reframing femininity
I’m getting divorced. Three simple words. Three simple words that don’t convey the pain and messiness of this season. Three simple words that don’t feel real. Three simple words that represent an impossibly complicated emotional state of being.
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When my husband told me that our sixteen year old had come out to him as transgender, I laughed. I thought it was some weird joke I didn’t understand. John may as well have said Sam was on a spaceship headed toward Jupiter. I was shocked and confused; it made no sense to me. “Bring…
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With one hand I hold tightly to my husband, in desperate need of his support, and with the other I push him away. It’s confusing and frustrating, but this is how the young and scared part of me struggles for control and acts out in fear. My mature and wise adult self knows better. I have…
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“The days are long, but the years are short.” Gretchen Rubin “And just like that, my youngest is a senior…”My friend’s words, appearing on my laptop screen, snap me out of my social medial reverie. My youngest is a senior too…just like that. I glance toward his bedroom door, and I feel that if I…
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The scent of my mother’s Clairol Nice and Easy solution in Medium Warm Brown wafts through our kitchen. I sit at our cherry wood table staring at my Algebra textbook. She unwraps the cellophane from her head and cranes her neck under the kitchen faucet to rinse. “It always starts out a little dark,” she says…
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Last summer we stumbled on a bluegrass concert in the square of downtown Fort Collins, Colorado. Our three kids migrated toward the front of the crowd to dance with the other children to the banjo, mandolin, upright bass, and guitar music.
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I have two best friends. One of them I met on the first day of advanced English class in seventh grade. We quickly became inseparable and what could have began and ended as “just” a childhood friendship has instead led to more than three decades of love and laughter, grief and loss, stories and inside…
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I was sitting at a desk that had been my husband’s, his Cross pen-set gone and the walls now void of his credentials and degrees. The circumstances that had unfolded in the months prior were difficult, to say the least. Mark had resigned and was engaging some much-needed Sabbath rest, and I had said yes…
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In the night, when I return to bed after a bathroom trip (thank you, menopause) my husband will often turn and touch my hair before we both go back to sleep. And if he returns from a trip, he adjusts my bed covers. I smile. There are two pieces of my life I usually don’t…
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Growing up in a working-class neighborhood in Detroit during the 1950’s and 60’s, one couple stood out as being different from the rest of us and to my mind, they were very exotic. Unlike our other neighbors, this couple had no children and the woman worked in an office downtown. The man was Hollywood handsome…
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