I don't like Christmas.  It's kind of a lot. To begin with, the holiday is so very obtrusive.   It rushes at me from every direction, demanding that I pay attention, saying I should feel joyous and bouncy and excited every waking hour. Christmas wants me to be an inexhaustible toddler, dazzled by everything, rushing around filled with glee.  Amid the lights strung high and low, the incessant holiday songs, and the numerous celebrations on my calendar, I'm drowning in forced merriment.  Every year it overwhelms me. Instead of feeling joy, I'm distressed. Like trying to wade through a kid's ball pit, it looks fun until you can't make any headway through all the obstacles so you sink down and decide this is where you live now.  And then the to-do's come calling.

We're skipping the thankfulness, and I hate it.  Are you only doing one of these things? As the calendar page turned from October to November, Americans pivoted straight from Halloween to Christmas - and largely ignored my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving. This "Christmas creep" - the drift of yuletide season into the months before December - has been in full swing for weeks, and it's getting stronger by the day.  Christmas ornaments shared shelf space with a smattering of discounted Halloween stragglers even before ghosts and goblins hit the streets. A local radio station switched to all-holiday music on November 1. As of a few days ago, a house in my neighborhood is fully decorated with hundreds of glittering Christmas lights...nearly a week before anyone is roasting their turkeys. Sitting alone on the dark street, it's a glaring beacon of premature holidaying. "What's the problem?" you say. "If somebody wants to jingle their bells before Thank...

For the last week my oldest child has been talking about a classmate from school who he says lives in our neighborhood. This is news to me, because he's rarely mentioned this child before and never asked to play with him. He says they have agreed to meet at the neighborhood pool so they can synch up Roblox user names and play together. I'm excited to get him out of my hair, and also for him to have a new friend. Twice now he has gone down to the wide parking lot in front of our neighborhood pool, and stood and waited for this friend. And stood. And waited.  Twice his friend never shows up. Twice he trudges home despondently.  Finally I asked for his friend's last name. In that moms-are-superheroes mentality, I think I can somehow make this situation better. My son says it's Bird or Burn or something, he doesn't remember. Who needs last names anyway? I look up both names in the school directory as well as our neighborhood Facebook group...and find nothing. "Are...

"Who did you play with at recess today?" "We didn't get recess!" my son exclaimed. "Mr. K said he was embarrassed that we were so loud at lunch, so we had to walk five laps around the parking instead of playing."  This year my oldest is in third grade, and third grade is hard. It's changing classes, letter grades, and increased expectations. And we've moved away from motherly teachers toward tougher teachers, it seems.  My son's story took me back to my own elementary days, in a sand-colored building with three cavernous halls ready to swallow me whole. Each classroom ceiling terminated in the point of a triangle, its vertical side featuring a row of windows designed to withstand Gulf hurricanes and tornadoes. But the storm I weathered in fourth grade wasn't wind and water. It was Mr. Meacham, who taught math, science, and social studies - and also educated me in debilitating anxiety.  Fourth-grade me I first became aware of Mr. Meacham...

I was told there'd be handbaskets. I'll concede that no one promised me a rose garden, but I distinctly remember the mention of handbaskets. Since, clearly, everything is going to hell. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what a handbasket is. Is it similar to picnic baskets of yore, made of smooth woven wicker with two hinged lids and a sturdy handle? That doesn't seem like the best choice of vehicle to transport me through the eternal fires of damnation, being that it's wildly flammable, but at this point I'll take what I can get. This nicely apportioned doom buggy can be found on Amazon . I'd like my handbasket to be woven of rattan imported from Indonesia, preferably an idyllic hilly countryside amid a lush tropical forest. Source the vines from trees near a turquoise lake or Hindu temple, please. Imagining those picturesque scenes will help pass the time while I float in my handbasket down the river, like a modern-day Moses, except to my destruction rat...

In the epic battle between a 41-year-old female with zero plumbing experience and a Bradford White 50 gallon electric water heater, I have been triumphant.  This was a war I never intended to fight, a battle brewing for more than four years.  Beneath the glare of a single bare lightbulb, the beast waits in its lair. In the first days after we moved into this beautiful house, I noticed our hot water was measly. Wimpy. Unimpressive. It was very warm at best, never up to the challenge of being truly hot. On the advice of our builder, I cranked up the water heater's two heating elements over and over until they were set hot enough to boil us, but the water temperature at our faucets and showerheads was still unexceptional. I was vexed, but thought it was a minor inconvenience we'd just learn to live with. Yet the thorn in my side slowly festered. About two weeks ago, the hot water inexplicably became even less hot. Now I was taking daily showers with no cold water added whatsoever...

On those few blessed mornings a week that my house is as still as an empty auditorium, I sit at the computer and ask the words to dance. Some days they tango. Most times they stand defiantly on skinny legs and glare at me.  On days like today, I have the audacity to poke them until they move. Life is almost pre-pandemic normal-busy-overwhelming , and already I'm worn out. Kids, job, household, wife - it's a frenzied four-step hustle. I'm not funny. I'm not insightful. My heels blister. And I'm doing a terrible job of writing and submitting regularly. If I don't scribble out essays for publishing, am I still a writer? Are my words still real if nobody reads them?  What does being a writer actually mean?

"Maybe he's sad," he told me. "Or jealous of my awesome dinosaur roar." My 8-year-old and I were laying on his bed after lights-out a few weeks ago, discussing his day. Lately he's been dealing with some mild teasing at school. A couple of classmates have been telling him he's annoying, locking him out of recess games, and mocking his first name. It's nothing that we feel rises to the level of bullying, but rather the low-level needling that virtually all schoolchildren endure at some point.  "That's what my friend said. That if someone teases you, it's because they're jealous," he added, and then demonstrated a velociraptor sound that fell somewhere between gargling alligator and demon-possessed lion. If he wants to think other children only wish they could sound that vicious , who am I to argue?  But how do you explain to your kids that sometimes people are just mean? The unfortunate truth is, it's a tough world out there...

Monday band rehearsals. Thursday boxing and soccer practice. Friday band concerts. Saturday soccer games. First communion, lunch out of town, preschool graduation, a community safety class.  In the next two months, my family will return to a pre-pandemic schedule. We'll go back to youth extracurriculars and events, adult hobbies, and a few safe social engagements. My husband's work schedule will revert to full-time regular madness: two morning shifts followed by two evening shifts capped off with one middle-of-the-day shift.  I am not ready. Normal means busy. Over the last 14 months the world came to a screeching halt, then only crawled along as absolutely necessary. Amid this slower pace and decreased expectations, I felt like I could breathe. I had precious downtime, something I haven't enjoyed much of since birthing children. Our calendars were blissfully light , filled in only with vital in-person functions. In terms of busyness, life was so much easier.  The holiday...

The troubles that you waste nights worrying about are rarely the troubles that actually strike. This sticks in my memory from a Chicago Tribune column by Mary Schmich , offering advice to the class of 1997 -- one year before my own high school graduation. It became a spoken-word hit when Australian movie producer Baz Luhrmann inexplicably hired an actor to read it against some jaunty ambient music, and the single was released to radio in 1999. A bizarre pop-culture moment that landed in my quote book , it often pops into my head.  Specifically the line, "The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday." It was probably closer to 10 a.m. for me, but the Tuesday part was correct. On a recent Tuesday this month, I was standing in a mammography room with my left breast painfully trapped between two plastic plates while an x-ray machine moved in an arc in front of my face. This was...

Just before 2 p.m., I was gathering my things for a school pick-up run. Bag? Check. Sunglasses? Check. Mask? Check.  Suddenly, multiple smoke alarms in my house started blaring simultaneously. I froze in fear. There was no explanation, there was only the ear-splitting screech of dire warnings in stereo. DANGER! Like a thousand pigs squealing Weird thoughts go through your head during a perceived crisis. My first panicked thought was our security alarm was going off, but 1.) I hadn't turned it on yet and 2.) I was the only one in the house, definitely not intruding. My second thought was I wasn't currently cooking, so it wasn't a burned dish smoking in the oven or a pot holder I accidentally set on fire like that one time in college. (PSA: Do not leave unattended pot holders on the stove, lest you turn on the wrong burner and they go up in flames.)  I frantically rushed around two floors and a basement while sniffing the air like a bloodhound, but I couldn't see or smell...

My husband's birthday came in January, just like every year. Over ice cream cake at the kitchen table (since we couldn't safely dine in a restaurant), we invited our kids to guess how old he was turning. "19!" Said the five year old. Her grasp of time is tenuous at best. "No, he's 46," countered the seven year old. My husband conceded. "You're 46?" I said, puzzled. "I thought this was 45. Weren't you 44 last year?" "Year before last," he said. I had to sit with that for a while.  If we mark time by changes -- the new moon each month, the shift in the slant of light that comes with each season -- then it's no surprise I'm struggling. For most of last year, each day of sameness slid into the next day until they piled up at the end of the calendar like cars in a chain-reaction crash. It feels nearly impossible to pick out anything recognizable from that mess.  It's been a year since the first U.S. case of co...