Living naturally, most of the time.
After BlogHer Health, I did lots of thinking about purpose and passion, about time and transition, about mothering and more. The month of January stretched wide, like the mouth of an animal whose jaws seem to magically open to the horizon. I began using The Best Part of My Day Healing Journal and began understanding how…
BlogHer18 Health, the first health-focused conference produced by BlogHer and SheKnows Media, was a terrific two days full of inspiring speakers, education and connection. To say that I’m glad I went is a profound understatement! It was terrific to be in a space with a shared language of health and wellness being spoken everywhere! I loved it! More…
Five years ago, in January 2013, shortly before I was to turn 40, I experienced something of a seismic shift from which I’m still feeling aftershocks. In the space of just a few weeks, I had the opportunity to interview three amazing people and be present to the same message told from three different perspectives:…
It was a year ago that I got clear just how profoundly my brother’s suicide nearly 30 years earlier had affected my life. I’d started to think about its impact on my health when I read Donna Jackson Nakazawa’s The Last Best Cure in 2013 and, in July 2015, Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Biology…
Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote a post called “Why I feel better” that detailed my supplement regimen and other healing protocols that I thought were helping with my physical and emotional/mental health. I’ve been feeling of late like doing another documenting, given that I feel like I’m made some significant improvements in the…
If I had to draw a picture of the past few months, it would be something like a tornado, all swirly and intense with flecks of debris scattered throughout. Edited to add: Curiously, the day after I originally published this post, I found I had accidentally taken a fuzzy swirling photo of my foot during…
The first two weeks of May have been packed. The month started with a Clean Air Awareness event I helped to organize. It was successful and I hope will lead to more awareness about clean air habits, especially people turning off their cars while parked at school. That drives me crazy! The event went well…
I’m thrilled to share that I’ll be part of this year’s Listen to Your Mother DC cast! If you haven’t ever attended a LTYM performance, make this your year! It is, in fact, the final year of the program as it’s been done around the country with original stories in each city. It’s going to instead become a…
The National Geographic special issue on Gender and the Gender Revolution documentary that airs this month could not have come at a better time. I was thrilled to get to see the documentary last week at a pre-release screening at Nat Geo headquarters here in DC. My post on The DC Moms goes into more detail…
I’m pleased to announce that I have work appearing in two new anthologies! Abundant Grace is an anthology of fiction by DC-area women writers. It was published in November 2016 by Paycock Press. My story, “Out of Scale,” comes from the novel I am writing. The story of my 2006 c-section birth appears in a new anthology, Birth…
My lawn and I have a lot in common. We both have struggled over the past several years, and we both require a lot of maintenance to thrive. When we first moved into this home that we fully renovated on the inside, there was no lawn. There were dozens – hundreds? – of baby oak…
When I was halfway through my first pregnancy, I found myself startled to realize that I would be giving birth to a white male. After all the time I had spent teaching about race, gender and class privilege, I wondered how I could ensure that my son wouldn’t grow up feeling entitled. Last spring, as…
It’s super exciting to watch a friend be as successful as Jennifer Robins of Predominantly Paleo blog and author of five cookbooks including the new Paleo Kids Cookbook that comes out on September 6. I met Jennifer when she came to a Holistic Moms meeting I organized with Stacy Toth of Paleo Parents as our…
When I was in graduate school, long before I had kids, several of my classes in both English and women’s studies addressed an approach to teaching called critical pedagogy in which students are invited and expected to participate in conversations about their own learning and even about the power structure of the classroom and the…
When I first began battling illness in late 2003, my commitment to social justice activism waned. I’d been up against resistance in the high school where I taught as I worked on the issue of racial disparity in AP/honors classes vs. “regular” classes. We’d made some progress, but it was still challenging. Further challenging, still, was…
It’s obviously been a terrible week for humanity. With the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile at the hands of police officers followed by the deaths of five police officers at the hands of a sniper who professed his hatred of and anger toward white people, it’s hard to have a whole lot of hope for humanity. And…
I felt so much stronger this year. My energy was better. I made it through that whole long spring time of Mercury Retrograde with nary a blip in my emotional mojo. Morning yoga was a regular thing, and I’d been walking or using the elliptical with some regularly. I had been making progress on my…
BlogU is a small and intimate conference that is both super practical and a lot of fun. It’s local to the greater DC area, which is big for me since traveling is such an ordeal with my food and fatigue issues. And it’s economical, with the conference – including all sessions, keynotes and parties –…
If you don’t think blood test results from the lab are super exciting, I get it. It’s not like I expected to be distracted the entire afternoon by their bolded “high” numbers. I would have preferred to actually look at my children, to attend to them instead of breaking the rules about no screen time…
Here is the post where I share that I am getting serious about incorporating essential oils into my family’s healing regimen. This time, it’s for real. I’ve been using essential oils for a long time and have been ordering them through a distributor since 2003! For a while, I built up a supply, loved some…
