and manipulating kind of predator, one you…
Most of us are aware of the horror stories of online dating and the peculiar, goofy, and sometimes creepy men that are out there. There are obvious red flags we should heed but more importantly, there are also subtle red flags to take note of before considering moving forward with someone. You are probably well aware by now of the more obvious red flags from the many articles written on the subject, your own experience, or from the stories of your single friends as it has become more and more commonplace to lament to your girlfriends in weekly bitch sessions…
Dancing along in a world created by my mind. Hiding behind the smoke and mirrors. Losing myself to someone I thought better than I. Ignoring the rumblings deep within until they would be ignored no longer, demanding acknowledgment.
The destruction
I never thought divorce would be the destruction of my life and of me, but it was. I now know that the upending of my life through divorce in the midst of my own complacency was long overdue. A necessary thing. It was time to let go of what wasn’t real. …
The reckoning of my soul
The walls I built to hold it all in are crumbling. Sitting vulnerable in my room with the doors and windows blown wide open.
My space is darkness now. Solitude. Naked in a swamp of my own doing. Fear lurking above the murky waters. A heavy fog hovers along the water’s edge. There is no crevice too small, for fear swarms everywhere.
Nothing looks the same. Nothing sounds the same. Old words no longer make sense, no longer apply. People in my life no longer seem to fit. I am not recognizable even to myself…
The street is crowded with people returning home after a long day of work. We look beyond each other, shoulders brush as we race to make the light at the crosswalk. The noise of the city is deafening. Taxis screeching through traffic, cars honking, voices raised, the whooshing of buses stopping and starting as they make their way through the city. A slight turn of my head just enough to catch a glimpse of my reflection in a store window stops me cold.
In that mili-second, time slows. I can hear my heart beating in my ears. As my eyes…
