Sometime in the late 80s, when I was old enough to look it but not yet legal, I went to a cottage for a weekend with friends. Many of the details are blurry. While I know it was in Grand Bend (our go-to beach destination on Lake Huron, within an hour’s drive of London) and […]
Great(ful) things about today
In 1995, I was 25 years old. A year earlier, my mom had been diagnosed with cancer. A year later, I’d be married. At some point between then and then, Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach was published. My mom gave me a copy. Mom was on her own journey of living in the moment, […]
Remembering July
There was a time — not so many summers ago — that on a gorgeous, sunny, July afternoon like this, our backyard would be filled with kids. I always loved that they loved to play here, and that I got to witness so many of their summertime (and othertime) moments. At their tiniest, they required […]
boys versus girls
Who’s on whose team? Do we have enough bullets? Hey, that actually went far! I’m on your guys’s team! Wait, no, boys versus girls! No fair—there’s three of us and four of you… That’s fair! OK, go! RUN! Hey batter batter batter! Oh my gosh, Emma… Get to home base! I got no shots. OK, […]
Proud Mama
There’s a file on my tablet that I created on January 30, 2009, at 3:05 p.m. called “I Don’t Want to be a Mom (Again).” Context: I was 38 years old. My son was five-and-a-half; my daughter, 3-and-a-half. Gabriel was heading into the home stretch of kindergarten and Vivi was gearing up for junior kindergarten. […]
For Sue, March 4, 2002 (unedited)
(A sneak peek/excerpt from the book in my head) A month after my fifth birthday in 1975, my family moved into the three-bedroom split-level on Tweed that I would grow up in. Within hours of our unloading the truck that summer afternoon, the “big” girls down the street (12-year-old best friends Beth and Sandy) took […]
The book in my head
There’s been a book in my head for 20 years. And I think I’m just about ready to write it. In late 2001, I pulled back from my 60+ hours a week communications job to work part-time, three days a week, with the goal of diverting some of my (greatly depleted) energy into my own […]
Triage
Before we had kids, my understanding of “triage” was limited to the war movies I had watched with Hubby back when we were dating and I was doing my best to impress him. (Yeah. Not my favourite genre.) In my mind, “triage” was what army medics and nurses did as they surveyed battle-wounded soldiers, deciding […]
Oh. Shit.
I knew the second I opened my tablet and saw the huge googly-eyed smiley-face emoji spinning around in the centre of my screen that this was not good. Not good at all. A client had asked me to forward her the draft of a document we had worked on months ago that was now moving […]
Writer│Blocked 