The part of me that writes and tells people about my writing, editing, and teaching has been mostly offline.

This summer, life became medication, appointments, positioning, feeding, worrying, and trying to remember which person needs to be where. I did not stop being a writer. But there was a glitch in the system somewhere and I did not feel like a writer. So I haven’t had much to say.

That part of me is beginning to come back.

Last week, Jackie, my beloved bald eagle from the Friends of Big Bear Valley nest cam, died after several weeks in intensive care at the Ojai Raptor Center. I was—and still am—devastated. I watched her day after day being an eagle, doing eagle things and thought, I could be more like that. A devoted partner. A fiercely determined and loving mother. And a bird, free and wild and unapologetic.

When Jackie died, I felt so helpless. I cried with my daughter, I made donations, I wore my Jackie & Shadow hoodie. And then I wrote.

My essay, “Jackie the bald eagle taught me how to sit with discomfort,” is live today at WBUR’s Cognoscenti.

Writing it did not make me feel better; that isn’t always writing’s job. But it let me join the global community of people mourning her and say: I watched her. I loved her. She mattered to me.

Other pieces of my writing life have been reappearing.

My essay “The Writers Group as Teacher” is in the new September/October issue of Poets & Writers. It is about what writers learn from reading one another’s work over time—not only how to give and receive feedback, but how to become better readers of our own pages.

Tomorrow I’ll begin teaching Building the Book From the Pages You Already Have, a six-week online memoir workshop about finding the book inside the pages you already have. The class is full, so this isn’t a pitch. I am just excited about it.

I have more classes coming, and I am taking on a limited number of new editing and coaching projects. I have taken on some very interesting projects this summer, many by writers from outside the US. It’s been an incredible learning experience for me, especially because I love helping other writers figure out what their work is trying to be and to say.

On September 1, I am leaving for a two-week writing residency in Canada (Canadapalooza part 2?). Please don’t tell my younger daughter yet—she is going to hate that I am away for so long. And part of me will too because I have never been away from my family for that long. I’m super excited, but I am also making lists, working on the schedule, and already worrying about my children, my husband, my indoor birds, my outdoor birds, and my worms (don’t ask).

But all the same, I am going, and I have Johnny to thank for making it happen. I have cancelled other residency commitments in the past because I was nervous about being away from my kids. Not this time, though.

You’re going, Johnny said. Even if you don’t write a single word and just sleep the whole time. You are going.

For much of this summer, my life had to be small. Inside that tiny space was surgery and more surgery, recovering, caregiving, and getting everyone through the next thing. Now other doors are beginning to open again: writing, getting outside (where I got licked by a very pretty and slobbery cow), teaching, travel, my own body, my own work.

But it’s not a triumph. I am not “back” or “better than ever.” I am still tired and my knee is still not healed and my inboxes are still disastrous and I watched way too much bad television on my phone.

But my Jackie essay is in the world. My Poets & Writers essay is in the world. A new group of students is waiting for me. New editing jobs will find me. In less than two weeks, I will get on a plane and leave my family, my house, and my birbies for longer than I ever have before to spend time with myself—a daunting prospect. Not unrelated, I think a lot about showing up to life holding my head up high and acting “from the spine.” Here is a brand new spine, healing slowly and doing its thing.

Apparently this is what coming back online looks like. More or less.

PS: Most of my posts will remain free. Paid subscribers help make this work possible and will receive occasional letters from closer in: residency notes, writing-process dispatches, prompts, and pieces I’m not ready to send to the entire internet. Please consider supporting this Substack by becoming a paid subscriber.

Surely, I think, there will be a morning when we wake up and realize we’re on the other side. Not all at once, exactly, but enough that we can point to it. There. That’s when things turned around.

Instead, recovery keeps arriving disguised as contradiction.

Two months ago I had a partial knee replacement.

I had no idea what to expect since the only people I know who have had partial or full knee replacements are my mother’s age (she’s 83). Everyone said it would be an outpatient procedure, but my blood pressure tanked and I could not stand, so I was admitted. Back at home, I was eager to get going again. I did not know how to sit still when I was not actually sick. But my trainer said I should take two weeks off from exercise. My surgeon said I should take a month off from work. I stopped taking oxy after four days. I was back at the trainer on day six. I was driving by day eight. I ended up taking seven workdays off so I was back on day 11. I was discharged from home PT after two weeks. But there were some days the pain and swelling were so bad I could barely walk. Some nights, I could not sleep because of the stiffness. I had strange zapping sensations that felt like I was being electrocuted. My doctor said that was normal, as the nerves that had been cut were re-firing and re-wiring together. And even when my knee was behaving, all the muscles that had worked to overcompensate before the surgery and right after were screaming. (My daughters had fun saying that I had a literal pain in my ass when I complained about my glutes.) Eh, I would tell people who asked, I have some good days and some bad. But it’s trending in the right direction.

Then, all at once I felt healed. I’m all better! I thought. Wow, that was fast. I must be very fit.

Alas. I had been overly confident about how quickly my aging body could heal. Just before the two-month mark, I did something—god only knows what—to irritate it, and my progress has been set back by what feels like three to four weeks. My knee is stiff, it’s achy, it’s more swollen than it was even last week. Whyyyyyy?

Six weeks after my knee surgery, my younger daughter had spinal fusion surgery to combat her severe scoliosis. It was not just any spinal fusion surgery: she had it from T3 – L5, which, if you know anything about vertebrae, you will know that is from her upper back to the base of her lumbar spine. She was in so much pain afterwards that she could barely remain conscious. She was in the hospital for eight days, at first in the ICU with a morphine pump. I had to remind myself constantly of what her anesthesiology attending said to her when she was about to go in: every day you will feel 50% better. I knew he was talking about the law of diminishing returns, that the immediate gains would be enormous and that it might not feel like significant progress as time went on, but she would eventually get there.

Five days after my daughter was discharged from the hospital, I came home to find her sitting upright at the dining room table, makeup spread in front of her, recording a video. She was completely absorbed, explaining each step into her phone. Two days after that, she was off her heavy-duty pain medication.

But nearly two weeks after she was discharged from the hospital, she isn’t yet comfortable in one position for long. Her feet fall asleep. Her leg muscles spasm and cause terrible pain. Her g-tube became irritated and infected while she was in the hospital and we didn’t catch it until she was home, so we are waiting impatiently for it to heal. But she stood up using a walker one evening. She had a friend over another evening.

We are both healing. And we each sometimes have setbacks. Both things are true.

In the hospital when I could not sleep at night, I wrote an entire essay and started another. I taught while she napped, read essays by flashlight so as not to rouse her. In an effort to take care of myself, I signed up for two different writing classes, thinking I could make time for myself and my art while she recovered at home. I have attended none. I forgot about the first two sessions of one and had to log off the third because she needed me. By the time the other class rolled around, I’d given up. I decided not to even bother trying. I hate the stressful feeling that comes with trying to figure out how to be in two places at once. But I finished an editing project on Monday, and I met with a student about her pages yesterday. I wrote a little yesterday. And today, I was able to write this. But even if I don’t write or edit anything tomorrow, I know my writing is trending in the right direction.

I’d like to be able to apply this principle to the rest of my life: to my very messy house, which used to be a lot cleaner and more organized. To the piles of laundry and dishes. To my email inbox. My to do lists. My exercise regimen and sleep schedule. Maybe the point is not that all of it will come back at once. Hopefully it will return the way recovery has: unevenly, contradictorily, and trending in the right direction.

I am back from a week-long whirlwind tour of Canada, during which I crossed the border six times, took eight flights, and saw more tiny airports than I thought possible. I even made a Canada playlist, which is how I learned how many songs I grew up listening to were by Canadian artists. “The Safety Dance”? Canadian. Who knew?

Now I am home. In ten days I’ll be having a partial knee replacement, and in July my younger daughter will have spinal fusion surgery, so I’m grounded until further notice. Honestly, it’s a good thing. I love being home.

Speaking of the future being so bright: when I was in high school, an alarming number of people used the same senior yearbook quote from that truly awful Timbuk3 song: “The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.” I rolled my eyes then because I hated the song and because the quote was deeply unoriginal, but I’m invoking it now for an important reason.

When my kids were little, I had the best pair of sunglasses. Big, black, and with little pastel ceramic flowers on the sides.

Aren’t they great?

Well, years ago, when my girls were small and we were in Los Angeles visiting family, I took them to Disneyland. At one point my younger daughter tripped, fell, and split her lip open. There was blood everywhere — on her, on me — and the sight of it upset her so much that she started vomiting. I rushed us into a bathroom to clean up, took off my amazing sunglasses so I could see what I was doing, and in the stress and chaos, left them there.

I emailed, I called. No one turned them in.

I tried to replace them, but they were no longer being made. Eventually I tracked down the product number, and a friend introduced me to sites like Poshmark. Every few months, I checked to see whether anyone, anywhere, was selling a pair.

For almost TEN years.

And then, two weeks ago, I found them. Not one pair, but two. I was sure it had to be a scam, but the cheaper pair was on eBay, I negotiated the price down, and look what arrived in the mail:

Now that you have what’s clearly the most important news of all, I have a few things coming up that I would like to share.

I’m honored to have an essay in Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship, an anthology forthcoming in June.

This Sunday (May 17, tomorrow), I’ll be attending The Be Well Series: Featuring Relative Strangers, an online event connected to the book. I won’t be speaking at that one, but I’m glad to be there, to listen, and to support a collection that makes room for family complexity.

Then on Monday evening (May 18), I’ll be part of Adoption Network Cleveland’s Monday Evening Speaker Series featuring . The conversation will focus on adoptee storytelling, the importance of telling our own truths, and why it matters that adoptees and NPEs speak for ourselves instead of letting other people shape the narrative for us.

And on July 9, my adoptee-centered writing class, Writing Personhood: for Adoptees, begins on Zoom. This class is for adoptees who want to explore identity, memory, voice, omission, emotional truth, and the distance between the story we were given and the story we actually lived. It’s a writing class, not a therapy group, though strong feelings may arise. Writers at any stage are welcome.

I also want to share a different kind of offering for memoirists and personal nonfiction writers. In August 2026, I’ll be teaching Building the Book from the Pages You Already Have, a six-week memoir manuscript workshop with . It begins Thursday, August 20, 2026, meets weekly on Thursdays from 6:00–8:00 p.m. ET, and is designed for writers who already have pages—whether twenty or a hundred—and need help understanding the shape of the book they’re writing. We’ll focus on structure, sequence, narrative momentum, reflection, repetition, and revision at the book level.

If any of this speaks to you, I’d love to have you join me.

And if you’d like to get a feel for my teaching, WritingWorkshops.com recently published a short Meet the Teaching Artist interview with me about memoir, revision, and building a book from existing pages.

Thanks for reading! And if you want my Canada playlist, just ask :)

How am I supposed to keep going when my actual life is already so full?

Not “busy” in a cute way. Not theoretically full. Actually full. Work. Caregiving. Appointments. Money. Bodies. Families. Grief. Logistics. The general avalanche of being a person. (Hi! It’s me, hi.)

This is one of the reasons I build my classes the way I do.

A few times a year I teach an intro class called Creating a Sustainable Writing Practice. In that class, we talk about how hard it is to write with all the noise of adulting swirling around. We do a few exercises to prove that we are already writing. We read “Short Assignments,” by Anne Lamott, from her famous book Bird by Bird. And we write affirmations to exorcise the demons that tell us we are too old, too inexperienced, too much, too us.

For people with pages, there is my upcoming memoir/personal writing class. In that class, we work with the pages writers already have. Not the fantasy version of the book. Not the perfect future draft. The pages in front of us now: messy, alive, and full of promise.

The class starts next week, and it’s going to be small, which I genuinely love. A small class means room for real attention: openings, structure, momentum, revision, and the bigger questions that come up when we write from lived experience.

I also have some writing news of my own: my essay “The Other Daughter” will be included in Relative Strangers, edited by . It will will be published on June 23. Pre-orders are available at the link.

I’m really honored to be part of this collection of essays about adoption and the NPE experience by 28 writers. The anthology addresses “the myriad emotions that arise in the wake of these discoveries and encounters, demonstrating that what we don’t know can hurt us, that secrets are toxic, and that truth can bring healing, redemption, and, sometimes, estrangement. Woven through is a universal question: What does it mean to be family?”

These two things feel connected to me.

I am proof that we can work slowly, in between the raindrops, and still get pieces published regularly. I travel constantly for work and with my children for skating competitions, so no, I do not write every day. But I have found a way to be on the road often and still be present for my job, my teaching, my family (and my birds!) and also be a productive writer.

Not perfectly. Not glamorously. Not with a scented candle and never with a clean desk. But steadily.

If you have memoir or personal essay pages and want help shaping them into something more coherent, urgent, and alive, I’d love to have you in class.

Details and registration are here.

And if you’re wondering whether the class is a fit, you can always reply and ask me. But don’t take my word for it — check my testimonials page and reviews from incredible writers who have worked with me like .

(Like this photo of my sparrow, Tock, asleep on my laptop. Feels like me! Can I get a hell yes?)

Given that, I wanted to share that I’m offering another section of Advanced Personal Writing Workshop, beginning May 5. It’s a bit of a misnomer because you don’t have to feel “advanced” to take it.

Some of you have taken this class before and mentioned that you might want to do it again, and others have asked me about longer-form memoir/personal writing work, so I thought I’d put it here in case it’s helpful.

This class is really meant for writers who already have pages and are trying to understand the larger shape of a project — especially writers working on memoir or other personal nonfiction who want the chance to workshop a substantial stretch of material, not just a few pages in isolation.

One of the reasons I created the class is that there are a lot of places to workshop short pieces, and there are also longer programs built around drafting. What feels harder to find is a space for the middle: when you have real material, real momentum, and a real project, but need help seeing what the book (or would-be book) is becoming.

My hope is always that writers leave with not just line-level or scene-level feedback, but a clearer sense of the manuscript itself — what’s working, where the energy is, and what to do next.

If that sounds like where you are, I’d love to have you. And of course, feel free to reach out if you want to ask me anything about it first.

Happy spring to you, and happy writing.

xoxo Aimee

And what was wrong with it? The entire belly of that enormous beast was filled with a mouse nest. 🤮

But it’s fixed now.

A quick but heartfelt thank you to those of you who read, forward, share, and subscribe, and especially to my paid subscribers. I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you support my writing the way you do. I’m very grateful for you.

In other news, today my essay Today I Was a Bird is now live in the Los Angeles Review. It’s an essay I am very proud of and have worked on for a long time. I submitted it more times than I care to recall, had it rejected, rewrote it, asked my writing group to weigh in and give brutal feedback, and did it all over again — twice. Then it finally found a home.

This is a piece I care deeply about. It’s about birds, yes, but also adoption, identification, captivity, care, and the complicated intimacy of recognizing yourself in another living being.

Two of the living beings in question:

Publishing a piece like this always reminds me why I teach. So much of the work, for me, is helping writers get closer to what a piece is really carrying: the deeper current under the anecdote, the image, the memory, the scene.

That’s what we will get into in my upcoming class, Advanced Personal Writing Workshop. It’s a six-week generative and intensive nonfiction/memoir workshop that starts May 5, meets on Tuesdays from 6–9 p.m. ET on Zoom, and is designed for writers who already have pages and are ready for serious feedback, revision, and momentum.

In this workshop, we’ll read one contemporary memoir, study craft, and workshop student writing in a way that is deep, intentional, and actually useful. Each student is workshopped once during the session and may submit up to 50 pages for that workshop. Writers also receive an editorial letter from fellow students, an instructor editorial letter on the full submission, and instructor line edits on up to 15 pages.

The goal is thoughtful revision: feedback you can use, a clearer sense of structure and possibility, and a stronger path forward.

Workshop details:

• Advanced Personal Writing Workshop

• Starts May 5 and runs for 6 Tuesdays, 6–9 p.m. ET

• Tuition: $650

• Early bird: $50 off if you book more than 30 days before the start date with code EARLYBIRD50

A few practical notes:

• The class is live and is not recorded

• A $150 deposit holds your spot

• Payment can be made by Venmo, Zelle, or PayPal

• Payment plans or financial aid are available if needed

If the essay speaks to you, I hope you’ll read it. And if you’re looking for a warm but rigorous workshop for your memoir or personal writing that will absolutely leave you with the beginning of a book, I’d love to have you in class.

In the meantime, service your snow thrower before the mice move in, and happy Spring!

xoxo Aimee

On every birthday, I tell each of my children the story of their birth. It’s my way of saying: I remember. I was there. You arrived, and my life changed.

My older child turns sixteen this week, and I keep catching myself on the edge of that number. Sixteen is not just a birthday. It’s a roaring milestone that lands in my body, too. It marks how long I’ve been someone’s mother. How long I’ve been watching a person become herself. How fast time moves when you’re living it in carpools, practice schedules, homework, snack runs, and the thousand tiny emotional calibrations of daily life.

When I was pregnant with Thora, I was so ready to have her that every time I felt a twinge of labor I thought, THIS IS IT. My midwife, who I found in the phone book and hated but felt I had no other options, wanted me to have her early so she could take her kids skiing on school vacation.

But Thora did not want to come out.

She liked it in there. And every time anyone tried to hurry things along, my labor slowed—like she was saying, politely but firmly: no thank you.

She took her time, but she is here. She is kind, caring, friendly, silly, brilliant, wonderful. We joke that she was happy having mama carry her forever.

Sixteen makes me think about that: her timing, her stubbornness, her way of holding her ground. It’s been there from the beginning. It shows up now in a hundred small ways—some of them funny, some of them maddening, all of them exquisitely her.

And while I am thinking about all of this, I’ve been watching the Olympic figure skating. It’s the first time I have watched that my family and I actually know people who are competing. It’s wild and thrilling how small the figure skating world is.

The team event got me in a way I didn’t expect. Most of the skaters who participated in the US team did not skate their best. Not really. There were wobbles and imperfect moments and that particular kind of Olympic pressure that makes even the most polished athletes look human.

But collectively, it was enough to win gold.

I watched their faces as they got their scores, and as other team members’ scores came in. They looked so worried—each of them terrified they were letting the others down. Meanwhile, some of the other nations had gorgeous skates in some disciplines, but not in all of them.

And what I kept thinking was: this is what it looks like to work together. Not perfection. Not one hero performance. Just trying your best, staying upright as best you can, and lifting up the rest of the team. That, somehow, turned out to be enough.

Which is… parenting, too, isn’t it?

Not the polished version. The real version. The version where you show up tired, you do your best, you love someone fiercely, you make mistakes, you repair, you keep going. The version where you sometimes feel like you’re not doing “your best,” but you are still here, still carrying the weight, still helping the whole thing hold. And you grow wonderful human beings and have to release them, little by tiny little, into the world to make their own choices, find their own way. Gold medal work for all involved.

I had a small bright thing happen: my work was published in Blue Earth Review (Fall 2025). That kind of news doesn’t fix anything that is happening in this country, but it does feel like oxygen. It reminds me that I still make things. I still have a voice.

My essay is behind a pay wall, so if you cannot afford to purchase your own copy of the issue but would like to read it, please let me know in the comments and I will email you a copy.

Do you need help with editing or book coaching? Contact me! I have time for you.

Also, I have a class coming up soon. Come write with me!

Advanced Personal Writing Workshop (online via my website)

The real story for me right now is still the birthday story of a baby who did not want to be rushed, a brand new mama who thought every twinge meant now, and a midwife who checked out, hit the slopes, and left me to the (lovely, kind, if somewhat unhelpful) OB on call.

Sixteen years later: a kid who is here, who is wonderful, who is still herself and refuses to be rushed, and a mama who is used to figuring things out not with everyone but with her tiny chosen team, none of whom are perfect, all of whom are perfect for her.

Happy birthday, Thora. You are monumental.

xoxo Aimee

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Welcome to Writing Personhood, a Substack that is part writing, part teaching, part living, part learning. And birds. There are always birds. Like this one, our house sparrow, Atom:

If you’re new, here are three good ways in:

1. Read one post (or three posts) first:

Or

Or

If you read one and it lands, you can browse the full archive here.

Want a class?

I teach small, live writing classes that are never recorded. If you’re writing memoir/personal narrative and you want structure and accountability as well as genuinely helpful feedback, you’ll probably like them.

• Classes on my website (schedule and registration info here)

• GrubStreet classes here.

Interested in editing or book coaching?

I offer developmental and/or line editing as well as limited book coaching for writers who want deeper support, feedback, and accountability. See details here.

Want every post plus extras? Interested in supporting a writer/instructor?

To get all posts and paid subscriber benefits, you can upgrade here:

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And if you know someone who might like this space, here’s the easiest share link:

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Not sure what fits? Just read for a while, or reply to any post and tell me:

• what you’re writing

• what you’re stuck on

  …and I’ll point you in the right direction.

Thanks for being here. You made my day by subscribing!

xoxo Aimee

The rest:

When my girls were little, we used to collect memories in a big mason jar by writing something good that happened down on a piece of paper and folding it up and putting it in the jar, and on New Year’s Eve we dumped them all out and read them aloud. We haven’t been doing it for a few years now and every year someone says, “We should start doing that again, it was so fun!”

This year has had as many downs as it has had ups for the people in my family and for people around the world. It seems like there’s no end in sight. But I do still work on gratitude diligently, and here are some things I am grateful for today:

• I have taught some absolutely wonderful classes this year with students who have chosen to continue with each other and with me after class was over, so I got to see more of their writing and how it grew and changed over time

• I have had the pleasure of working with several students 1:1 and being trusted with their words and ideas is an absolute honor

• I have been writing many new essays

• I earned spots in two residencies for 2026 and I have had to move the dates twice now for one of them, which is both frustrating and good because I have a rich and busy life!

• I have spent a lot of time thinking about reacting vs responding and I am pleased to say that I am learning to respond more than I react. I have always been a pretty reactive person (which I am not proud of) so this one is big for me

• All four of us are healthy, we have a house we love, animals we cherish, clean water and healthy food, busy lives, we love and are loved by family and friends, both girls have boyfriends and best friends we think are sweet and kind, and J and I are coming up on 24 years together. (Who ever would have guessed??)

In the new year I will be teaching two classes at GrubStreet, both in person at the center. One is 6 Weeks, 6 Essays, and the other is Jumpstart Your Memoir. If you are interested or would like to learn more, please let me know your questions!

As I mentioned up top, My Advanced Personal Writing Workshop starts on 1/13 and I have one spot left. It’s a six-week intensive in which each student workshops up to 50 contiguous pages. It’s an exciting class because you leave knowing you are really writing a book. The price for this class will be going up after this round, so snag this last spot now while you can! Info about the class and how to register and pay is here.

I read (and listened to) many books this year. I beat my goal on Goodreads and didn’t even log some of them. The ones that stayed with me the longest:

• everything written by and edited by Alice Wong (I finished the last one, Disability Intimacy, just a week before her death),

• Firstborn Girls (Bernice McFadden)

• One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Omar El Akkad)

• Careless People (Sarah Wynn-Williams)

• The Names (Florence Knapp)

I also listened to a bunch of novels that flew by as I cleaned, drove, fed birds, whatever that I enjoyed in the moment. I selected a number of my favorite books to listen to with my older daughter in the car as we drive back and forth to various activities, including The Color Purple (Alice Walker), The Perks of Being A Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky) and That Was Then, This is Now (SE Hinton).

Best of all, I re-configured my social media so that I am either not on it or my feed is almost entirely birds. Not just pet birds although I have a few of those I follow. (And have! Here is a photo of me and my incredible queen house sparrow, Tock, eating from my hand.)

I follow bird photographers, crow/corvid rehabbers, bird conservation organizations, and more. My favorites this year have been FOBBV (home of Jackie & Shadow, the world’s most famous bald eagle cam) and verycoldnoodle, the most ridiculously funny blue jay(s).

I wish you all an easy, happy, and healthy transition into 2026, and may the next year be better for all of us.

xoxo Aimee

I am a super Type-A person, I’m a high strung control freak; I know this about myself. I get dopamine hits off of being productive and crossing things off lists. I love love love to-do lists.

Remember Toad, from Frog and Toad? He is the one who taught me how good it feels to cross things off a well-stocked to-do list. Who’s with me?

But I am not organized by nature: if I don’t write things down, I forget them immediately or wake up in the middle of the night shouting “Aaaagh! I have to get my glasses adjusted!” or “I forgot to add honeycrisp apples to the shopping list, oh no!”

So what do I do? I have a lot of help. Notebooks and cute pens, phone notes app, AI, and more. And we have to talk about FINCH. It’s the most adorable productivity and self care app. If you know me, you know I adore birds and in this little app you grow your own ridiculously cute birbie. Every time you accomplish something on your list of daily goals, you get rewards with which you can buy cute outfits for your birb, furniture for her nest, or give gifts to other people’s birbs that live in your tree. It’s so freaking cute that I want to achieve more things so I can decorate and give gifts.

I know… I’m a million years old and I play with this thing all day long. But I’m telling you, since I started I am way more accountable to myself because I want to take care of this little birb. Look how cute she is!

Anyway. I have done many things in many places using a lot of different tools. My laptop with my phone as a hotspot, noise-cancelling headphones, and a portable charger have enabled me to work and teach in the strangest places. I have taught classes from my car, hotel rooms, many Starbucks and other coffee shops, airport lounges, airport gates/snack bars, skating rinks, and more. This week I even taught a class at Disneyland. I did take my ears off to teach, but I’m still wearing my ancient Minnie Mouse hoodie. :)

You can see that there was water behind me and after sitting there a while I noticed an icky smell. Ducks! They were so cute but they made the water very stinky. They stood right next to me interrupting class, insisting on being fed. Sadly, I had nothing for them so they moved on to some other person who had a baby and a big bag full of snacks.

I wish I could teach or attend meetings from a plane. That would really be the ultimate time saver, as I tend to teach after a full work day and when I’m traveling for work, I want to get home as fast as possible instead of being trapped wherever I am for another three hours to finish a class.

Likewise, I have had student take my class from home, work, cafes, hotels, all over too. It never bothers me because it’s life and we are mobile and life is portable. It doesn’t bother me when people eat on camera or do whatever they need to do so they can be comfortable in class. I especially love when pets and children show up on Zoom in cameos.

In spite of or maybe because of all this running around, I love teaching and I love my job so doing both well is like playing time-Tetris, not space-Tetris, figuring out how much I can do in the space of every 24 hours no matter where I am.

In other news, I have a new essay called The American Goldfinch coming out in December in Blue Earth Review.

And in January I will be teaching my Advanced Personal Writing Workshop again. This is an intentionally small class in which each student has the opportunity to workshop 50 contiguous pages. Reserve your spot now; this class will fill (no matter where I teach it from or you’re attending it from). Join us!

Today as I was lying on a gurney in a hospital johnny, attached to stickers on my chest, an IV in my arm, a blood pressure cuff and a heart rate monitor, perky and well-intentioned healthcare workers trying to make their day go by faster with idle banter made me increasingly uncomfortable. I was doing the Spelling Bee on my phone after a long night of no sleep and nearly two days of fasting, and I was repeatedly interrupted by commentary I really could have lived without.

“Wow, just look at that hair!” (Wait, do you mean me? I had not noticed that I have crazy hair)

“I think curly hair has stories to tell.” (The only story mine has is that its owner does not know how to harness it)

“Do you lift? I can kinda tell.” (No, I just have shapely—as my mother always said, meaning fat—arms and thighs)

“You can’t possibly be bothered by needles like this IV, can you, I mean with all those tattoos…” (Not really but it doesn’t mean I want to watch you insert it so that’s why I’m looking away)

“Oh look at all those tattoos, wow, I bet that hurt!” (Really, you can’t come up with anything better?)

“It says here you have PTSD, what’s that in relation to? I mean, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but…” (I think what you mean is, do I have medical anxiety and am I feeling safe going under anesthesia or having this procedure done)

And when I had to go to the bathroom, saying loudly, “Oh, no problem, if anyone understands needing the bathroom, it’s us, har har har.”

Now, on one hand, I understand you might argue that with tattoos like mine I am inviting commentary, but if you knew why I got them and the kind of commentary they have prevented about the scarring I have underneath some of them, you might keep your mouth shut. I absolutely know that everyone I encountered today was being very nice and they all meant well. That does not negate how I felt. I did not like it. I do not want my body the topic of discussion for anyone unless I bring it up and ask someone their opinion.

I am an introvert and to some extent a people pleaser so I am always going to die a little inside while I smile and make small talk with you about my crazy hair and my fat tattooed arms and my mental health and my needing to go to the bathroom one last time before a colonoscopy. But here is a plea to health care workers, aestheticians, massage therapists, hair stylists, and anyone at all who works with people in vulnerable positions and their bodies: if you absolutely need idle banter to make your day better, please make small talk about something else. I would (somewhat reluctantly) summon my professional extrovert for chat about the weather, the game I’m playing on my phone, my jewelry, even the spelling of my name (like the mammogram tech did yesterday, since her name was also A-I-M-E-E and she put me at ease by asking me if I have a little speech I give people when I’m on the phone—which I do, it’s “My name is Aimee spelled weird, it’s A-I..” before they get too far into A-M-Y and need to backspace and start over). But my body? Please stop it.

Nonpregnant people are clear now that we don’t touch or comment on pregnant people’s bodies. White people have been told time and again not to touch Black hair. Can we—everyone—please stop the body commentary altogether?

However, if you asked me throughout my childhood what I wanted to be when I grew up, writer was never something I’d said. Maybe it was because I had not read many memoirs, or maybe it was because my writing was mostly private writing in a notebook. But I did love to write book reports and essays, I read constantly, often reading and rereading the same books until I knew entire sections by heart.

Let me stop here for a moment to say that I will be teaching my Advanced Personal Writing Workshop again. It’s a six week course, and it begins Tuesday, January 13, 6 - 9 pm Eastern. Please join us! It’s a small, intense course in which you get 50 contiguous pages workshopped. Work hard for six weeks and leave with the start of a book!

Since I made the decision to pause my figure skating and focus on my daughters’ skating, I had to figure out what to do with my body. I love yoga and I’m seeing. trainer twice a week but I am a person who needs to be more active than that. Yet somehow I hurt my knee not skating and can’t run (okay running might be a stretch, I am strictly a 5k kind of girl) either. So I’m wearing a brace on it and walking: 10,000 steps a day, per my trainer and doctor. It doesn’t hurt to walk with the brace and if I remember to ice it, it doesn’t hurt later, either. So I dusted off my Apple Watch that I never really used before and I try to take different paths every day. Here are some pictures of me walking out and about. Pretty, right? (The scenery, not me!)

Big change in background for a girl from Queens, huh? I always loved to walk, but not having to walk with purpose like you do in New York City when you’re getting 10,000 steps just by walking to and from your everyday places, you realize that walking takes effort in the country. I am loving it. It’s good for thinking, and also for not thinking. Sometimes I listen to music, and other times I call friends or my mother, but most of the time I get lost in my musings, and here is what I have landed on after a few weeks of this:

Maybe despite or maybe because of my best efforts (and maybe both?) I am a writer. Same as I was when I was five and writing in a beat up little diary with a pickable lock. I am a writer with a day job I love doing something unrelated to writing, an evening job I love teaching other writers, a family I love, and an incredibly busy life. I have sometimes tried not to write, but it comes out anyway. Sometimes it comes out as crap, but I am nothing if not tenacious, and as I have written about previously, sometimes it takes eight or nine rejections and revisions before a piece of mine sees the light of day.

I wrote an entire middle grade novel about a girl with three arms. It’s finished, I researched it, it’s beautiful, I love it. I started it as a bedtime story for my daughter as a tool to help her find her disabled way in this ableist world, and then I wrote it down. As I wrote, it turned into something very real that I think could make a difference in the world. But I set it aside to work on my memoir, and then a few years later I attended a workshop to help me turn back to it and someone forwarded me links to middle grade books already published about a girl with no arms. What?! So now I don’t know if I just chuck it or pursue it or what.

Let’s talk about my memoir for a second. I have been working on it since I started it kind of on a whim in 2020 when an editor of some of the earliest pieces I’d had published said I really should be working on a memoir. It took a long time to cut here and fold there and shape it into something that looked like a book, and as I’ve talked about, it has gone through a few rounds of workshopping and edits before I realized it was almost ready. (Is a book ever really ready?)

Two edits ago I was readier than the manuscript, and I sent out a handful of queries, most of which got requests for fulls that ended in polite rejections. One ended with excellent feedback, and when I rewrote and re-queried, that too ended with something like, yes, it’s beautiful and I have become very selective about which memoirs I take on, so I’ll be stepping aside but I will be championing you from the sidelines and I can’t wait to read it when it’s on the shelf. Bla bla bla they are all so similar. But then, one agent who had the manuscript for nine months (during which time I rewrote it twice) sent back this rejection:

I feel like there’s something missing or not quite right with these pages, but I am not sure what that is, which tells me that I’m someone who would love to pick this up in a store and would likely love it from beginning to end, but that I’m not sure how to get it to that point. I don’t know what needs to be done to make it shine, and I don’t even have worthwhile feedback to give you. I’m so sorry.

Yes, yes, I know it’s her, not me, she’s not the right agent for my book or me, there is someone else out there. But wow; I don’t know what needs to be done to make it shine? WTAF, person. I know she was giving me feedback on an earlier version and maybe this new one (in which I cut a ton) does shine, but what a thing to say! If you don’t have any feedback to give (or as my mother used to tell me, anything nice to say) don’t say anything at all, right? Ouch. Big ouch.

All that to say, a pattern is emerging in 2025. My writing is getting better, but as productive as I am, as much as I write, I acknowledge that it’s taking me longer to polish and brighten a piece because my writing needs time to marinate and I need time to see it differently.

I have a new piece called The American Goldfinch coming out in December in Blue Earth Review, and it’s one I love so much. I hope you will too. True to Aimee-form, I have worked on this essay for three years. It has been rejected at least seven times and I’ve rewritten it and rewritten it. But I knew it had potential and now I’m so pleased it will see the light of day. Exactly the way I know my memoir will, too.

If you haven’t taken a moment to read my most recent essay, Pistol Whipped, here it is for your convenience. Thank you, Hippocampus, for publishing this piece!

Sending you love through the change of seasons.

xoxo Aimee

When it comes to writing, I operate similarly. Sometimes I write pieces in one fell swoop, and it feels like they’re perfect and need no editing at all and they should be published immediately. I must have heard the phrase “put it in a drawer for six months” a thousand times and I always thought, well, maybe that works for other writers, but definitely not me.

But it does work. I found that out the hard way: I had surgery about three years ago on both of my hands. I could not write, I could barely type, and I needed help with almost everything. I continued to teach and edit, but I simply could not write. My hands were casted and bandaged. I wasn’t worried about my manuscript, because it was, in my mind, complete. It would just have to wait for querying.

A year went by. First one hand recovered, then the other. When I picked my manuscript back up, I had my writing group read it “one last time,” and I realized immediately that there were issues. In the year that I didn’t look at my book, one or both of the following things happened:

• spending my time teaching and editing helped me apply what I taught to my own pages because my eye got sharper

• not having eyes on it for a long time helped me see flaws I could not previously see because I was too close to it

When my hands healed and I could start typing again, I took a peek and was disheartened. My manuscript definitely needed another round. Just glancing through it, I could see places that needed cutting and rewriting. It was humbling and also exhilarating: I was a better writer! I had learned, and maybe even by osmosis.

Long story short (or TL;DR): I’m doing it one more time. Third time’s a charm. Then, onto querying.

This month I have an essay in Hippocampus. It’s one that I’ve worked on for years and I’m really proud of it. I wrote it, it was rejected, I workshopped it and rewrote it, submitted it. It was rejected again, so for a while I gave up. I loved this essay. I knew it had potential and couldn’t understand why no one else saw that! I decided to forget about it for a while, and then I went back and edited it again, had my writing group read it and give me the most brutally honest feedback they could muster, and I incorporated it all. Then I submitted it again, and this time it was rejected with feedback and the option to resubmit. I edited it one last time, and here it is. I hope you like it and I hope it shows you that a piece can be rejected seven times and accepted on the eighth, and in a magazine you’ve always wanted to have your creative nonfiction appear in, at that.

In other news, I am teaching Memoir In Progress, an eight-week course at GrubStreet starting at the end of October. It’s Mondays from 10:30 - 1:30 ET. I am also teaching a two hour master class at James River Writers called Bringing Order to Memoir Mayhem on October 3rd. Join me!

Also, I will be participating in two residencies next year! One is at the Ou Gallery on Vancouver Island, and the other is at Ricklundgården in Saxnas, Sweden! I am hopeful that I can use one to polish and query and the other to work on my next project, which is really already in the works!

I have been racking up the points because I’ve had to travel a lot this summer, and to nowhere especially exciting: Reno, Phoenix, Virginia, etc. On one flight I sat next to someone who was wearing flip flops (no!) and eating fish (please no!) so here is a photo of me hiding in my hoodie and trying not to barf.

Speaking of putting things in a drawer, I decided to take a break from figure skating this season to focus on my family and my writing. I loved skating with team last year but I felt a little spread too thin and needed to set that aside for now. It was a hard decision but the right one.

How has your summer ended up?

But I teach and edit for a living. Some of you pay for this Substack (and thank you to those who do, you have no idea how much it helps me). I have been creating a place in the world for myself as a writer. Would I just disappear, going the way of so many others who give up, give in, say this is too hard, and not for them? How could I do that?

I thought about my writing group and how recently one of the members had confided in us about something they had been struggling with and said something like, I’m not asking you to fix this. I just needed to say it out loud, to name it.

I thought I would try that too.

I am not saying this because I need a pep talk or cheerleading, I wrote. I am just in a … not like a dark place. Just a place I haven’t been in a long time. I just don’t feel like a writer anymore. … I don’t know how to zap myself out of it. Maybe I just need to actually sit down and write something.

My friends were there. They listened and they heard me and they didn’t try to fix it. One offered me a prompt, take or leave, that she had tried when she was in a similar place a while back. The prompt was simple: “How To…”

I tried it and the words came pouring out. For my friend, it turned into a piece called “How to grow a garden when everything around you is dying.” For me, it turned into a two-part piece. The first half was “How to wreck yourself in 10 easy steps” and the second half was “How to heal yourself in 10 complicated steps that are way easier said than done.”

I let it all out in that piece, and it helped me so much. 9 single spaced pages of rambling about everything going on in my head and it’s not like I was instantly fixed and felt like a writer again but everything that had been troubling me was in one cohesive place and even if I never did anything with it again, I had written it, and it was somewhere. I sent it to my group and I said, I don’t need you to read it if you don’t want to. I just need to show you that I did it. Thank you for hearing me and helping me.

Literally within two days after I shared, these things happened:

• An essay I’ve been working on for three years called Pistol Whipped that has been workshopped at least four times and rejected 8 times from different lit mags was accepted at a publication I’ve been really excited to appear in. It will be published in September and I’ll share the link with you all then. Yay!

• I was invited to write for an anthology about adoption, NPEs, estrangement, and complexities in these kinds of families that I am super excited about and have an essay already in the works that I plan to submit.

• An essay I had already had published about my relationship to Sinéad O’Connor’s music was republished on Sonya Huber’s incredible Substack in conjunction with her anthology Nothing Compares to You.

• Another essay I have been working on for over three years that has been rejected ELEVEN times that I rewrote yet again got a high level rejection with feedback from a very desirable lit mag saying “While we found it interesting and enjoyed the braided form, some elements seemed too overt and some didn't come back into play. We thought just one more round of revision would help.” Which encouraged me enough to keep working on it

• Even better, a day after that, I got this message about the same essay. “Congratulations! Your entry, The American Goldfinch, was awarded Honorable Mention in the Memoirs/Personal Essay category of the 94th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. There were nearly 3,800 submissions in this year’s competition, spanning 45 countries! Your accomplishment is something to be proud of.”

A coincidence? I’ll take it. Excellent timing? Someone “up there” looking out for me? I don’t think so. But whatever it was, I desperately needed these wins, however small, to catapult me back into the writing world.

I did not become perfect overnight. I stayed wildly messy. Here is what I wish I could have done differently:

• I did not stop binge watching my trashy TV show (okay I will confess I watched all 21 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy this summer, and I finally caught up with the last episode of season 21 yesterday and when I closed Netflix I could actually feel my brain cells regenerating)

• I did not suddenly become scholarly and disciplined and start working on my query tracker and my book proposal which was my SINGULAR goal for the summer, no I did not and I still have done zero work on that

• I did not finish my dear friend’s manuscript like I promised I would while I was on my cross-country flights last week (my excuse is that one was at 6 am and the other was a red eye and I’m sticking to them) but I still have the rest of today and tonight (I’m getting there, T!)

• I did not magically remember all the things I was supposed to do last week when I got home from a work trip where it was 118 degrees every day and ended up apologizing like crazy and paying through the nose for forgotten appointments, missed meetings, last minute cancellations and so on

But here are the things I did do:

• I started editing 3 of my essays again, now sure that The American Goldfinch will find a home (because honorable mention notwithstanding, it still has not been published anywhere). I have two others nearly ready to go (one for the anthology I mentioned above, and another I will be sending out).

• I finished the memoir I had assigned to my students but had fallen off reading, Firstborn Girls, by Bernice McFadden. It was one of the best books I’d read in a long time. It was a beautiful coming of age story with interesting, important, and painful historical facts about Blacks in America woven in, and as she got older and her desire to become a writer became stronger and stronger, she talked about her process. Rejections! Revisions! The importance of the inciting incident showing up at the start of chapter 1! Things I talk about all the time in my classes, true also for “real” writers. All written with some of the most gorgeous sentences I’ve ever read.

• I applied to a fully-funded residency for 2026. Fingers crossed! (Like a lot of us, I have applied for many and been rejected from most and sadly could not attend a few of the ones I actually was admitted to and awarded funding for due to scheduling snafus. This makes me wary of applying and spending the $30 - $50 at a time. But it felt time to try again.)

• I am going to meet with my writing group again. Tonight! I can’t wait. I miss them.

• I am teaching two sections of my advanced beginner/intermediate memoir/creative nonfiction class that you can sign up for here if you want in. There’s plenty of room in both and I’d love for you to join us!

• I opened up again for editing. Hit me up if you have an essay or manuscript of any length that needs my eyes.

I am so imperfect, but I am a work in progress, always growing and changing even at 52. It amazes me really how much I can still learn.

Have you ever felt like you could not write anymore? Did you ever admit it to anyone? What happened when you did?

Love you all.

xoxo Aimee

June was so busy that I could barely breathe. Some of it was intentional and luxurious: older daughter spent a week in Hawaii with her high school science department doing some incredible sightseeing and some community service, both kids spent a week at younger daughter’s camp for children with serious illnesses and disabilities and their siblings, we all spent a week in Dallas at Theater on Ice Nationals where three of us skated, and both my kids became national champions.

But before any of that, Johnny’s closest friend Pete died suddenly. 44 years old and he dropped dead of a heart attack. Johnny, whose strongest quality and what I love most about him is his loyalty, jumped into helpful mode. He was there for Pete’s wife and kids around the clock, and I did my best to be there for him in the same way. But wow did that take a lot out of us. Grieving. Explaining to our children, especially since he was at our house the evening before he died, hanging out with them and playing video games like everything was absolutely fine.

But of course it wasn’t absolutely fine. To explain to two children that there is a world in which a young-ish person they knew well could just die the morning after they saw him looking as healthy as he ever had was incredibly difficult. Because he wasn’t healthy: he’d had a congenital heart issue that had been corrected nine years earlier but he was also overweight, worked at a desk, seated for twelve hours a day, and led a generally unhealthy lifestyle. So while we were mourning, we were also getting a wake up call about how we could take better care of ourselves and each other.

My biological mother died at 56 and my biological father died at 60. I am 52; I feel that clock ticking every day. So when people in my life start dying, it’s really scary. It’s a giant reminder that I have terrible genes. I don’t want to die soon. But after Pete died, I didn’t jump up and start exercising and eating more kale. I did not write. I worked when I had to, I parented when I had to. The rest of the time, I got in bed and didn’t want to get up. I watched trash television on my phone and my migraines came back. Until I had to travel for work: to the Atlantic region of Canada, to Toronto, to Phoenix.

In Dallas, I got super sick and had to push through a week of managing three different, incredibly busy skating schedules including my own. Since each team stayed in a different hotel (and we were in a fourth) and everyone had to be in a different place at different times, I only managed because Johnny was there, helping to chauffeur us all around to meet up with our teams for different practices and team events and competitions and whatnot. Still, I had an emotional meltdown and missed my birth mother so much that I cried nonstop for two days. I think I scared a few people. But I pulled it together in time to cheer and scream and lose my voice for my kids as both their teams won gold, skating as beautifully as they ever have in their lives before a national audience of other theater on ice skaters and families and coaches and judges.

We came home from that and the next morning, Johnny drove the kids the four hours to camp. Then I had a glorious week home alone with my spouse, which only happens that once a year when they’re at camp. Normally that is a week I stretch a year’s worth of productivity into: cleaning the house, sorting and donating kids’ stuff, organizing, shopping, and spending quality time with Johnny. But apart from one dinner out, once again, I could barely get out of bed.

It feels so extreme. Like the country, I guess.

And that was just June.

Towards the end of the month, 40,000 people and I signed a petition to stop fireworks in Big Bear Valley. I signed because the eagles Jackie and Shadow that I’ve written about here before live there peacefully and every time Big Bear hosts a fireworks show, they are spooked away from their home, staying away as long as six days. I signed it because I am attached to those eagles and their babies, who are fledged but perhaps not dispersed, and still very young. I also signed it because while many people enjoy fireworks, they are terrible for wildlife and the environment, and also because there’s nothing to celebrate right now anyway. 40,000 people signed and it got tons of news and press, and they held the fireworks anyway.

My so-called holiday weekend was just a long weekend. I watched the eagle cam and I heard Jackie’s cry when the fireworks started and then I watched as they disappeared.

Now, I am in a hotel room in Los Angeles where I am with my younger daughter to participate in the Rollettes Experience. We arrived yesterday. Traveling with a child in a wheelchair takes twelve times as long as when I travel alone. I travel so often that I have status everywhere: Clear, TSA Precheck, Sky Priority, Platinum Medallion Status, lounge access for the next two years, early check ins, late check outs, bla bla bla. I get in and out of everything in ten minutes. But with Freyja, we check bags, we have to register her chair for every single flight, we worry that she will get detained and patted down (like in Dallas), we have to be the first to board because she needs a tiny wheelchair to get her down the aisle to her seat and we are the last to deplane because of same, and I have to carry everything. It takes hours. We are at a hotel four minutes from the airport and we can see planes take off and land from our window, but it took us over an hour to get from baggage claim to the room even though I’d checked in early and had a digital key because we had to wait for a shuttle to take us the four minute ride that was wheelchair accessible.

Exhausting.

Now it’s 2 pm Pacific time and Freyja is still sleeping. I have tried to wake her since 11 am: fed her through her tube, taken off her scoliosis brace, talked to her, sung to her, told her how much she’s missing, and she finally very clearly said to me: Mama, I know we are in LA and I’m excited for the Rollettes Experience but I am tired and I want to rest and I will enjoy it more once I’m rested and I don’t even care if I miss some of it.

Out of the mouths of babes and all that. Maybe I should stop writing this and get in bed with her and take a nap too.

So, how’s your summer going?

I have watched the world-famous eaglets Sunny and Gizmo grow since the moments they were eggs hatching. I’ve kept my computer open all night while their mother Jackie shielded them (and their sibling Misty, who did not survive) from the harshest of storm conditions for hours and hours on end without moving a muscle. I’ve seen their father Shadow bring fish after fish after fish to feed everyone on the nest, and rearrange every stick carefully to keep the babies safely in the nest bowl. Now, they are fully grown but still babies, figuring out how to be eagles. One, Sunny, has fledged but doesn’t really know how to fly well. She returned to the nest for a few days to be with her sister, rest, eat, and play, and then she flew off again today. Gizmo is trying hard to emulate her sister but as of this writing, the girl is just not ready.

Through all of this, the tears flow.

It’s so obvious, even to me, that it’s easier to cry about eagles flying the coop than it is about my own daughters, who are now 13 and 15, becoming full-fledged (no pun intended) teenagers, wanting and taking space from me. They’re very good, easy, wonderful children, and I am such a lucky parent to have them. And yet, like any 13 and 15 year old daughters, they are teenagers. They are adolescents deep in adolescence, and as wonderful as they are, they have their moments of being snippy and dismissive. This takes me back to my own adolescence and makes me as snippy and dismissive or worse. I was a terrible teenager and I can dish it back as bad as I get it. But then, of course I feel awful. That’s not what I’m meant to do as their parent, even if at times I feel like I’m little more than an ATM and a chauffeur and like my feelings don’t matter.

I know this is part of the job description of mother to teens but it’s the part I don’t like. Luckily, I have kids I can tell this to, and both of them have moments of clarity and tenderness and will curl up with me and say that they too miss the times we spent when they were younger, like mama-daughter days and Family-Night-Movie-Nights and weekends with nothing to do but be together. Now there are exams and sports and boyfriends and so many other things that get in the way of those times and I know that is just part of the life cycle of parenthood and it’s the way it’s supposed to be, but it doesn’t mean I have to love it all the time. I am easily wounded and I always take their sassiness and/or their lack of availability for their mama personally. I know rationally it has nothing to do with me but I can’t help it.

Back when my older daughter was first born, I wore her everywhere. She hated to be put down and cried whenever I tried to. I had to nurse her around the clock. She slept with me and needed skin-on-skin constantly. I loved it and there were times that it frustrated me because I couldn’t go to the bathroom alone. When she was an older baby, I taught her to make friends with the black-and-white patterned shower curtain so that she could amuse herself without screaming while I took a fast shower. I told myself we were close, and we were.

This was all new for me; as an adoptee I was not close to my adoptive parents the way I instinctively thought parents and children should be. I was a lonely child, and I wanted affection from my parents who were not affectionate people (with me). Much later, I reunited with my birth parents. I was 26 when I met my mother and just over 40 when I met my father. It took time for me to develop a close, loving relationship to each of my biological parents, and they each died very young and seemingly immediately after I became very close to each of them, which re-triggered my adoption-related loneliness and abandonment issues big-time.

A wise person told me that separation begins with the cutting of the umbilical cord and it continues with every passing day. I understand this and know it is healthy and normal. My daughters should separate from me slowly and they are. It is good that they do. I applaud their independence when they achieve it. However, neither of them are especially independent; both of them are youngish teenagers and need me in ways I never needed or even wanted my parents. I grew up a Gen X latchkey kid adopted by two working parents. I started taking the NYC subway to school by myself when I was eleven years old. I got my first job when I was fourteen, and I moved out when I was seventeen. All this before we had cell phones! My parents could not track me or call me or text me. And this was before I had a driver’s license! I got both my first cell phone and my driver’s license when I was 26 years old. I was fully functional for years without either one. I wished I hadn’t needed to be so independent all my life, but was not. I wished I had been more coddled, but was not.

My girls can’t do any of those things. They need permission to do just about everything. They need rides everywhere and aren’t allowed to go anywhere on their own without permission and when they do, I track them everywhere. When I caught my fifteen-year-old competitive figure skating daughter (who absolutely should wear a helmet when she bikes anywhere but also knows how to fall from fast speeds and bug heights without hurting her head) lying about going for a bike ride without wearing a helmet on the bike path, she sobbed and begged my forgiveness. I’ll never lie to you again or do anything so unsafe, she blubbered. I looked at her very sternly and wagged my finger at her, but inside I thought: When I was her age, I was worried I’d get caught doing so much worse. This kid is an angel compared to how I was when I was her age.

I love treating my girls. I love getting them things I did not have. It makes me so happy to take them places or allow them to go on school trips or pay for them to do sports or dance or anything they want to do that I wasn't allowed to do when I was growing up. This is why I work, why I teach, why we save. And while I want them to enjoy every minute, I also don’t want to shove down their throats that they should be grateful for what they have because we are giving them something we didn’t have. That’s not why we do it. We do it because they are children and because we have it and we are their parents and that is what we are here for. And despite that, I get fragile when they tell me their sister gets more than they do, want more than I am prepared to spend, ask if they can have a sleepover with their friend the second we get home from somewhere when I was hoping to spend some time with her, or get snappy or sassy when I know they are tired or hungry. I am such a hypocrite sometimes.

So I go to yoga.

These days, I work out a decent amount for someone my age and who is as busy as I am. I see a trainer once a week because I am 52 and post-menopausal and I was once diagnosed with osteopenia. I carry my younger daughter sometimes because she’s non-ambulatory. She’s pretty heavy for me. I want to be able to carry her with ease and I want my bones to be strong, and weight training helps with that and all the other things I want to do: figure skating several days a week, yoga, being active and in less pain in my everyday life. My pain specialist says exercise and sleep are the best anti-inflammatories I can take, and I have noticed my shoulders and neck hurt less (from severe cervical spinal stenosis) since I started working out more and sleeping better.

I used to do ashtanga yoga six days a week. That is a very intense type of yoga: a specific and difficult sequence, jumpbacks and chaturangas between every pose, no props, no heat, no music, about an hour and a half of just being in meditative silence—and I love it. It works so well for my personality type. I miss it. But it wrecked my arthritic hands and I can’t do it anymore. I also lost a lot of weight when I did it, which was not healthy for my head. Now I do vinyasa flow classes and it’s a lot calmer, quieter, and easier. I haaaate heated classes but that’s all that seems to be offered anywhere I look. I often go to classes that are a lot easier than what I’m capable of but I don’t mind. I get out of my head, which is the point of yoga for me now. I tape up my hands and move my body and forget about my life for an hour. In those classes, the instructors talk a lot and they often ask us to set an intention. In every single one of those classes, I ask myself to set an intention of kindness and patience directed at my children and spouse.

Kindness. Patience. Be the parent I wanted to have. Be the parent I want to be. Be the spouse I want to have and the spouse I want to be. And when I fail and am snappy or teary, I try so hard to remember my intention and start my day over. Because progress, not perfection.

My younger daughter met a friend at her camp last year who was so enthusiastic about their friendship it was almost like she was dropped from the sky, designed exactly for what my kid needed. Even though they live nearly two hours away, they kept in nearly daily contact by text and FaceTime, and we arranged visits when she was in our city for doctor’s appointments and sleepovers whenever there were school vacations.

When the friend (let’s call her X)—who has a condition that qualifies her for the same camp for children with serious illnesses that my daughter attends but up until recently appeared to those who didn’t know her to be completely healthy—took a sudden turn for the worse and needed emergency spinal cord release surgery, she began to depend on my daughter and her friendship more and more. She needed leg braces like the ones my daughter wears. Then, she could not walk without crutches. Then, after a scary hospital admission, they would not discharge her without a wheelchair, so we loaned her one of ours. She was painful and grew more disabled every day. Her mom told me how hard it was for her at school, to be the newly disabled kid, having a hard time catching up to everyone who moved faster and without pain. She needed my daughter and my daughter loved being needed. She prioritized this friendship over her others because she loved being there for someone and also she was having fun and it felt so special to talk and play with the same person every day. Until.

Until this friend started getting better after her surgery. And she started thinking about going back to school and seeing her other friends again. She stopped wanting to play with my daughter on their online games every day. At the end of their calls when my daughter would say “Talk tomorrow"?” like one or the other of them would always say, she’d respond with a curt “I don’t know,” or “No,” and my daughter would collapse into tears when they signed off.

I knew she had some trouble with social cues, but all the same, I encouraged my daughter to speak up. And that’s when the real fighting began. I won’t get into the issues an 11 year old with a serious health condition and some neurodivergence and a 13 year old with a neurological disorder and some developmental delays had trying to debate and resolve their mutual concerns but I will say it was difficult and it got a lot worse before I had to intervene and literally ask the 11 year old and her mother to leave our house because of the cruel things the 11 year old said to my child. To be fair I think she felt backed into a corner, but all the same, the things she said were to me utterly unforgivable.

My daughter however is so starved for the kind of healthy best-friendship that she sees her sister have that I worry she will make a mistake here and forgive this girl again and again—my older daughter has had the same wonderful best friend for four years through thick and thin, through trends and boys and girls and cool kids and other ups and downs. They met at the very start of middle school and they’re still as close as ever. They’ve had to adjust to my girl’s insane skating schedule and now her friend’s equally insane cross country schedule but they make it work because they are friends, and that’s what friends do. They’re great role models for my younger one, who tries hard to emulate the same thing, but has yet to have someone consistently act similarly with her. Well, she did. Until this.

Am I being vague? Maybe. I hope we can all get past this. A day later, the friend called to apologize, but to me there’s been irreparable damage done. But I am not my daughter, and I am trying to give her space to feel her feelings and let things play out for herself. If I had my way I am not sure what I would do.

I know I can’t control it… I am a guide. I have seen what forbidding teenagers from doing things or seeing people can do. Also, I tried blocking this girl on my daughter’s phone but she’s way tech-savvier than I am and she unblocked her and undeleted her faster than I could say boo. I have to continue to talk to her and trust her to come to me—which she does—and ask me to help her make the right choices.

All of that aside, I can still want to throttle that kid. Which I won’t do of course. I can, however, write some of my feelings out in letter form.

(Stop reading now if that is boring for you.)

If I could say what I wanted directly to the child (which I would not), it would be something like this:

Dear X,

You and my daughter shared something incredible. When you met at camp and you pursued her, I was delighted. Call you tomorrow! you always said. I’ll text you on my way home! I almost couldn’t believe it. You laughed together, played together, and began to lean on each other when your health got bad. She loved going to camp no matter what, but going to camp knowing you would be there? Magic! She lit up when she talked about you. You were not just a friend to her. You were her person. She put you first, before everyone else. You listened to her. You recognized all her friends when you came to her birthday party. You were the only one who slept over. All her other pals were and still are jealous of you.

So when you said you were “branching out,” it wasn’t just words. It was a knife. It told her—told us—that she was something to grow away from. Now that you were better and not physically disabled anymore (for now), it was like you didn’t need her anymore. But you don’t branch out from people. From your friends. From her. She isn’t a placeholder. Did you use her while you were recovering because no one else would play with you and now that you’re getting better you want to ditch her in the hopes that your old nondisabled friends will take you back? That’s a kind of cruelty you might not even realize.

I know things change. I know people heal and grow in different directions. But there are better ways to say it. My girl was there for you when you needed her. Not because she had no one else, but because she wanted to be. She loves you. She chose you. And when you just said “no” to “talk tomorrow?'“ instead of explaining, and then when she asked why and you said curtly “because I have other friends, other obligations, why should I explain my entire schedule?” and so on, in a super defensive way, that helped nobody. I’m glad I asked you to go. My daughter gave you her whole self and always put you first. I can’t have you treat her that way. She’s worth more.

I didn’t need you to apologize. I don’t need you back in my kid’s life. But I do wish you could see her someday for who she is: a person who was never temporary.

She deserved better. I will never stop believing that.

Now, if I could say what I want to that mom:

Dear X’s mom:

You! You missed a huge opportunity to show up for both your daughter and mine.

You refused to speak in anything but the most even tone, you refused to see that your child was being mean—no, cruel!—to mine. You could have directed her toward kindness, but instead you tried to impose arbitrary rules that neither child liked, and just kept repeating yourself in ways that were unhelpful and meaningless. By saying “you’ve both been getting on each other’s nerves, let’s agree to talk on Sundays at 7.” you let them think that friendships have nothing to do with empathy and everything to do with schedules. My daughter looked at you like you had three heads because that solved nothing and she knew that even if we were free on Sundays at 7 (which we aren’t) they would just pick up the argument again then because they had not worked anything out!

I know you have been very focused on getting her healed after this awful surgery. But I think you have missed a lot by allowing her to refuse to let you help her with difficult conversations, by allowing her to refuse to let you listen when she’s having fights with her friends, by allowing her to refuse to talk to you or let you in on so much of this. She kept trying to close the door, she kept wanting to have this discussion without adults and my daughter kept begging for my help, so I had to go up and you followed me and they kept trying to get rid of you and I had to say no, the adults stay, sorry. Silence, avoidance, lack of intervention, all of that contributes to abandonment (i.e., “I’m branching out”).

Your daughter is young! She needs you to intervene. Yes, she is brilliant! Yes, she reads a lot and had a wide vocabulary—but she needs your help to use these words. She said terrible, horrible things and you let her. How could you let her? How could you let me just throw you two out and you never even reached back out to apologize? You didn’t know she’d been in touch with me and my daughter when we agreed no contact. Did you know she’d called to apologize? Do you have any idea about any of this?

Of course I can’t tell you how to parent. But I wish I could tell you more about how to help your child interact with mine, because this was a big flub. I hope you learn from it and teach her next time (with the next friend) that real friends stay friends even when life gets easier for one and not the other.

In the meantime, I will help my daughter heal.

I went to the closest nail place that was open that early on a Saturday. It was Vietnamese owned but you’d hardly know it. The two people working tried hard to speak English with each other when I walked in. The man behind the counter wore a very weatherbeaten tan baseball cap with an angry looking bald eagle mid-flight embroidered on it. It the bird’s talons were the letters “USA” in red, white, and blue.

I thought about how frightening life is for so many people. I worry about my children, particularly my disabled child--whose school is funded by our state’s Department of Education, and who has state Medicaid to supplement our health insurance. But of course this is nothing compared to people who worry about waking up and wondering if they will be denaturalized and deported that day, if they will be separated from their family, if they will be fired for no good reason, if they will be banned from the job or sport or school or life they love. So many of us are hurting.

I stared at that horrible beat-up hat and wondered where he got it. I thought about how furious that eagle looked and how the American bird isn’t just a bald eagle but it’s always one that looks so mad all the time.

It took these lovely humans at the nail place some time to relax around me. After a while, the woman began to ask me about my family and to speak to her colleague in her native language. She told me about her son, who was the first in her family to go to college, and asked me about my daughters. When I left she made me promise to do gel the next time because my nails were so terrible. (I was glad she was honest, ha!) I tipped her well. I felt so sad for them, clearly so afraid of an appearance by ICE and sudden deportation. I decided I would go back as often as I could, which is out of character for me since I am not really that much of a primper and pamperer. But I will try. It is nice to have clean nails. I don’t do colors, but when they’re done I don’t pick them and then I don’t feel self-conscious about them.

And it felt good to be not-horrible to someone who seemed to expect everyone walking through their door to be horrible and everything else feels horrible.

I am about to enter week four of travel, which just compounds the stress and exhaustion. I like traveling, but it’s been a bit much lately. First I was in Florida (Port St. Lucie, Boca Raton, Miami, Jacksonville). Then Colorado (Colorado Springs, Boulder, Ft. Collins, Longmont). Then Arizona (just Phoenix!). And the day after tomorrow, I’m off to Michigan (Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Detroit, Ann Arbor). This is for both skating (for my older daughter) and work (me). In Florida I spent a day with my mother, as well. I have enough miles that I can usually upgrade to Comfort + which makes a big difference on my body, but I have a cervical spine injury that causes a significant amount of nerve pain that increases with travel. I take a medication that helps with my nerve pain but also causes insomnia, which worsens with travel, particularly with time zone changes.

So when a friend of mine texted me a link last week to a live eagle cam in the San Bernadino Valley of southern California, I was like, oh cute, whatever, but when I couldn’t sleep that night, I started watching and after five minutes I was all in. I sent the link to the cam to everyone I knew who might appreciate it and it turns out they all sent it to everyone they knew who might appreciate it and soon we were all texting. “Did you see that? The babies are eating!” and “Hey, Shadow just came back!” and “Egg #3 hatched this morning!” and so on.

I watched the eagles—Jackie and Shadow—sit on the eggs.

I watched the eggs pip and then I watched one and then a second one and finally a third one hatch.

I watched the mama sit, hour after hour, on her babies, and I cried when she fed them for the first time, remembering nursing my babies for the first time.

I watched Shadow, the daddy, fly in and out, bringing fish, relieving Jackie, the mama, so she could also hunt, or stretch her wings, or do whatever she needed to do. And when the weather turned stormy, I watched as she kicked him out and said in her whinnying voice, they’re my babies, and I’ve got this. She braved ice and wind and I turned the sound up like it was a noise machine and I slept soundly with her on my laptop screen next to me all night.

I had them on my phone on mute through three days of meetings. I turned the wifi on during my flights so I could watch them and I didn’t care who was next to me or what they thought. (Yes I mean you, guy who watched Fox News the whole way from Atlanta to Boston.)

I have to admit it: I’m obsessed. I learned that while the bald eagle has been a symbol of the United States since 1782, and became legally protected in 1940, it only became the official national bird a few months ago, when Biden signed a bill into law declaring it so.

I read all the live recaps, the Wikipedia page, the history of these birds and their sordid (really!) pairing, their parents, and more. I undeleted my Facebook account to scour their past updates, and in all, I’ve learned more about bald eagles than I ever thought possible. Thanks to that and a probably unhealthy dose of anthropomorphism, I am now completely attached to this family of five. They live in a beautiful part of the world that from this (managed 24/7 by dedicated volunteers) camera’s eye view appears nearly untouched by people. Watching them is watching nature, free from politics and hatred and MAGA and tariffs and acceptance letters and grades and the price of groceries and bills. Watching them be birds is watching nature take its often-terrible course before your eyes and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. But it’s also freedom from worries and overcomplications and moodiness and it’s a reminder to me, that at least in some ways the world manages to keep going despite humans’ best efforts to fuck it all up. The joy I feel watching one of them bring a fish for their family or even a stick to repair the nest after a rough storm is almost indescribable right now.

This is the exhale that I (and the other 50,000 viewers at any given time of day or night) so desperately need. I hear updates about Jackie and Shadow on the news when I listen, and I know these bald eagles are captivating people and bringing them joy—not just bird people like me—all over. That is the kind of patriotism I can get behind.

Repeat after me: disabled people are not tragic and they do not cause tragedy.

After last week’s totally preventable and fatal collision between a regional jet and a Black Hawk helicopter just minutes before landing at Reagan International Airport, the world watched as Donald Trump tried to pin the blame on DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), in particular, the hiring of disabled people by the previous administration. He claimed that aiming for diversity lowered the standards of the workforce.

Come on now. We know this is utter bullshit.

Not only was that as nonsensical as the tragedy itself, it also does nothing to console the families and friends and community of the victims. Like me. Six of the dead were from the Boston figure skating community, where yes, elite skaters train daily, but additionally, community members go to great lengths to remind other members that skating is for everyone. All are not only welcome, but encouraged to participate.

Typically, figure skating is an expensive sport, which can mean that as skaters train longer and harder it becomes more challenging to participate. However, there are recent efforts like Figure Skating in Harlem and Diversify Ice to ensure that skating can be available to Black and brown skaters who struggle to afford ice time and the cost of coaching, adaptive skating programs are cropping up everywhere for disabled skaters, and adult skating communities are becoming more and more robust.

The Skating Club of Boston (SCOB), the place where my family are and the six Boston skating folks were members, is a unique place: a three-rink facility that was designed for figure skaters from beginners to the most elite, training for world and Olympic medals. It is home to 1100 members, including my family of four. I will be the first to admit that it can be a super intimidating place because it’s not your typical rink that’s mainly for hockey with a few hours a day for figure skating. But once you get past that and realize how welcoming everyone is and how nobody cares what you’re doing as long as you observe the rules of the club and the ice, you can be an adult doing Learn to Skate, a six-year-old homeschooled kid spending all day every day at the rink, or anything in between, and everyone is just as kind to you.

We joined for my older daughter, a fourteen-year-old dedicated skater who trains there six to seven days a week. Synchronized skating is her sport of choice. She currently skates on Hayden Synchro’s intermediate team, which trains half-time at SCOB. The Skating Club of Boston owns the novice, junior, and senior level Hayden teams. My daughter also skates on SCOB’s Theatre on Ice novice-level team, and she trains at SCOB with her coaches every day after school and on weekends working on singles as well.

My younger daughter is disabled. She used to be able to walk with a walker, but she lost much of her mobility during the pandemic when schools and rehabilitation centers closed and she had no physical therapy for two years. She had surgery on her legs in 2023 to lengthen her Achilles tendons. After that, we asked her to pick an activity to keep her legs strong, and she chose adaptive skating to be more like her sister. Now she skates twice a week and skates on SCOB’s Theatre on Ice adaptive team. She loves to compete and perform in her costumes and makeup and to be part of a group.

I am an adult skater at 52 years old, coming back to the ice after decades away, and I practice three to four days a week with one coaching session per week. My progress is slow but steady. I also recently joined SCOB’s Theatre on Ice adult team and it brings me tremendous joy to do now what I was not able to do as a child.

My husband has skates too and likes to join us for public sessions or to help our younger daughter when she wants to practice without a coach. He is our number one skating chauffeur and he never misses a show or local competition.

We all progress at different rates and often compete against each other but between lessons and competitions, we are all friends in a tight-knit community, supporting each other, spending time with each other between sessions, at competitions and shows, traveling with each other, practicing with each other, showing up for each other. With increased diversity efforts and seeing different faces, different ages, a rainbow of genders and sexualities, and now different abilities on the ice, the sport is pushed in new directions and space is made for new levels of athletes previously not thought possible. Both my daughters could compete in multiple disciplines if they wanted to, and so could I. There are categories for all levels of adults (even 50+!). Skating is hard — the hardest thing I have ever done — but it is also fun! It’s not just about making it all the way to the Olympics, though it might be for a select and talented few, like those who died last week.

My family knew the coaches and the skaters from our club who were on that plane and for us, Trump’s pointing fingers at DEI and disabled workers is falling on deaf ears. It won’t bring these special humans back and it doesn’t console anyone. Some of these children were people of color. Some were transracial, international adoptees. The coaches were immigrants. All people like those Trump is trying to cast out right now. All of them were people who saw the goodness in everyone at our club because we had a single thing in common: the love of skating. Jinna and Spencer were children with bright, artistic, ridiculously talented futures and Vadim and Genia were coaches who brought out the same in other children. Flames needlessly extinguished.

The skating community is small and bonded. We support each other, irrespective of our skating goals. And right now we are coming together irrespective of politics, because the untimely death of children should not be a political issue, it’s one we can all agree should never happen no matter what. We will heal and we will keep going. But we need you too. All of you. All are welcome in the skating world as skaters or as spectators. Come join us. See what we are capable of.

And yes it’s awful and tragic and horrible, of course it is. So a real leader takes responsibility. A real leader apologizes. They stand and weep with the families, and acknowledge that the Black Hawk helicopter never should have been where it was, and explain why there was only one air traffic controller working during the hours when there should have been two. They admit that everything about this was wrong. They don’t blame other people. And they certainly don’t blame the previous administration’s efforts to hire a more diverse workforce, especially imaginary disabled people. That’s adding insult to injury. Who does he think his audience is? Not us. By behaving this way, it’s just so much worse. Because in addition to explaining to my children that children and coaches and parents they saw every day had to die in this terrible way instead of getting to grow old like most of us will, and helping my younger child not hyper-fixate on the even less pleasant aspects of these particular deaths, I also had to once again explain that what they’re hearing outside our community about the cause of the crash is incorrect and that these anti-DEI efforts are wrong and racist and ableist and misogynistic and, let’s face it, another excuse for radical neo-Nazistic decision-making that no one will be able to chalk up to just another “awkward gesture.”

If I had to make JUST ONE it would be: stop picking my goddam cuticles.

My poor cuticles. They’re a crime scene that betray all the stress in my life. Don’t ever look at my nails. Just don’t. I can’t ever grow my nails because the minute I have a tiny little crescent moon appear, it’s a scythe that slashes at any peel-able, pick-able, mine-able skin until there’s blood, sometimes even dripping around my finger. Seriously. Good thing I wear mostly all black and mostly long sleeved athleisure-wear with thumb holes I can easily pull down over my war-torn nail beds. The poor things. I carry band-aids in every bag. I have cuticle cream, cuticle oil, liquid bandage, all of it. Nothing works except weekly manicures and who has the time or money for that? Not this person.

So there’s that. TMI, I know.

But I do have real goals that seem silly to make on January 1 because they’re evergreen. About being a better human, drinking more water, exercising more, sleeping better, and paying more attention to my writing. I could break them down into specifics, but couldn’t we all?

Plus, I am one of those people who has an early year birthday, so forcing myself to change on a dime as I am facing turning a year older (52!) seems like an even more horrible task. Let’s see how I’ve done so far.

So far in the three days of this year I have agreed to write 1000 words a day for five days and I have already failed by not doing day one. But instead, in the past week I edited someone’s 283 page book, another person’s 41 page book outline, and made a list of things I want to work on and/or apply to. I will call that a win. And maybe I will write 1000 words today. Even 2000.

So far in the three days of this year I have exercised once and not three times. But I have been sick for a week, and that once was in a dance class I signed up for and was sure I would back out of. So I will call that a win, too. And since I am feeling a little better, maybe I’ll get out for a run today and I know I will skate tomorrow.

So far in the three days of this year my sleep has been awful because I’ve been sick and under some deadlines but I did get a chance to nap yesterday and it was glorious. I am learning to take those moments when I can. Also over the break I sucked myself into binge watching a TV show and I stayed up to watch another episode and another and another… which is unlike me, and I was relieved when it finally ended so I could go back to my books and snuggling my birds and my kids and living my life without being distracted by watching something on my phone with earbuds. I am making a mini-resolution to stay off of TV series for a while because it REALLY messes with my sleep unlike falling asleep to my audiobook on a 10-minute timer. Now I’m back to that and I’m calling that one a win, too.

If I were a stickler for resolutions this week would have been a fail all the way around but I’m giving myself some room for flexibility.

Except with the cuticles. Anyone have any suggestions?

Also. What was your favorite book of 2024? I am making my TBR list and need some new recs!