"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...

Some people collect comic books, or vinyl records, or refrigerator magnets. I collect words.  In the fall of 1998, my first semester in college, my best friend urged me to start a quote book. We shared an infatuation with the first two Counting Crows albums, dripping tortured lyrics that, in the throes of early adult angst, spoke to our souls. Adam Duritz sings words you can't help but pay homage to by writing them down for yourself. Suddenly I saw the world was full of words I needed to keep. So I dug out an old hardcover journal I had been gifted in high school. With the inspirational Footprints poem on the cover, it wasn't really my style, but it had 168 lined pages ready to absorb meaningful, beautiful words, and I obliged. I wanted a list of expressive and evocative quotations that said I wasn't alone, and snapshots of the memories I might someday forget. The very first quote I wrote down was, "Your past is where you came from, not who you are." It told me, i...

I didn't think it would happen to us. Not to *my* friends. We were smart. We were practical. We knew the risks. We had read articles from doctors advising against it, heard about the struggles of other parents, and agreed that we would never turn into Those People.  But when December came, one by one they fell victim to the contagion. They bought Elves on the Shelf. Enemy of the people I didn't understand what was happening. These are otherwise level-headed, rational parents who for some reason looked at their lives -- working from home, schooling from home, navigating a pandemic, plus taking on the load of Christmastime -- and thought, " You know what would be great? If we added even more daily responsibilities in the name of enchantment! " I wanted to talk them off the ledge, shake them into sensibility, take their temperatures and suggest bedrest. But it was too late -- the elves had already been named. It had begun. Oh, my dear friends, what have you done? Even my...