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…
Gender today
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…
Now appearing… in two new anthologies!
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…
Water me like a new lawn or watch me wither
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…
What we teach our children, and ourselves
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…
Behind the scenes with Jennifer Robins of Predominantly Paleo
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…
Talking about talking about race and gender
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…
Getting back on the train to social justice
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…
Things I want to remember about this awful week
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…
The highs and the lows of living full out in the world with chronic illness
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…
Return to BlogU
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 –…
Lab report & retort
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…
Declaring my love…for essential oils
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…
What I’ve Been Up To!
It was February the last time I wrote, in the wake of a Femworking meeting after which two members challenged me to think about what success means to me. Things have been moving a lot since then! I was also getting some coaching and working with a therapist, both of which helped me to integrate…
What would “success” look like
Today I was challenged to define success. This was at the end of a networking meeting, and I was spinning my wheels about what I’m trying to achieve with Mindful Healthy Life vs. what seems realistically possible given the commitments I have to my health, to my family, and to my community. Well, that was…
Missing the moment, and then not
When I saw the other parents in the room at my daughter’s last dance class of the session, I froze. What were they all doing in there? I was supposed to be on a phone call! I mean, I could have figured we might be invited in at the end of class, but from the…
Broken
I felt broken. Like a camera that had been stepped on and would never take another in-focus picture. It’s hard to know what to attribute to what, but I think food was a big part of it. The short version is that I felt moody the day after Thanksgiving and horrible the day after that…
A blissful hour: Massage Envy review
When I heard that Massage Envy was looking for review bloggers from TheDCMoms.com, I relished the idea of a free massage. However, as someone with chemical sensitivities, I was worried that the place or its products might have fragrances that might trigger a reaction. Fortunately, the manager of the Potomac Yard location in Arlington assured me…
A no-travel, just-us Thanksgiving
This is the second year we haven’t traveled or hosted anyone for Thanksgiving. I’ve been offline all day and want to avoid getting too sucked into a screen, so I’ll just recap in brief, and in photos. Despite designs on waking at 4:30, I ignored my alarm and didn’t get up until my son woke…
How long can November possibly last?
For a short month, November has been really long. It feels like eons ago that I started this daily blogging thing, this getting up at 5 (or at least by 5:45) on school days to exercise and write. There have been two days off from school and now three this week and then boom, the…