Tonight, I will be attending a graduation ceremony that will be like no other I have attended. Because of the pandemic, students will be required to wear masks and sit six feet apart, and families in attendance will be limited to five, socially distancing themselves f...
As a school counselor, it wasn’t unusual for me to sit face-to-face with a student (or parent, or teacher) who came to me complaining about the way they were being treated by another student or teacher. Our conversations might go something like this:
The month of May, for so many a reminder of life’s renewal after a bleak winter, will forever be bittersweet for me. It was May, 2008, that my family celebrated what we knew was my mother’s last Mother’s Day and birthday. A week later, on May 23rd, she took her last b...
When we moved into our home in Grand Prairie, Texas, 36 years ago, we fell in love with our neighborhood. Not only was it a quiet, shady street that calmed the soul after a hard day’s work, it was populated with friendly neighbors who welcomed us with open arms.
Having just turned 72, I fall into the earliest cusp of the Baby Boom generation, a huge group of Americans born during the two decades after the end of World War 2. Thus, I qualify as an authentic recipient of the “OK Boomer,” eye-rolling retort -”a viral internet sla...
When I finished the first draft of my memoir Another Cheesy Family Newsletter, in February of 2018, I didn’t have the slightest idea how to move my book from the screen of my laptop onto printed pages that multiple readers could digest and ponder. I didn’t know anythi...
When my daughter rolled up her sleeve, I could no longer deny the horrifying truth. Up to that moment, Matthew and I had assumed that, like our parents before us, we would soon send our three kids off to college, careers, and families of t...
Every writer lives for reviews. For the fledgling writer, anxious to establish herself in the literary world, a good review is a small step forward in her career pathway. Reviews are the professional writer’s bread and butter…literally. The more reviews a writer rec...
Observing the wide age range of our Democratic candidates during the debates recently, I wondered, just how do you define “old” these days? Studies show that the younger we are, the more likely to perceive old in terms relative to our own age. To a 20-year-old, a 50-...
Horror stories about stepfathers and stepmothers abound, and no doubt many are true. What we hear far less often is the story of the stepparent who literally “steps up” to fill the shoes of an absent or otherwise not-so-devoted biological parent. I was 21 years old w...
