Blog

For years, our life has been rhythmic. We pick up speed late summer and sprint through the fall until Thanksgiving. We slow our pace in December and gradually trot toward a long rest from January 1st until just around the end of March. Life gets full again in the...

Mother's Day was for hiding. Some years, it was behind my apron, fixing up a feast at home for my mother-in-law while Nate attended church. And other years it was underneath my covers, seeing this thin sheath between me and the world (which had what I wanted) as my...

She slid up next to me, a sprig of a thing with her long, thin frame that will likely be taller than mine before the year closes. I was wiping down the counter — tasking — and she wrapped her arms around me and rested her head in the crook of my neck as if we were...

I was sixteen and every single one of my girlfriends owned a pair of Birkenstocks. Nine of us in khaki shorts, polo shirts and Birks, all lined up in a picture that I still have, hiding our secret thoughts and individual lives behind a safe uniformity. We had a shared...

The day we pulled up into our driveway with the first two of our children that we’d adopted -- into the home that had been full of empty bedrooms for years while we waited for them -- we sat with the keys in the ignition while they, buckled into boosters in the back,...

It is the rare writer who invites you in, not only to their heart but yours, and through the back door — in such a way that words and story are subtly ushering you closer to the heartbeat of God. I read Christie Purifoy's book last summer and I’ve counted down the...

She was turning eight on the first birthday that she celebrated with us. I think this was her first birthday ever, as the first years of her life had been undocumented. And I was overwhelmed – a likely coupling. We’d just completed our most recent adoption of two more...

"I want a friend who is just like me, Mommy," she said through tears to me, years ago. "I feel alone." She dismissed those siblings of hers who like different songs, and sing to different beats and the spend their time ordering when she wants disorder or...

Several years ago when I was a new mom, my dear mentor and friend casually slid me a book by Sally Clarkson. I didn't know when I started reading that I might find another mentor within the pages, teaching me through her words on paper. Sally has encouraged women all...

"It was almost like they were suggesting it could ruin our family." It took a minute to register. What my dear friend had been carefully advised against -- adoption -- was the life I was living. Ruined? My mind flashed to Hope practicing her ballet routine for a March...