I was in the car on a Thursday night, driving my two kids to soccer practices. At a stop light, my daughter said from the back seat, "Momma, I have a question for you, and I need you to tell me the truth."  I braced myself. I thought this was going to be one of those serious questions about life, the universe, and everything. Maybe about how babies get in the belly or whether Santa is real.  Instead, she threw me for a completely different loop.  "You know how you don't do hard things all day long like moving heavy stuff or running all day or something? So...why are you so tired all the time?" Oh, child. Let me tell you why.  I explained that there is a difference between physical tiredness - from playing soccer or moving heavy things all day - and something called the mental load. Like it or not, women - especially mothers - still carry most of the mental load, and it is exhausting. It's five hundred small decisions every day that affect a thousand other th...

Dear Dan and Andrew and Rob and Aneesa and Jake, Hello, it's me again. The woman who calls the congressman's office nearly every weekday to complain or comment on whatever political issue made yesterday's headlines. As an intern, you have the unfortunate job of picking up the phone.  From my pile of non-responses I know you're tired of my daily calls. I can hear it in your voices when you assure me that you'll pass my concerns to the congressman - even before I tell you my opinion on the issue I've called about that particular day.  I know you're bored with my calls. I can tell by the way the ice clinks in your plastic tumbler as you sip your drink while I'm ranting, then coolly tell me you're just an office worker. When your response is flat and monotone, when I can hear your exhale echo in the handset speaker, when you say you've written down all my concerns, I doubt your truthfulness. I bet when the phones ring around 9:15 every week day, you ...

It waits. In January, my sixth-grader missed his first middle school dance. He had really wanted to attend this masquerade-themed party for three local parish schools. I confirmed with his friends' moms that they would be there. He designed a mask made to look like a monster character he has written about for a Young Authors book. I helped him bring it to life.  The plan (top) and the execution (bottom) He was all set to have a great time. And then: the flu. On the Wednesday before the Friday dance, he came home early from school feeling queasy. By dinner time he was dealing with nausea, a stuffy head, runny nose, a slight cough, and a 102-degree fever. He hardly moved off the couch for the next two days. When he asked through a fatigued haze if he could still go to the dance, I had to break the bad news that he could not. Tears dripped down his flushed cheeks. My heart ached for him, because I had wallowed through that kind of disappointment. But mine has an embarrassing story att...

There is no headstone. No rectangular concrete marker with a rounded edge across the top to blunt the grief. No carved heart of incongruously shiny granite, no lichen-embossed urn to hold flowers and remind me of my emptiness. There are no words carved indelibly to remind anyone that she was. My mother wanted to be cremated, and have her ashes scattered in the mountains. She thought funerals were barbaric, all those people hovering over an expensive coffin holding a person who's gone, all that wailing and swaying, all that sadness.  She hated the idea of people coming to sit at a marker to mourn her. Celebrate, she said, because I've gone somewhere better. No use being sad. Perhaps she didn't understand that funerals and graves and headstones aren't for the dead. They're for the living. For the ones left behind who have nothing to hold but air and memories. For the ones who are left with no way to prove their loved one existed except this box she rested in for a whi...

The Little Limes were beautiful. In early summer, the so-called-petite hydrangeas sprouted thick green leaves and a profusion of pale green blossoms that faded to white then pink. Their light scent drifted around the patio attracting winged things.  After winter set in for good, the leaves broke off but the blooms dried into shades of caramel, sand, and chestnut that lingered on the stalks. Then the brittle blossoms swayed against the white snow. Yes, they were beautiful. For another time, another garden, a life where no one perpetually needed to pass through. Here, now, they were flower-heavy and weight-bent and wild-grown. I tried to tame them, really I did. Every spring I trimmed the shrubs down to a diameter of less than two feet. I wound a circular tomato plant trellis around each bush to coax it to carry its own weight. And I spoke sweetly to them, asking them to please bloom upright like their rosebush neighbors and not crowd the patio stepping stones. Please - be polite, be...