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"Why doesn't anyone else have to do this Mommy?" she asks again as we drive to another specialist appointment. No matter how I answer, she still has the same question. It's as if there are no answers for her, for this kind of question. Yet. With adoption, there are...

I had to hear it through a half-dozen other mouths before I realized it’d been in my head first, and for possibly years. “What am I doing wrong?” It’s the mother whose child isn’t sleeping, and the wife who’s husband isn’t emoting, and the daughter who’s father is...

“How well do you think your husband knows you?” this new-to-me christian counselor asked me on a frigid January afternoon as I sat in her office. “Really well,” I responded without thinking. After a studied pause, she asked, “What percentage of ‘all of you’ does he...

I was fourteen and still riding my bike to my best friend's when I exchanged the innocence of youth for unbelief. I was out of pigtails but still had a bedtime when I siphoned myself off hope. It would be at least 15 years later before I realized what had happened to...

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...