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The more often people call me strong, the more I notice the fine print: you are strong, so we will hand you more to carry. You are resilient, so we will assume you will bounce back. I'm tired of being the safe place for everyone else while quietly wondering where my own soft place to land is.

A story about being fired, untangling work from worth, and starting over. For most of my adult life, my work has been closely tied to my identity. If you asked me who I was, I would start with what I do and maybe, if there was time left, get around to everything else. That is a strange thing to admit, because my kids and my family mean the world to me. They are not an afterthought. But I was raised to believe that work equals worth. That I am not enough just being me. Rather

The Wall, the Laugh, the “I’m Fine” On Monday, Lulu was sitting in reading class, goofing off with a friend, when she threw her head back laughing and smacked the back of her head on the cinderblock wall wall behind her. She came home cheerful and matter-of-fact, gave me the rundown, and because she seemed okay, we went with the classic “we’ll keep an eye on it” plan that every parent uses when something seems minor but also…not. ​ Later that evening she had cheerleading pict

By all appearances, everything in my life looks normal. I’m answering emails, juggling kids’ schedules, and showing up where I’m supposed to be, but inside, all the little things I’ve been “pushing through” have quietly soaked into the seams of my life. Like a lot of people, I have spent years telling myself, “This is just a season. It will get better when the calendar slows down, when money isn’t so tight, when the kids are older, when we’re through this next big thing.” I a

It's love and loyalty and school pick-ups, but it's also sitting at brunch when his ex-wife walks in like I'm not even there. Most of the damage lives in the things she says to the kids—words that draw a clear line between 'hers' and 'mine,' as if we don't all share the same practices, tournaments, and family logistics.

This year I'm tapping out of resolutions and going with one word instead: grace. Not the throw pillow kind, but the kind that lets me admit I'm tired, that I self-sabotage, and that the person I most need to stop abandoning is myself.

Every year the holidays turn life up to eleven, so it feels weirdly perfect to be starting here, now, in the middle of the chaos instead of waiting for a “better time." ​Years ago, in a very different season of my life, I wrote my way through infertility under a different name. That little corner of the internet was never about page views; it was about surviving something that felt impossible, and blogging became a lifeline that helped me put words around grief, hope, loss an