I’m a yo-yo right now, feeling both fine and not fine as I drop my son, our second and final child, off at college. He stood before me recently, sporting the new suit we bought for him to take to college. I suddenly saw what everyone else has been seeing: a grown man. In the same instant I swelled with pride, I also ached. This is really happening.
Read in full on AARP Disrupt Aging.
My husband and I were living in Germany when I became pregnant for the first time. I had no idea back then how our daughter’s birth overseas would be the beginning of a family narrative that would shape my children’s lives so distinctly.
I received my doctor’s hearty approval—Kein Problem! — to vacation in Tuscany two months before my due-date. With great expectations, we joined our old German friends, transported to Florence in their sleek black Mercedes. Perhaps my doctor would have felt regret a few days later had he witnessed my husband and me standing in the wrong queue at the spectacular Il Duomo. We believed we were in line to see the cathedral, not climb to the top of the dome.
So it was, at 7-months pregnant I found myself climbing the notoriously winding, narrow stairwell of the Il Duomo. Four-hundred sixty-three steps with baby inside. It was claustrophobic. The air was stale. The thickness of other sweaty human beings clambering to the top pressed unforgivingly into my personal space: my rounded belly. Back on solid earth, I thought of what would have happened had I gone into labor then and there, in that tight, dank, ancient stairwell. I’d taken a risk, but since everything had turned out well, I was overjoyed to have that glorious view over Florence forever printed in my mind.
The mysterious relationship between pregnant woman and her unborn child is elusive. I was going on with my unorthodox life, carting my little unborn daughter along, unmindful of injecting a spirit of adventure in her.
We grew to be a family of four and lived for a short time in Dubai. Arabic music delighted us and we acclimated to the call of worship punctuating the air throughout the day.
Read the full story on SheKnows.
The sun descended into the ocean, a fiery orange ball igniting disco-like flashes across the rolling waves.
Sunburned, the kids were weary, beginning to fray. Parents faced the aftermath of a full day at the beach, involving lots of sand tracks through the house and messy baths because of said sand. The grandparents turned their attention to dinner: It was burger night.
Unlike everyone else, my son’s burger was plain; he wouldn’t let lettuce and tomato ruin his hamburger. The cousins sat together at the bar, boys to one side, the giggly girls the other. Coughing and vomiting suddenly hushed all laughter and conversation.
Read in full at Parent.co.
“You lift your eyes and there is a bird across the street perched on the topmost point of the firehouse bell-tower. Why does she just sit there? What does she see? You need to follow the way of this mama bird, to get up high above the trees so that you can know where you’ve been and where you’re going.
Truth is, the longer you’ve been a mom, the clearer are your failures. The blessing of perspective allows painful truths to emerge that often you picked at blades of grass instead of getting up high. You’ve regarded yourself as a good mom, yet as you gain distance from the early days of babies and toddlers, preschool and elementary school, from this place above the trees you can finally see.
Like that mama bird sitting up high in the tree, you stand now as a humble mom of 17 years, better able to discern where you’ve been and where you’re going. ”
Read in full on Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/kathryn-streeter/motherhood_b_9686272.html
“But when I coddle, I hurt them. If I keep myself at the center of their universe, helicopter parenting and serving their every need, ultimately, the goal of independence is undermined. It’s much harder to stay in the shadows and watch my kids successfully dodge one bad decision only to perform a dramatic faceplant when the next major obstacle reveals itself. But how else will they learn?”
#TBThursday: Published by Story|Houston, this creative nonfiction essay explores memories of my childhood. Sometimes the passing of time helps sort out the confusing joys of an upbringing.
Today, WSJ Hilary Potkewitz probes the challenges IKEA presents to relationships in “Can Your Relationship Handle IKEA?” My personal testimony on this very theme was published by The Good Men Project.
“The One Trip Guaranteed to Stretch Your Marriage”
http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-one-trip-guaranteed-to-stretch-your-marriage-dg/
Moving? Freaking out? Been there, done that x22. Here are my off-beat tips just published at Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop!
http://humorwriters.org/2015/01/11/expect-expect-move5-offbeat-tips-veteran-movin-mamma/
kathrynstreeter.com 