I am really into intimacy.  I have plenty of friends that I have casual friends with that I see around, but my close friends are people that I can say anything to. And they can say anything to me.  And we do. I love to be up in people’s business and well, they don’t really [...]

J- and I have been differentiating “moving on” and “moving forward”. When we think about moving on, we think of recovery and coming back to ourselves.  We think of just taking emotional space to recover from a really hard period of life.  Not only are we resting and being still, but we are also taking [...]

Previews for this movie had me very excited about the premise. A baby is bred to be a donor for her sister, who is dying of cancer. When she becomes a teenager, she is tired of it and sues her parents to gain the rights to her own body. The book caught [...]

During the first few days after the girls had moved out, I felt as if I were recovering from a car accident.  I was in a sort of shock, where I knew what had happened was absolutely horrible and sad, but there was also an insane humor about it.  Like, can you believe that we [...]

The Mistress’s daughter is the riveting memoir of A.M. Homes and her relationship with her birth parents. The story begins when, at age 31, she goes home for Christmas and her mother tells her that someone is looking for her.
“After a lifetime spent in a virtual witness-protection program, I’ve been exposed. I get up knowing [...]

When we disrupted our adoption with the girls, we set it as a goal to support other parents and hang out with kids as much as possible.  We understand how valuable it is to give parents a break from their kids and we seek to better understand child development and “normal” child behavior at different [...]

When I looked at my own expectations for our family. I honestly thought that I didn’t really have them.  I thought that I could take what came and roll with it.  Our agency and therapist didn’t really push us to do the work to paint any picture that we did have.  In the end, I [...]

At the end of May, I put out a call to my friends asking about cheap vacation rentals. M-, who we had met through our agencies trainings hooked us up with two people that were willing to loan us their vacation houses(!). So last week, we spent up in Groveland with the dogs on retreat. [...]

My friend K- has been doing some intensive Nonviolent Communication (NVC) work and invited me to this workshop.  Not knowing anything about NVC, but knowing that I need all the tools that I can get to improve my parenting skills, I decided to go for it.  The workshop consisted mostly of introducing participants to the [...]

One of our big lessons from our experience as foster parents is that reading book after book, using imagination and planning how to handle different circumstances did very little to prepare us for the reality of parenting or foster parenting.  We continued to experience the reality of “the system,” which is not truly set up [...]