I still remember where I stood that Sunday. I must have been three or at the oldest four. The church’s smell of coffee drifted above the part in my hair, crisply pleated lines of men’s suit trousers at my level.
I reached up to take again my dad’s hand, callused and rough from years of farm chores. Yet the chuckle I heard wasn’t his.
He must have been two when it happened: back when his cheeks still looked like he was storing up nuts for winter. (Now, at 16, he just eats like he’s storing up for winter.)
The store’s fluorescent lights buzzed above, and the air conditioning was running full-blast there in the South.
Something beautiful happened in my family last weekend.
This is me, in San Diego, with my husband–and my oldest son, who has your back. He is one of the United States’ newest marines.
I sat with a friend recently, warming my hands over a fire pit as the nights here in Colorado begin to slide into fall. What she and her family have been through is nothing short of horrific, and it felt sacred to listen to her story in relative silence.
They’re on the other side of tragedy now–the side they weren’t sure they’d ever see. But because they made it through the trauma, she explained quietly, everyone thought they were okay now.
I’ve been feeling an unexpected, if not undesired, kinship with my man Moses lately.
Remember when Moses comes down the mountain to the all-out idol-worshipping party of 2 million people (who God just brought out of Egypt and is about to give the Ten Commandments)? Moses loses it and breaks the stone tablets in half.
As an author and voracious devourer of fiction, I consistently get a kick out of the comedy Stranger than Fiction (2006), with Will Farrell and Emma Thompson.
Will Farrell’s character, IRS agent Harold Crick, begins to hear a narrator’s voice over his life–a narrator who has power to determine his circumstances. And who indicates he’s going to die.
Harold seeks a literature professor’s advice (Dustin Hoffman), who suggests he start to find his author by determining whether he’s in a comedy or a tragedy.
So there’s this chance raising teenagers could kill me.
I’m (again) in one of these parenting seasons where hope feels like a mind game. There is indeed a battlefield in my brain, in my soul.
When I first got married, it was not long after an intense “mean girls” period in my life.
You know, there are some hard ways to socially learn what not to do. Here are some of the lessons–of varying legitimacy–in which I had been viciously ardently instructed during this period of my life. (Maybe you can relate.)
Months ago, I stumbled upon what I thought was an epiphany: silicone scar strips…which promised, with 4.5 stars on Amazon, to fade stretch marks, people.
My heart lifted. My first child ballooned my belly like a watermelon, complete with stripes. When another mother asked to glimpse my stretch marks after I mentioned their severity, she gasped aloud with some equivalent of Good golly.
As part of the premise of this blog, I commit to uncomfortable conversations worth having. And the onus of that falls on me—toward authenticity in the midst of my own doubt and weirdness.
So today, I’m opening the convo with something I regret.
![Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language](https://www.janelbreitenstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/love-languages-text-1.jpg "Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language")
© 2024 THE AWKWARD MOM
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
