I had to ask my son last night.  I didn't want to scare him by telling him what happened in Texas, but I had to know how his teachers had prepared him for what has happened at far, far too many schools since Columbine High School.  "Honey, have your teachers talked to you about what to do if a bad guy with a gun came inside the school?"  He didn't even hesitate. He didn't even hesitate. "Yeah. They said to lock the door and go out the window," my son answered. "Unless the bad guy is coming in through the window, then we go out the door."  My sweet child -- who has been alive fewer years than have passed since a gunman blasted his way through a glass panel at Sandy Hook Elementary and killed 20 first-graders and six staff -- has been trained on what to do during a shooting.  He is not law enforcement. He was not conscripted into the military.  He is 9.  I know how he's the first one to come to the aid of another person. I've seen him sto...

Sometimes grief grabs you by the heart and squeezes so hard that love comes out.  Five years after moving into this house, I finally painted the master bedroom. Last weekend I was crawling along the floor foot after tedious foot, cutting in where the baseboard meets the wall, splitting the long straight lines of white into two colors - like a before and after - when I stopped for a second to consider the moment.  And I thought,  I wish my mom could see me in this good life.   Tears pricked my eyes and heavy sadness fell on me like a thick blanket. Grief is like that sometimes, sudden and blinding. I wanted to cry. I wanted to lay down right there, brush in hand, and dissolve into sleep. Most of all, I desperately wanted to see my mom and have her see me, so far from where I was when she left.  The windows of the room were open, an unusually warm spring breeze drifting in. My husband was mowing. The man I moved 1200 miles to join, near family I had just met, in ...

"Enough psychiatric prescriptions are written each year to give one to every person in America. If we are treating everyone, what are we really treating? Life? Because life isn't a symptom." Four years ago, these words were spat at me by a miserable man trying to pass himself off as a psychiatrist employed by the No. 2 hospital system in the world.  Last Friday, his voice echoed through my head while I stared at my bottle of alprazolam. Brand name: Xanax.  My anxiety first showed up in grade school and was thought to be a "nervous stomach." The kind of stomach that prevented me from eating out in public because I would become so nervous that I'd vomit.  By high school I suffered panic attacks that left me sitting on cold tile floors, sweating and shaking and fighting nausea. As an adult, I learned yoga breathing and coping strategies. Still, I occasionally get so upset or anxious that I run back and forth to the bathroom with bowel complaints.  Thanks to co...

I frowned at the infographic. Detailed symptoms and signs for varying stress levels in neat, color-coded columns. As if emotions - life - were that easy to catalog. Green means you and your calm, steady demeanor are thriving, focusing, taking things in stride. If you're feeling yellow, then something isn't quite right but you keep on keeping on. Orange indicates struggle; you feel like you can't continue, you're self-medicating and performing poorly. By the time you get to red - "I can't survive this" - you're experiencing a disabling distress and loss of function.  Mental health and mental wellness (and there is a difference) are not so easily separated into rectangles like jars. Feelings are sloppy and uncooperative, like trying to pour water from a cup but instead it dribbles down the side of the glass and onto the floor.  This list pokes me uncomfortably between the ribs, tells me I have never thrived for more than a month at a time. I hang out in ...

Calling Poison Control was not in my plans, yet here I am. People rarely use rubbing alcohol yet everyone keeps a bottle, typically in the back of a medicine cabinet or under a sink. Yours is probably covered in a layer of dust to rival the ruins of Pompeii, with a label that was printed in a font discontinued when laser printers were invented. That's the way of domestic afterthoughts. Several years ago the bottle I was probably gifted at my christening ran out, and I moseyed up to Target to buy another dusty, leftover bottle from the bottom shelf of the health and beauty aisles. As soon as I got it home, that brittle plastic bottle gave up the ghost and began leaking from its side seam. It threatened to ruin the other forgotten things buried in my linen closet, like the rectal thermometer from when my kids were babies (RECTAL written on it in permanent marker), a pair of eyeglasses missing one screw, and a set of hot rollers that survived the 2001 flash-flood of La Nana Creek whic...

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...