It is this late-summer funk in which you find me, crushed but not destroyed, choosing to be grateful and choosing life over death, joy over pain. This piece is one of the first I wrote for Substack, and because motherhood turns a person over and over like the never-ending tumble of laundry in my machine, it’s still true now.

I hope you enjoy this essay, and please share it with a mother who needs to know that she is not alone.

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Today I screamed at my kids. The window broke in my aged Ford Explorer because my three-year-old played with it, my kids had asked one thousand times for snacks even though we’d already eaten the equivalent of a 7-11 end-cap in junk food, which of course I feel guilty about. So I yelled at them, STOP! They stopped and then we all cried.

Actually - “cried” is too gentle. I sobbed until my throat hurt.

I’m not really mad because my kids are, wonder of wonders, kids. They’ll break stuff, they’ll eat too much junk food, they’ll talk loudly about poop in the middle of a conference call. What makes me sob until I can sob no more is the feeling that every time I fail, I don’t deserve them; I haven’t arrived as a mother and I never will.

As an adoptive mom I’m keenly aware of how hard my husband and I worked to have kids. It feels like there’s not a bureaucratic form we haven’t filled out or a lawyer’s office we haven’t paid our life savings to. I worked really hard for the title of “mom”; I waited a very long time for this.

This was no quickie in the backseat or, alternatively, long-stemmed rose romance and hotel room and well, you know the end of that story. This was interviews and savings and home studies and paperwork and more interviews and lots of hope that failed and hope that finally succeeded.

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So how can I possibly lose my cool at these walking miracles? How can I tell them to stop and make them cry, how can I ever get tired of being called “mom” when that was all I wanted for so long?

I feel that I don’t deserve them. I see myself as though from a great height and I shake my head in disapproval even as the self I am watching has a face red with frustration. What a disappointment, I cluck. What a sad place you’ve arrived to, when you hoped to arrive at glowing, patient, life-giving motherhood.

My five-year-old daughter is wearing a fluffy mint green sweatshirt with a sequined unicorn on the front today - her outfit is the outward expression of her inner life. She has no such thoughts about arrival. The only place she wants to be is snuggled next to me on the couch on this blustery day, reading a book about princesses.

I have scared her with my outburst, she looks at me with trepidation in her big brown eyes. This is where I realize it, as though a cartoon anvil has thunked me on my thick head. I have arrived. This is motherhood. Whether I deserve it or not, I have the heart and trust of these precious kids. I am their mother, they don’t mind that our skin colors are different, they are unconcerned with DNA. They want me to be safe and kind, to apologize and give kisses when I forget how to keep my cool. They want me to be generous with my time and myself, they want to make mistakes in the safety of my nest.

Today I screamed at my kids. Today I apologized for screaming. I told them I was sorry, that I love them dearly, that mommies get frustrated too. I did not tell them that this is the dream of motherhood which has finally borne out long past hope, past fluffy sheep toys and lullabies. I did not tell them that motherhood is the story of endless failures and constant pressure, that I will fail, but I will never abandon them and I will never stop trying. I did not tell them that I have arrived, that motherhood is lurking here in the heartbreak and the mistakes and the making-up.

I did not say this to my kids. I just said I was sorry and they gave me sticky kisses and patted me on the head and asked me to read The Five Little Monkeys which I gladly did. But I thought it: I’ve arrived at the most beautiful place I could ever be, may I never take it for granted.

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1. Salt it. The water, the veggies, the starch. Salt it all. (Hint: the reason why you crave restaurant food is because they use way more salt than most home-cooks. Use a little more salt, and you’ll save money at home and still not use as much as most restaurants do.)

2. Buy cool stuff and use it. I love seasoning blends and sauces and have lots of obscure ones that I pick up on clearance all over the place. (One of my favorite places for sauce sourcing is, weirdly enough, TJ Maxx.) The other night my inspiration started because I needed to use some old zucchini - add pasta, feta, ground pork and that weird jar of Moroccan Tan-Tan and you have a smoky, salty, summery pasta dish.

3. Speaking of feta, wander through the store, buy things that call to you, and trust yourself to use them. I bought a block of feta at Grocery Outlet because it was two dollars. I didn’t have a recipe in mind or a plan, but feta shouldn’t be left to fend for itself so I selflessly stepped up. It perfectly topped-off the Moroccan pasta.

4. Don’t forget the golden rules of cooking: salt, fat, acid, heat. (You can add sweet and umami here if you must quibble.) If your dish is well-seasoned, if there is a slight slide of fat on the tongue, if you have an acid-tang in the aftertaste and a little heat, either because the dish is cooked properly or because you gave it a quick chop of a pepper or a palm-full of curry powder - it’s quite hard to mess it up.

   

5. If it grows together it goes together: Olives and soft cheese, zucchini and tomatoes, rangey red wine and beef, bright white wine and clams, potatoes and garlic, citrus and seafood, peppers and onions. If you’re trying to cook something on the fly, just ask yourself - could these things thrive in similar climates? If the answer is yes - go for it.

6. Commit to a flavor profile and go big. Many home-cooks are afraid of over-powering flavors and so shy away, making the home version boring and forgettable. If you want to eat a curried sweet potato or a Thai noodle dish or a sizzling slab of Carne Asada - make it at home! But do it right. Use more seasoning than you think you need, taste again and again, and make sure that anyone who tries the dish can pick up the flavor, because that’s what brings joy to food. Around the world, we’re all working with the same stuff: a starch, a protein, a vegetable. The herbs, spices and configurations are what make a Turkish kebab and a Mexican fajita two very different experiences.

7. Wander. Wander through the grocery store. Wander through the farmer’s market. Wander through the cooking section of a big-box or discount store. Order a weird dish you’ve never heard of from a food truck. Wandering is a luxury, but even if you only make time for it occasionally, your kitchen and palate will thank you.

8. See your cooking as creativity. Sure, you can meal-plan, but don’t let practicality steal your zest. Sure, you can google a recipe and follow it, but you could also get inspired by a cookbook and then wing it. Let creativity and cravings guide you and you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

9. Fill your freezer. We raise our own beef, Adam frequently brings home fish (for a while we had tons of wild Alaskan halibut and salmon, what a treat!) and we buy pork and chicken from local producers in bulk when we can. Having protein in the freezer means we eat everything - from oxtail to stew meat to sirloin steak - and has taught me how important the seasonings, sides and sauces truly are. Even the most humble cuts can be elevated with the right blend of spice and style, and as a result of eating this way, we not only cut down on food waste, but we teach our kids to eat well at any price point.

10. Cook and eat with gusto. Make the chorizo, fry the tortillas, use fresh cilantro. Make a kofta patty, stew your oxtails the Jamaican way, add the extra splash of cream to the potatoes. Cook and eat like your life depends on it - because it does. Without food we die, without joy we wither. Step away from the frozen entree and instead, make yourself a spicy, sloppy, umami-drenched homemade bowl of ramen noodles in the same amount of time. Slurp it into your mouth because why not? Every meal should be treated like a kiss.

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Because of this, I decided it’s high time I ask Buzz to stand still as I mount up. It’s not a hard thing to train a horse to do. I’ve done it dozens of times. If I’m honest, I’ve just been lazy with my personal horse on this particular behavior. If I’m mounting from a fence or rock, he’ll stand until I’m mostly over him before he moves, and even then it’s a half-hearted scoot forward, nothing scary. But it’s enough to make me want a more steady mount. It’s long past time I made him stand still, anyway.

So the other day we started working on it. It was a windy afternoon and he was excited for an adventure - he sees me pull out the tack and dances around like a little kid at the prospect of a fun activity. “Where are we going now? Are we going? Is it time? Are you ready? Huh? Huh? HUH?”

So, naturally, when I asked him to stand still, his response was to trot around with his tail up and nostrils flaring.

This is about how our conversation went:

Prance? Trot? DO STUFF?!

No Buzz. Stand.

You mean run? You mean twinkle-toes? You mean GO SOMEWHERE?

No Buzz. Stand.

Sigh.

Fine.

This is boring! Let’s prance!

No Buzz. Back up. Come forward. Stand.

Good boy.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Whoa. Stand.

Sigh. Fine.

But do you REALLY mean stand? What if I paw the ground jussssst a little?

No. Stand.

Fine.

Ahhhhhhh! DUST!!!!!

Ahem. Sorry, it was just dust. My bad.

You’re OK. Stand, Buzz.

And so on.

It’s very hard for Buzz to believe me, but this is really all I want. He really will be rewarded for his good behavior by doing something as boring as STANDING STILL; and, as he can tell you, it’s harder than it looks.

And yet, for most horse people, this is the goal. We are impressed by speed and power, sure. We love a smart, fun horse. But what we want more than anything is a horse who will listen to us. A horse who is fast and cool doesn’t do us much good without the training to control it. (I actually have a friend who’s horse bucked her off and then finished an endurance race without her. It’s a funny story but not very fun to live through.)

Also, horses who know their jobs and can settle into them are happy horses. Letting Buzz prance off as soon as I put my foot in the stirrup is just lazy, poor horsemanship, we start our ride reacting instead of partnering, which is stressful for him and me.

Of course, Buzz is also teaching me how to be human in all of this.

I purposefully took this summer off to do two things: spend time with my kids and edit and query my novel manuscript.

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But of course, it’s hard to be patient, as Buzz well knows. So I have a boot halfway in each stirrup and too much on my mind. Like Buzz, I assume that although we agreed that this would be a slow-down, kid-centric summer, I should probably give a little trot, or a wiggle? Maybe a paw, just to prove that I can’t be messed with. Shouldn’t I be DOING SOMETHING? I know! I’ll apply for a job I don’t want! I’ll panic about the queries I just sent! I’ll google “mom jobs” and get depressed! See? I am fast and smart and good at things! I can RUN LIKE THE WIND!

And deep inside, I hear the Horse-Trainer voice: No. Just stand.

Standing still is harder than it looks.

What if standing still is hard because it’s good, because every cowboy knows that a patient horse is a smart horse, that horses who get worked up about the job to come put themselves in a froth for no reason and expend half their energy on pointless charades of effort instead of reserving their stamina for the real thing. What if I can’t make a literary agent say yes to my work by worrying about it, what if the opportunities I’m praying for won’t come in because I obsessively refresh my inbox, what if my kids actually just need a present and available mother and not a spazzed-out gum-smacker wrestling with a future she can’t control?

What if standing still is all we’re meant to do for now. What if the job will come when it’s ready? Just as, after many debates about the virtues of standing or not-standing, I finally land in the saddle and give a click with my tongue. Buzz moves out with power and joy and confidence, because he waited until it was right instead of rushing ahead.

What if we can learn a lot by standing still?

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My daughter (11) is the perfect age for The Descendants, but I love it too. It’s over-the-top, primary-colored fun, with sweet, barely-even-kissing teenage romance. Because I’m in my 40s, it reminds me of High School Musical, although sharing that anecdote about the Days of Yore invoked a sigh from Addy.

The Descendants story centers around the offspring of fairy tales we know and love. We meet Prince Ben, the so-perfect-he-seems-unreal son of Beauty and the Beast, Audrey, the pretty pink-and-blue-haired daughter of Aurora and Prince Phillip, and even a son of one of Snow White’s dwarfs. It’s campy and silly and very musical-theater, the sets are honest-to-goodness sets for the first three movies, as though you’re supposed to think you’re watching a stage show.

The premise is that villains have been banished to the “Isle of the Lost” since Beauty and the Beast came to power and made everyone safe. Auradon, the hero-land, is predictably well-behaved, clean and kind storybook perfection. (Fairy Godmother teaches a “remedial goodness” class, a detail which made Addy laugh out loud.) And the Isle of the Lost is indeed lost - the villains are crazy-eyed and batty, their outfits are steampunk bad boy, lots of eyeliner and extra belts. When Prince Ben decides to let four Villian Kids (affectionately referred to as VKs) to the land of heroes, this is where our story starts.

Of course it’s tween fun. The bad guys are ridiculous but not actually all that dark, although keeping them locked up on the Isle doesn’t seem like a terrible idea. There’s a lot of inside jokes, like the Evil Queen constantly asking everyone how she looks and Jafar’s penchant for robbery. The music is Disney perfection - wholesome and fun and well-produced, with obvious nods to my generation - it’s hard to find a song that’s not inspired by either MJ or an early-aughts boy band or both.

But what I noticed most about the series (Addy and I blissfully binged the first four movies over the weekend and have been obsessively listening to the music) is the commentary it makes on… wait for it… modern geopolitics.

No, I’m not kidding.

The kids, both hero kids and VKs, are living in the world their parents and grandparents built. Audrey’s grandmother tearfully reminds her that she lost her motherhood to Malificent. Faeries had to raise Aurora, and so the Queen was robbed of years of her child’s life, by a truly malevolent force. To Audrey, this is the war stories we grew up on - nazis, communists, oh my! - and it’s relatable that she doesn’t understand her grandmother’s fear or pain.

To the kids, both heroes and villains, victory looks like opening up your heart and not bullying, making friends and seeing past silly differences. Which makes sense. This is a kids’ movie, made by the Disney channel with spontaneous break-dancing for crying out loud. There’s a talking dog.

But to their parents, and to me as a parent, it’s a sort of sweet and sad commentary on our modern age, one told with a lot of compassion for us inheritors of relative peace. I was born in the 80s, raised in the peace and prosperity of the 90s. Sure, I graduated college in a recession and my generation does not have the Boomers’ luck with investments and housing prices. But geopolitically, we’ve been doing pretty good, by historical standards. America’s might and power is still pre-eminent on the world stage, and even destabilizing tragic events like 9/11 were met with strength and perseverance, our political fights have been mostly about funding and taxes, not the security of the homeland. So is it any wonder that my peers and those younger than me have a hard time grasping the gravity of world events like October 7th or Russia’s incursion on Ukraine; the Taliban’s re-takeover of Afghanistan or unrest in South America? We struggle to reconcile our relative peace and prosperity with the desperation of much of the world, and so, like the hero kids, we feel blindly about for good answers, struggling to make sense of a new reality. Are open borders a necessary moral good or a deeply disturbing floodgate of evil? Can the land of heroes absorb all of the bad behavior, poverty and criminality of the Isle, or will it just turn both places into a wasteland?

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When Captain Hook’s hilariously unhinged Cockney-voiced son Harry threatens to gut Prince Ben with a hook, we’re informed that villains didn’t receive enough love as children. Which, honestly, is a very generous way to think about second chances. It always could have been otherwise, and we forget our own graces at our peril. But at the same time, the VKs who won the lottery and move to the clean, safe, not-terrible land of heroes are the ones who are most nervous about opening the bridge to the Isle, much like recent immigrants who often advocate most strongly for immigration reform. They know first-hand why they left, and they’d very much like to protect what they have now.

Reality lurks behind bad guys in eyeliner. What do you do about actual evil, evil that can’t be fixed with inclusion and cupcakes? What do you do with real tough choices about rights and prosperity, wars and dictators? Grownups have to make tough decisions about safety and protection, which is why Maleficent (despite being hilariously overplayed by Kristin Chenoweth) is shrunk into a lizard and put in a terrarium at the end. Because this universe needs funny retribution that makes my 11-year-old laugh, as it should be, but Maleficent is evil enough that she needs to be resolved in some way, not just used as punchline.

In the real world, there is evil that doesn’t care about your dreams or your hopes, what you deserve or what you want. There’s evil that can’t be put in a box or mocked into obscurity or even locked up on an island. The Descendants is a sweet, teenage version of this perennial truth: evil has to be dealt with, one way or another.

Like our heroes and anti-heroes of pop music, we get to choose who to be, hero or villain. We get to decide if we want more VKs in our country or not, if war is ever justified, if there is such a thing as right and wrong. One thing we cannot do is pretend these hard questions don’t exist.

In every world, evil poses a question, and in every world, good has to answer.

Good Art: The Descendants movies and soundtracks. Best enjoyed with enthusiastic kids who will laugh at all the jokes, swoon at the teenage love story and try out the dance moves on the living-room floor.

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Of course the trevails and trials of parenthood come up. We’ve all had the kid who will eat nothing but vanilla yogurt for several days or hates socks. But, “Life would be meaningless without our kids,” my husband said. I’ll note that this is one of the hottest things any man can say, but especially the man with whom you have chosen to parent these rascals.

We nodded along. We all agree: our kids give us perspective, wonder, joy, deep wells of love and purpose.

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But is that a good enough reason to have them? Even more troubling - are we just selfishly demanding that these tiny beings complete us?

I’ve been reading a lot about the fertility crisis, in the West generally and in America in particular. One thing that stands out to me is the way that we are now questioning something that used to be commonplace assumption. Broadly speaking, we used to believe that everyone needed kids, wanted kids, would have kids if they could. Now, again making a generalization, we assume that you don’t. And, as a kicker, even if you have children, you find them to be difficult, inconvenient barriers to an easier, wealthier, less-stressed life.

Is that our goal: ease, wealth, or peace?

If it is, nobody, and I mean nobody - who has ever made a young man pick up his room, pull weeds or scoop dog poo - the kinds of things which turn a little boy into a young man - thinks that parenting is easy or peaceful. No one who’s ever trotted sweatily behind a bike as chubby legs wobble on two wheels is confused about the cost of parenting. No one who has ever coached a tween on hygiene and body hair thinks, “Wow; what fun!”

Parenting is a sacrifice, and saying that it’s not does our generation a disservice. We buy school shoes and sports fees, haircuts and Goldfish, and any wanna-be parent watching from the sidelines will wonder if this is such a good idea. Kids are expensive, they interrupt our conversations, our plans, our retirement accounts. I think this hard, expensive, life-upending adventure is worth it, however, despite the memes about exhausted, broke parents and the legions of my peers who have opted out entirely.

Why? Are some people just built to be parents?

This will be construed as a hot take, but I think we parent for the common good as well as our own.

Parenting is not something you want to do. By God’s grace it becomes a joy and an honor. But we do it because we will die out if we don’t, because the loss of our culture, our faith, our very species hangs in the balance, because we believe that if someone gave us life, we should do the same.

The other day we went to the theater to see Toy Story 5. Jesse woke up from his nap singing “You’ve Got a Friend in Me”, as prepped as a Norwegian soccer fan for the excitement to come. He wore his Woody shirt and hat and brought stuffed Buzz and Woody along, earning jealous stares from other young movie-goers. When Buzz and Woody appeared on screen, one small ecstatic fist raised in the air in triumph - the moment was here, his heroes were on the big screen in a new adventure - and he stayed glued to the film the entire time, munching popcorn and switching between Adam’s and my laps in total immersive joy.

It was one of those rare moments when I could feel time rushing by, like the sand under my toes as the wave retreats back to the sea. I knew, deep in my gut, that this would not come around again, it was a fleeting, precious moment of wonder. His full-throated obsession is good for me, the childlike imagination we watched play out on-screen was here in my lap, making my thighs fall asleep and my hips hurt. My kids are a flesh-and-blood reminder that children aren’t props or vehicles for our own inner child, they are people, like Blaze and Bonnie, like Andy and Sid, characters in their own dramas and heartbreaks, ecstasies and adventures.

While I was tearing up over the enthusiasm of my children for Toy Story (Addy and Isaiah were devouring popcorn and giggling one row over with their cousins), I noticed that adults greatly outnumbered children in the room. Not aunts and uncles and grandparents shepherding kids and therefore making the grown-up-count higher than the kid-count, but genuinely childless people, coming on a weekday afternoon to enjoy a cartoon.

Now hear me: this alone is not a judgment. Toy Story is great, for all ages. And I understand the desire for nostalgia. I’m a Millennial on the cusp of Gen X, in possession of my very own print journalism degree no less, exactly the kind of person who craves the simpler times of Woody and Buzz.

But my generation’s obsession with our own childhoods while being unwilling to get into the messy business of raising kids ourselves is troubling to me. So many of us are engaging in cheap memory-hacking, the rush of storytelling without the sacrifice of having to explain that story to a small, not-yet-developed brain.

For example, in the latest Superman movie, Clark Kent’s whole storyline revolves around an obsession with his parents, first with the Kryptonian Jor-El and then with his earthly adoptive family, Jonathan and Martha Kent. I’m sorry to tell you that it did not work for me. The emotional pay-off was supposed to be that a grown being, capable of lifting skyscrapers and saving the world, watched home movies to sooth himself post-heroics. I found it weird and deeply unsatisfying. Worse still, it’s emblematic of a growing need of my generation to constantly be the child, the precious misfit, the one in need of cheerful memories and head-patting.

But think of the heroes of our youth: Han Solo and Jim Hawkins and Jean Valjean; Aragorn and Matt Murdock and Steve Rogers. There are plenty of women to name, too, none of which would have curled up in a ball to stare at childhood photos of themselves after a hard day. Can you imagine Jo March or Leia Organa or Elizabeth Bennett needing such a comfort? What would we think of Arwen or Claire Fraser or Meg Murry scurrying home after battle to watch themselves at a younger age, in search of warm-milk reassurance? Our heroes did not model the endless backward gaze that our generation has perfected. So why are we still pursuing it?

I think we’ve told ourselves that connecting with our inner child is valuable, that examining our lives, our stories, our origins gives us emotional resonance and power. And it does. Play is important, and so is memory.

But it can become a sedative, and keep us from the real business of being the heroes of our own stories, the safe laps for the next generation to find themselves on.

It’s nice to be the kid, but it’s even better to give the childhood you dream of to the young ones, rather than fighting with time to go backwards, into the shell of a memory. We want to milk our past for meaning while avoiding the deep wells of poignancy and power right in front of us, here and now.

It’s time to grow up. The next generation needs us.

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Just as the writing expands our hearts, the rejections can do the opposite if we aren’t careful. But I got the nicest rejection letter of my life the other day and have been dining out on it ever since, I’m just so tickled by its kindness, even if it did end with the “it’s not you, it’s me” of publishing. It is wonderful to have even a few people reading this little story of mine and thinking it worth a reply of any kind - I’m not sure I’ll ever get over that thrill. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this piece, either for the first time or revisiting, and please send your prayers/thoughts/hopes/caffeine my way as I continue to pursue representation/publication for my fiction.

My chatty four-year-old and I were leaving Whole Foods with a full shopping cart. I’m a bargain-hunter by nature, but now and then we venture into the sunlit uplands of $7 gourmet cereals for a few specific items.

Anyway, those few items had turned into a few more (Unique beer! Baby bok choy! Designer gelato!) and I had my hands full with bags of groceries and my pint-sized commentary machine (I saw a firetruck mama! Where was it going mama? It’s sunny today mama! What’s that guy doing mama? What’s that for mama? I saw a birdie mama!)

As Isaiah climbed into the car and I loaded up our purchases, I noticed a blond-haired woman about my age, sitting outside the store at a wooden picnic table, which was fitted with a Whole-Foods-green umbrella. She had a brown paper take-out container, and she sat before it with such desolation on her face that I looked again. She wasn’t crying, or holding her head in her hands, or doing any of the things that we associate with heartbreak, but heartbreak was present all the same. Whole Foods is close to the hospital - I imagined maybe she came from seeing a loved one, perhaps she’d just had a scary appointment - in a split-second I wondered if there was a way to help, or if perhaps she simply wanted to sit in the sunshine, in which case my presence would only interfere. All these things were running through my mind as I loaded my frivolous groceries in the car; in her presence I felt a little embarrassed by my $8 locally-grown clamshell of butter lettuce, self-conscious in my excesses.

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Isaiah had buckled in when a man in a fleece and running shoes came by. “Have a nice day,” he said quickly, and as if embarrassed by his own gesture, he dropped a vibrant bunch of sunflowers on the table in front of her and hurried away.

The sunflowers glowed in the spring morning, glorious and exuberant. The woman’s face changed, it went from contained sadness to utter desolation, and she wept outright. I cried too, watching compassion unfold through the windshield with my little boy humming in the backseat, coloring in his superhero coloring book.

I’ve been working on a little fiction project, not because I think I can write fiction but because my real life has felt like one long DMV line lately and no one wants to hear about that, including myself.

But the act of writing fiction (which of course, has caused me to read more fiction, as I really don’t know how it works) has lead me to think about compassion. Because creativity, imagination - they are the ultimate act of compassion. They dare us to put ourselves in another’s shoes, to engage in the radical act of putting ourselves (and our opinions!) to the side.

Like the North-Face-wearing young man who saw a sad stranger as worthy of his attention and kindness, like the flight attendants who gave us a free lunch in the back of the plane when they realized we were flying home with a three-week-old adopted baby, like the elderly rancher who stopped on the side of the road when he saw my mom-bus pulled over in Eastern Oregon cow country: “You OK ma’am?”

Fiction is compassion. It is putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. It is daring to believe that our way is not the only way. Through telling stories we broaden the breadth and scope of humanity, we imagine ourselves the shoes of someone older, younger, happier, sadder, less privileged or more intelligent, less able or more kind.

There are no small lives. There is no small sadness or small joy. Every human life has value and every story matters. Thank you, as always, for reading mine.

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Our neighbor turned off the irrigation ditch this year. The water is technically his, ours comes from another source, but it runs through our land and others, an object lesson in collective consequences. So the ditch sits, taking up valuable real estate by not doing what it was meant for, instead it is dusty and barren. The chorus of summer evening frogs has gone silent. My boys can’t float popsicle-stick man-o-wars and hunt for water bugs, there is no water feature to remind my horses they aren’t made of sugar. The trees just on the other side of our fence have all died, they had years of wetland and were used to feasting, so now in famine they lean in brown dejection over the fence. The land aches to be cared for, even sagebrush and rocks would be a welcome change to the blowing dust and sad, thirsty bits of grass poking up.

By contrast, our pastures are my husband’s point of particular pride. Any bald spots or brown patches are a dig at his abilities and must be rectified forthwith, to have our neighbor care so little about his is mind-boggling, not to say upsetting. It’s a shame, because when one neighbor decides to stop caring about his parcel, it affects everyone’s land.

Bad neighborhoods don’t simply become bad one day. It’s not like everyone bands together and agrees that they hate clean streets and unlocked doors so it’s time for a new era of mistrust and trash. It starts with stealing some cookout food or not watering your grass.

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Many faith traditions have a theology of stewardship, such as in Genesis 2 when God tells mankind to take care of Eden at the very beginning. Despite our higher impulses, we don’t often get it right. There’s frequently fighting about what stewardship should look like, and times when we just don’t care if we’re getting it wrong, we want it our way. But at our best, we know that the only way is this: start with goodness and work from there. We can’t wait for our neighbor to turn the water on, we have to fertilize our pastures, irrigate them, care for them, and give our kids the example of healthy stewardship. It’s caretaking that isn’t easy or cheap, but it is right.

Obviously the land is on my mind. Agriculture is near to my heart and Oregon has a plethora of local meat and produce and wine and beer and outdoor activities: this is our own Eden. But it’s true of culture, too. We have to steward kindness and neighborly acts, just as we do the land we live on. Slow down for the mom and young kids in the crosswalk, even if the four-year-old has decided to study a bug right then and there (this may or may not be the voice of said mom.) Be a courteous user of trails and campsites, shop local when you can. Our neighborhoods are only safe because we watch out for kids on bikes and we use the honor system for food left in the shared fridge. Our towns are only cute because we smile at babies and dogs, we support our local businesses and we tip our servers well. Our land is only beautiful because we care for it, we water the pastures and work the land and leave the wild places beautifully wild.

We can’t do everything: we can’t fix all the problems or mend all the fences or irrigate all the grass. But I hope for all of us, the grace to steward our parcel well.

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No, you are asking for teamwork, for grace and give. You want their ear turned toward you, their eye softened on you. You want the hind end to propel the front, to gather itself and grant that extra bit of oomph, noticeable even at a slow speed but much easier to see and ask for once a horse gets going. You are looking for a graceful, bent barrel, a suppleness to the work which tells you the horse is ready, engaged, perhaps even enjoying himself. No one wants to run in a circle indefinitely, but a few minutes of long-line communication, while feeling the earth roll beneath your feet and the easy rhythmic cadence of horse hooves and horse breath tendered into partnership and grace? That’s pretty awesome, both for the horse and for the human.

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I lunged my horses for the first time ye…

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Stick with me here. When I teach writing classes at the community college and library, it’s around a style of writing, such as kids books or Substack or westerns or food writing, which gives a hook of interest and a focal point for my students.

Typically, my students register to learn about the how: the buttons on Substack or the methods for childrens’ book publishing or landing a gig as a restaurant reviewer.

Spoiler alert: the more important question is always the why and the what.

If you don’t know why you’re writing, or what you want to write about, you can have every piece of the how figured out, and still not be successful.

So, how do we figure out the what and the why?

I think it’s like sorting silverware.

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In your imaginary brain-drawer, you have spoons for soup and forks for pasta and knives for the soft sides of pears and the spreading of butter on crusty bread. We might find a few memories in there too: baby spoons you can’t seem t…

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Please “enjoy” this little satire and remind yourself, as I am trying to do: the answer to ‘who do you think you are?’ is more powerful, and yes, dangerous to a certain kind of darkness, than you can imagine. If you want to read his previous advice to Snakeguts, click here. )

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To this day, that’s still what I want, but it’s a bit harder with a passel of kids who aren’t satisfied with a couple of silver-dollar pancakes at a shaded table. Now, that chubby curly-headed baby is a long-legged soon-to-be middle-schooler, who has opinions on lotion, pierced ears and a tiny dog obsession. We’ve also added two boys to the mix, one 2nd-grader who’s favorite activity is riding bikes and “inventing” things (code name for taping trash together in creative ways) and a three-year-old who eats more than the other two combined and has mastered the side-eye. It’s an expensive crew to take out to eat, and we make an entrance. But they’re mine, mine to mother and be proud of, and I want to feel celebra…

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Dakota was Adam’s horse through and through. I have seldom seen a horse choose a person like that, but he walked right up to Adam on their first meeting and announced that they were meant for each other. He was right, as horses usually are about this kind of thing. He was a Tennessee Walking Horse, and big, almost 17 hands, long-legged like his human. He was a contradiction, kind but pushy, laid-back but way too fast for most riders, a natural leader and soft-hearted teacher who intimidated many riders because of his speed and size.

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This strange holiday made me think of this piece, which I wrote during COVID and is also about displacement, the odd sensation of the world looking different than you thought it was. I hope you enjoy this little essay, and send me all your entertainment and pain management recommendations as I get back on my feet.

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I saw an old town car going slowly by, its speed and sound and style all the same sensible beige color. I looked down at the sidewalk, but then quickly up as I heard it: the loud sound of a crash, the immediate splintering, crunching of a bumper and a fender, the skid and scrape of demolition derby. It’s unmistakable, you know the sound of a car crash anywhere. I ran over. The sedan was lightly smoking, the elderly couple inside shaken, the wife at the wheel. “I never drive!” She was on the verge of tears, shaking, tiny wrinkled hands in the air in…

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Which is probably always the case, there are usually more happy coincidences than we realize - but still. It was a wonderful trip at a time when I’m reminded to feel especially grateful for wonderful things.

Addy is at a very sparkly age for a big adventure, she’s not too old for FAO Schwartz but not too young for Hamilton. My friend Holli and I have traveled all over for years and are compatible travel buddies (museums, coffee shops, champagne, shopping, walking) as well as dear friends. We can pick up where we left off at any time, anywhere in the world and start talking about books and food and fai…

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I’ve been up in the night because I’m entering week two of yet another shoulder-pain flare-up. It’s hard to cook, impossible to handle my horses, difficult to sleep. The things that bring me joy are buried in a fog of pain, which only lifts long enough for me to make the next medical appointment or do math on painkillers. I joked with a friend that I can’t take Oxycontin beca…

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I wrote this piece a week after bringing home our third baby, and in 2023 it found a home at The Other Journal, a lovely literary magazine which I am not nearly smart enough to write for, but thankfully they gave me a shot anyway.

If you like this piece, I urge you to upgrade your subscription to support this work and more like it, so that I may continue writing and others, who may not be able to afford a subscription, may continue reading.

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She was purchased as a puppy from a gas station in Sunriver before we had any kids, when we had just bought our house and were hoping to full it with laughter. Adam surprised me with her, we had friends staying with us and Casey made up an excuse for him and Adam to go out sot they could pick her up without arousing suspicion.

“Do you think you want a dog someday?” Casey’s wife Sarah asked after the men left. We sat together in th…

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But today I am not going to do either of those things. The world is large and scary, and many things happened in 2025, and I am neither willing nor able to do a “round-up” of any kind right now, because my brain is Jell-O and my fingers are cold and my kids want 5,000 snacks per day.

Instead, I’m going to tell you what I love, Right Now. Not soon, not yesterday, but now, our one burning moment to make the right decision, honor the right impulses, say the right thing. Our one opportunity to live, actually, because we don’t …

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I refuse to become addicted to having the “right” opinions or the hottest takes, but I am committed to writing well about things that matter, things that move me, things that make us all more human, not just the jungle sounds of derision and ghastliness which any primate can make.

As such, I’m stealing from one of my favorite Substack authors, Paul Kingsnorth, who has been articulating this well for much longer than I have, and reminding you that anyone who wants to read my work can do so here, no payment required. So please! Send this piece on to a friend! But, if you want to support my voc…

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