Like last year, I am not writing my blog right now because I need to navigate the twins returning to college. I scheduled these posts so the blog wouldn’t be empty and I could have space to process my feelings. A cop-out, but forgive me. Having them go is really, really hard. I need mental space to feel what I am feeling, help the kids through the transition, and sit in the quiet for a moment on the other side.

This is how I came to wear a turkey cutlet on my boobs at the wedding last week.

A month or two ago, I called my cousin with a proposal. She likes to shop; I do not. I needed a floor-length black bridesmaid dress. She met me at the mall with my list of requirements. I had the dress instructions from the bride, a price range, and a request to make the shopping portion of the trip last under a half hour. She moved us through the mall like Michael Phelps in the 100 meter butterfly.

She whipped through a rack of dresses, yanking down two and thrusting them into my arms. She moved through the store, sniffing the air like a meerkat to identify a break in the clothing racks that led to the dressing rooms. I held up the first dress dubiously.

“Really?” I asked.

It was pretty much the most un-Melissa dress you could find. Sleeveless, backless, plunging neckline and black. But it fit.

“We only have 22 minutes,” she reminded me.

Read the whole post here.

Like last year, I am not writing my blog right now because I need to navigate the twins returning to college. I scheduled these posts so the blog wouldn’t be empty and I could have space to process my feelings. A cop-out, but forgive me. Having them go is really, really hard. I need mental space to feel what I am feeling, help the kids through the transition, and sit in the quiet for a moment on the other side.

My mother bought my kids a new book called Little Quack’s Bedtime and we were reading it at dinner tonight for the first time. It’s about a mother telling her five ducks to go to sleep. It’s a simple tale of ducks being scared of the dark, but of course, if you think as I do, you can see infertility references in everything. The ducks point out all the things that are scaring them about the dark and the mother reassures them.

And then that last duck…goddamn Little Quack…had to twist his figurative knife into my literal heart.

Read the whole post here.

Like last year, I am not writing my blog right now because I need to navigate the twins returning to college. I scheduled these posts so the blog wouldn’t be empty and I could have space to process my feelings. A cop-out, but forgive me. Having them go is really, really hard. I need mental space to feel what I am feeling, help the kids through the transition, and sit in the quiet for a moment on the other side.

What I do remember from the movie is a witch with an eye that you could look into and see how you would die. Not just how you would die, but you would see yourself in the moment, so you would know your age, whether you were in pain, if you were alone. For years after seeing this film, I would think about that witch eye and wonder what I would do if I were facing that witch. Would I ask her to lift her eye patch? (As you can imagine, an eye like that must be kept under a patch lest the woman buying a cantaloupe next to you in the produce aisle would learn as she glances your way that she is going to drown in a boating accident about two years from now.) Would I be able to walk away from that knowledge knowing the information is right there for the taking?

Because I fear that I’m the sort who can’t really walk away from information, even in knowing that being cognizant of your death date could bring more stress than comfort. If I saw that I was going to die in my nineties with Josh by my side, and the twins and their children gathered at the end of the bed, I might go through life a tad more relaxed. But if I saw that I looked about a year older when the witch lifted up her patch, and I was dying alone, bleeding to death in an alleyway, I might not really enjoy the last twelve months of my life, especially those moments when I start to walk down an alleyway and realize exactly where I am.

Read the whole post here.

Like last year, I am not writing my blog right now because I need to navigate the twins returning to college. I scheduled these posts so the blog wouldn’t be empty and I could have space to process my feelings. A cop-out, but forgive me. Having them go is really, really hard. I need mental space to feel what I am feeling, help the kids through the transition, and sit in the quiet for a moment on the other side.

The night I finished the book, the Wolvog threw a tantrum during tuck-in and we had to follow through with the consequences which meant that I didn’t sing his goodnight song. This has only happened maybe once or twice before and it was terrible timing to have it happen on a night where my heart felt so raw.

I finished the final chapter edit and wrote the epilogue. I’ve never liked the last page of a book. I’m really not a fan of having a book end. So I wrote the last page to be an open moment, where the reader and the writer (who is who? Truly–since so many readers contributed to the book and were the writer and I felt like I learned just as much as someone reading the book) can sit together indefinitely on a final thought that needs to be considered in every moment of every day.

I went downstairs to get Josh to read the epilogue and then slipped into the twins’ room, intending just to give the Wolvog a kiss. But he was still awake, silently watching me while I stroked his head.

We climbed into the glider and he rested his head against my shoulder and we both closed our eyes. And my heart broke into 1000 thousand tiny shards. It literally exploded inside my chest. Because the glider felt like a boat and I had just written all of these pages about this fictive island–the Land of If–and it felt like by writing that epilogue, I was somehow rowing away even if not really. At least I was sailing around the island, sea monsters be damned, even if my plan is to remain on this island for longer.

Read the whole post here.

Like last year, I am not writing my blog right now because I need to navigate the twins returning to college. I scheduled these posts so the blog wouldn’t be empty and I could have space to process my feelings. A cop-out, but forgive me. Having them go is really, really hard. I need mental space to feel what I am feeling, help the kids through the transition, and sit in the quiet for a moment on the other side.

Perhaps this is the best part of the Internet: you write a post and someone bounces off of it, and then you read their post and bounce back off of it, exchanging ideas in these chain-linked posts which circle back into thoughts through various paths of words until we come — perhaps — to the heart of the matter. And perhaps what women owe one another has always been the heart of the matter.

What do we owe one another as women? We explore this idea time and time again. While we may have come to expect men to range from holding us back to marginally supporting women’s rights (“I mean, if it matters to you, it matters to me.” Which can also mean, “if it didn’t matter to you, it wouldn’t have crossed my mind.”), we expect women to give each other a boost, to have each other’s backs, keeping in mind that we’re all individuals as well as members of this collective sorority.

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