The Garbageman, the Bee Gees and other Big Triggers
Somewhere in Illinois there’s a garbage man who thinks I have a crush on him. These days, we’d call him a sanitation engineer or waste management professional. But when I was a kid we just called him the garbage man. I don’t know if this was insulting or learned behavior or just what everyone called
How to be a failer, not a failure
I want you to fail. I mean that in the nicest possible way. I’ll explain. I’ve been thinking a lot about bravery. It’s just so untidy. It forces us to grapple with our fear of failure. It makes us go with the tools we’ve got when we’d rather polish them, rearrange them, or, wait until
Kick mom guilt to the curb
Of all things to do me in. A permission slip. “I, the undersigned, parent or legal guardian for _________ , hereby grant permission and approval for the above child to attend the above mentioned off-campus school function. I furthermore release …” Why was everything instantly blurry? Why were the words “I furthermore release…” igniting all
Why twice-a-year Christians are my people
“I don’t get it. Why do people go to church twice a year?” one of my co-workers blurted out this week in a brazen workplace violation of the holy trinity of taboo topics: politics, religion, and will-you-cover-for-me-while-I’m-on-vacation. No one spoke. Crickets. Just, thud. He rescued himself from his own pregnant pause by continuing, “That’s like
God won’t give you more than you can handle. Um, actually…
I have a friend who works on her feet all day, muscling through migraines and chronic neck pain. After her day job, the real work begins when she arrives home to care for a disabled loved one. She doesn’t stop. She doesn’t have that luxury. She works and sleeps and does it all over again.
Justice vs. mercy and other lessons from a teenage driver
I should have known something was wrong. My son never uses his phone as a phone. And he was calling me during rush hour. Turns out there’s no messing with a mom’s intuition. My son had just been rear-ended on the freeway — it was a chain-reaction, quick-stop situation and he got plowed from behind.