While the last few years of movies haven’t been the greatest, 2024 came back roaring.

I’m not normally a movie critic-as I tend to stick with the comparisons I do with wine. I like what I like; critics be damned. I read the overly simplistic takedown of movies and then I see it and wonder who hurt that critic so badly they forget they were watching entertainment, or they completely missed the point of what lesson we were supposed to learn in said art piece.

My three favorites to end the year on were Wicked, The Six Triple Eight and Lee. These three films encompassed some of the best acting I’ve seen in decades. They took me back to movie making as an experience. They also did the thing I love the most-make you cry and get angry because they’re telling true stories of the very human complexities we haven’t quite figured out over many generations. Which is to say-we still struggle with how to treat each other as humans. Whether it was Elphaba fighting for those who are marginalized as she’d always been and felt alone in that fight, to Kerry Washington’s depiction of a leader of an all black, female infantry brigade who struggles to obtain basic civil rights while fighting for their country, or Kate Winslet as an iconic WWII Veteran photographer trying to humanely showcase the horrors of humanity, these movies made me feel exactly what I was supposed to feel.

The fabric that wove them all together felt deeper than just that, though. It was the stories of women who battled something that seems old but more relevant than ever.

You could say that black women saw, once again, how their fight felt lonely in so many ways during this election. They always see the injustice and fight for it-both during election season and every day because they don’t have any other choice but to. You could say that we’re seeing the horrors of how many black women truly die in childbirth but we’re now only realizing it because of the abortion restrictions and white women are dying now, too. You could say that Gaza and the mass graves unearthed in Syria reminds us of what humans are capable of when a thirst for power annihilates human beings. You could say these human stories repeat and repeat and repeat.

Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to human stories-because it reminds me that the human condition of suffering never ends and at some point, there is a resolution that seems to bring us back to our humanity, if only for a little while.

While my daughter, as a labor and delivery nurse that lives in the state we do, has to watch women give birth to dead babies that couldn’t get abortion care and get stuck with an astronomical hospital bill where they’ll try and tell her it’s not covered because it wasn’t pre-authorized-humanity is definitely on a downward spiral, still. And the thought of us losing Jimmy Carter and then having a man who’s sexual defamation case was just upheld taking office, all within a month, screams that our once darling-of-a country is all but dead.

The truth is, when you dig into who we’ve really always been and what we still haven’t wrestled with, the bones of our demise have always been there. The question is-what are we gonna do about it?

When I ever talk of cage diving with great whites, people think I’m crazy. “Why on earth would you ever want to get in the water with something so dangerous?” they ask. When I followed the Giséle Pelicot rape case, the answer was always easy for me. I’d much rather swim in the deep, dark waters any day, than take a chance at what man does to us all.

God, how I want my answer to change…

I like getting to work early. I eat my breakfast and catch up on the events of the day.

For awhile now, Taylor Swift and pictures of my grandbabies is the only thing keeping me sane. I’m in a group called “Gen X Swifties” and I began to notice a pattern with our cognitive dissonance. Everything right now feels hard.

I listened to the stories of people who, like me, had just lost a parent. The stories of children navigating college or new jobs or moves. Helping your kids with their kids. Having health issues ourselves. Figuring out what retirement will be like. It all feels like so…much. That’s just the day to day. This group has felt like a little corner of the world I go where we also share funny memes and go down rabbit holes trying to figure out Tay’s next move. For a few minutes of the day we get to almost become kids again. With the status of this part of our life, I think that’s why the state of the world right now feels so much more.

We’ve gotten to a place in our lives where we fundamentally know exactly who we are. We’ve lived enough to have seen a lot, historically and we’ve grown as women. There is a deep ache in our bones that wants us to protect ourselves but the fire we feel in protecting our kids and grandkids-it’s appropriate to conjure up the “momma bear” scenario for what we all feel.

I’m not sure what this world thinks they’re going to get imposing laws and rules on women, telling them they will have no protections if they’re pregnant and the unspeakable happens, or they’re not ready to be pregnant and there’s no medical interventions to keep that from happening. How a woman can be raped and our government wants to force trauma on her that she couldn’t prevent by having to carry that baby to term. I hear men consistently using the disgusting troupe of “if she’d just keep her legs closed”. 64,000 rapes resulted in pregnancies in the last few years in states with abortion bans.

I don’t know why they think women would ever want to keep having more babies when this country tells them if something happens their death or trauma won’t matter. Why should our lives-our bodies-keep getting used as a political pawn?

We are sick of a society that tells us to keep doing this with our bodies, our minds, our labor, only to be met by a country that doesn’t give women paid maternity leave. Or a society that won’t help with childcare costs-many situations being the same price as someone’s take home pay each month.

We live in a country that wants us to have babies and be the everything to everyone. The organizer of birthday parties and holidays and teacher gifts. We pack for every vacation, schedule doctor’s appointments, find summer camps and do 70% or more of the cleaning in the house. They want us to stay home to do it all, but most can’t afford that so we work and still do it all.

We’re taught since we were old enough to understand that this is our God-given right and privilege and that we should be grateful we get to do this but honestly-is this REALLY what we signed up for? To live in a world where more is expected of women every year without the support we need? And we wonder why there’s a mental health crisis with women.

I am so sick to death of seeing people my daughter’s age live in this kind of world and it makes me even more enraged my granddaughter is in it. Where her body and life will be a soundbite for mostly men to analyze and debate over and decide what kind of a life she gets to lead. I’m so completely sick of it.

This isn’t what we signed up for. So no-not everyone will decide to have kids in the future. Because what their kids will be born into-especially if you’re a girl-is scary. I have conversations every week with my daughter who’s a labor and delivery nurse and we talk about how fast things are going south. It’s not hyperbole. It’s here and I don’t know if most of us truly live in a state of cognitive dissonance and think it will all just work, but I just can’t be there anymore.

When they say vote like your life depends on it-it does. They have closed down maternity wards here already and are transferring high risk patients to places further away and shit goes south. We all see it happening.

The funny thing is-as powerless as women feel right now, and as much as they’re fighting to keep us that way, I like to take advice from Glenda the good witch when she said, “you had the power all along, my dear”. We do. We just have to wake up and use it.

Until this country decides that the conversations about us are worthy of being decided by mostly women in the room and medical professionals who understand the complexities of our bodies, we’ll just be over here choosing the bear.

If you would’ve asked me a few years ago if I would’ve been someone whose blood would be boiling defending Taylor Swift, I would’ve laughed.

When Britt was growing up, her and my nephew Ryan would listen on full blast. In the car, in the kitchen-she was a feel-good sensation that splashed over my ears and filled me with high school nostalgia. Her music was easy and fun. Somehow, over the last several years and with the loss of women’s rights, she’s become something different to me now.

You can not like her music, but if you’ve paid attention, lately, you’ll recognize the absolute vitriol that has been hurled at women. This summer alone, Taylor, Beyonce and Barbie amassed billions of dollars over the course of just a few months. They kept calling it the “Summer of the Woman”. Who could’ve guessed (I say in my most sarcastic voice) what would come next?

As mom was nearing her end, my nephew Ryan introduced me to two of Taylor’s albums I hadn’t listened to much before. They were different than most of her other work and I was in the headspace to listen to something contemplative, so I gave Folklore and Evermore a shot.

Something happened to my soul when I listened to those albums that broke wide open. It game me a chance to process what I think, I, and thousands of other women had been feeling and it helped prepare me for mom’s impending death. I was crushed and healed at the same time. It was like I was sitting in those foggy woods with Taylor trying to put myself back together.

When I see the absolutely disgusting hate spewed at women who use their fortunes to give back to their communities and to take care of their bands, truck drivers and crews-it can only mean one thing-fear. Fear of a woman having something they all want but can’t have. And I welcome any man who feels that way to take a seat and join most of the women they know who have felt that for the entirety of theirs.

I am fortunate. The three men I’m closest to in my life-Steve, Ben and Ryan are tender men. They are strong and confident but have a heart that includes everyone. They wrap me and all the women in their life in compassion and sit with us when something comes up they don’t understand.

Steve sat with me and mom the day Roe was overturned. We cried. We screamed. Even though he had no clue what that felt like, he was going to do what he could to protect us. He almost seemed more helpless than we were because he couldn’t do anything to stop us from hurting and he knew it.

These three men in my life are some of the most gentle humans I’ve ever met and that’s what makes them so strong. They don’t feel a need to do anything to put powerful women down. They know we all do better when women have power over their minds and bodies. They don’t need to do anything to elevate who they are because their ability to love all the people in their life, as they are, is the thing that makes them the strongest.

As men have historically had a seat at every table in the past, why is it that making room for women to succeed scares them? I really want to know because I want my granddaughter to grow up with better. I don’t want her future successes be followed by a, “well that’s just how it is”. Excuse me, but fuck that.

When you get death threats for attending football games, I think it’s time for everyone to just calm the hell down. After all, Matthew McConaughey shows up at all the UT games and FC games and everyone absolutely loves it. I guess Taylor just needs to adopt an, “ alright, alright, alright” attitude and nobody will feel threatened.

Watch yourselves…the little girls are watching you behave this way and they’ll vote one day. There’s nothing like a mad woman. (Pun intended, of course)

To me, there’s nothing that makes me feel quite like music does. It’s healing. Let it stay that way…

I know what you’re probably thinking. Dryer sheets? What in the hell does that have to do with grief? In normal circumstances, dryer sheets would have nothing to do with it, until they do.

I went to check the mail and there it was-a letter from Hospice Austin reminding me the holidays are coming and they have resources available to help me and my family through this time of grief. “It’s been almost four months and sometimes grief gets delayed until months later or things like the holidays can be painful reminders of your loss.” They weren’t wrong. Already, Britt and I had been having discussions about what this year would look like.

As I put the letter down to kick me out of where my head was going, I walked in the laundry room to put the clothes in the dryer. I picked up the box of dryer sheets and started to cry.

Mom liked to buy things in bulk-the most of whatever she could. Growing up poor, she always felt like she didn’t have enough, so as an adult, she tended to be the,”we don’t have enough toilet paper left” when there were still ten rolls in the package.

The day we brought her home from the hospital on February 4th and she started hospice, I washed all her clothes and as I grabbed the gigantic box of dryer sheets that was newly opened, I realized it had 250 sheets. 250. In that moment, something settled in my head about the time she had left. Would she outlast this box? The doctors had given her four to six months so it was unlikely.

The days passed and every time I did her laundry I began to assess the pace with which she was declining with how fast the box of dryer sheets were going. Come March, no matter how much unnecessary laundry I did, the box never seemed to finish.

I washed her last load of laundry on June 1st-three days after she died. As I put her last load of clothes in, I screamed at the box of dryer sheets. Grief is fucking weird.

As I grabbed the box of dryer sheets today, I noticed that they’re finally almost gone. They outlived her and I hate them for it, as stupid and dramatic as that sounds.

That’s the thing about grief-it doesn’t ask your permission before it completely pounds you upside the head. It can be a dryer sheet, a song, or a letter from the hospice facility to remind you that you can’t shortcut grief. It’s not linear and everyone gets hit with it so different.

I’ve been down this grief road before, many times and the only thing I know is this-you have to treat yourself sometimes like you’re a child. When things feel so big and you know you can’t do certain things on your own. You have to ask for help and sleep and cry and sing when you feel good. But whatever you do-don’t let yourself forget. Even when it’s really, really hard.

Mom hated me doing her laundry. It was one of the last things she could still do for herself up until the very end. I learned to love that part of the day where I’d come hang up everything in her room and she’d remind me of all the times we fought because I wouldn’t hang things up when I was a kid. We’d laugh and tease each other.

Wherever you are in your grief, it’s ok to cry when you do the laundry. Or look at their pictures. Or when you think about the holidays without them. Take all the time you need.

Some things happen in life that are inevitable but feel unbearable. It’s been fifty days since mom died and I’m not sure when this house will settle into it.

Her silver bird urn graces us on the entryway table upon our daily arrivals. So do the swallowtails she watched over, whose nest was in the corner of our front porch. Her bedroom, the first one to the left when you enter, still stacked with her most prized possessions-pictures of all her grandchildren.

I sit on my spot on the sofa and look over to the right where she sat on Friday nights, the place she’d sit when we’d watch movies together. The place she slept so many days before she died. The spot she sat when her hospice nurse would come on Mondays. Her spot.

I look in the freezer where her chocolate chip waffles were that she ate every day and I can’t buy strawberries, yet. Her partially eaten strawberry ice cream, I can’t throw out.

Our dining room table where we played dominoes every Wednesday night. So many hours of laughter, I’ve lost count over the last few years.

Death is inevitable but I don’t want it to be. I want her to come back and hug Addi and argue with me. I want to cut up her strawberries that go on her waffles and I want to sit and have long talks about things that broke our hearts and the things we’re grateful for.

We don’t talk about death like we should. We celebrate birth and a new life but as someone is coming to the end of theirs, we fill it with half-assed conversations that happen to be half-truths about what’s really happening to them.

We don’t allow people to tell their doctor they’re ready to not be in pain anymore and there’s another way. The needles and tests and medicines don’t work at some point and we need to say the hard things.

We celebrate life and all its newness but we fail to properly celebrate the old. The life well-lived. The lessons full of heartache but triumph. We don’t tell families they’re allowed to hold two opposing thoughts of celebrating their dying loved one and how to hold the pain of watching them go.

We don’t talk about the reality of death. The visions of the dead they experience and lost bodily functions and angry and sad death. We don’t prepare each other, so we never leave space for it.

We don’t we talk about the last moments of being completely worn out as a caretaker and wondering when it will ever stop-watching the death but as the death comes, feeling guilty for those feelings at all.

I knew mom was dying and so did she. She wanted to talk about it and we did-often. Her doctors, until she entered hospice, never did.

I hope as time goes on, we learn to not only celebrate life as it comes in but the soul as it’s passing through. I hope we learn to talk about what death really looks like. When you’re coming into the world, it’s messy and painful and beautiful. So is death.

I haven’t been on here in awhile. Writing hasn’t seemed like a space I could be in, until now.

It’s difficult to fine-tune where my head was, and where it is, now. The only thing I can equate it to in the physical realm is being in the river when the water is murky and all the sediment gets stirred up. At first, the sediment swirls and it’s cloudy and everything looks dark and then it settles and you can see glimpses of these beautiful pebbles of color, underneath. They were always there-just covered up. I started to look at the sediment as a layer of protection for the beauty of the river.

Life has felt much like that, lately. A little over a year ago, I was in Colorado with Ben, doing that very thing. Swirling the rocks around in the river to clear the mud so I could see the color of the rocks. We needed to get away and have some fun. He had been sick off and on for several months and we were in the beginning stages of trying to figure out why he was suddenly losing weight.

At our first doctor’s appointment, his blood work had shown severe anemia and he had lost twenty pounds rather quickly. His initial Crohn’s tests came back negative but the doctor had to perform one more test, as he still thought that’s what he had. The final test came back conclusive for Crohn’s and it was severe. Ben had Crohn’s in the worst place you can get it and it’s where it can be difficult to treat.

We got his official diagnosis on August 4th and on August 9th everything changed. His elevated treatment protocol wouldn’t happen because his bowel had obstructed and perforated and we then moved to an emergency situation.

The following hours would be filled with ambulance rides, multiple surgeons hurling questions at me and informing me of what would happen to him.

Ben also had COVID, we learned, so there would be no visitors for support. Seven hours went by like ten years, as I waited for them to tell me what happened and what we were up against.

Ben ended up with nearly a foot of his small bowel removed. The damage was too extensive and the next forty eight hours would be significant, as his infection risk was extremely high.

Over the next several months, he battled one abdominal abscess after another that landed him back in the hospital, multiple times. Central line infections. A surgical reversal for his colostomy bag with a subsequent additional bowel resection and a surgery to install a wound VAC to address a significant abdominal infection that also left him on IV antibiotics for six weeks.

During this time, we were also planning the final stages of Britt’s wedding. Those days held me in places of significant pain and joy. One minute I would be talking to her about decor and the excitement of it all and then she’d switch to nurse mode and ask about Ben’s stats and which antibiotic they were trying that day. Vacillating between the two was the darkest place I’ve ever been. Losing dad the way we had was devastating but I didn’t know how to live in the place I was. You’re not supposed to do this with your child.

“You’re not supposed to watch your child be in this much pain”, I thought. And you’re definitely not supposed to almost lose your child. When Ben woke up from his surgery, his only request was that I notify his school counselor as quickly as possible. He didn’t want to fall behind. He Snap Chatted a pic of himself lying in the hospital bed as his first day of senior year. As I saw that, I quietly excused myself to go cry outside. This fucking sucked. Every bit of it. I was mad. I was sad. I was happy for my daughter. I wanted to throw up and scream because I couldn’t fix him or be with her to plan her day. I wanted someone to tell me why the fuck this was happening. I hated everyone and everything and I loved them both so much it hurt, deeply.

Even in the moments that seemed too much, Ben always found a way to keep going. He made friends with the nurses and they laughed at his jokes. He was compliant with his doctors and asked questions about his care. He did his schoolwork, determined to go back as soon as he could. His resolve was steady and he never lost focus. This thing happening to him wasn’t going to be the thing that defined him, and he reminded us of that, every day. He kept saying that this was temporary and he could do temporary. When I wanted to fall apart inside, he was my source of strength because it was HIM that was going through it and I needed to take my cues from him. He literally took one hour at a time and I needed to do the same. No more “what-if-ing” or thinking up scenarios that hadn’t happened, yet. He deserved for me to hold on to the same hope he had.

Ben got out of the hospital two weeks before Britt’s wedding. We got him fitted for his suit within three days of the cut-off. Prior to that, his wound VAC was a machine that was attached to a vacuum-like appliance in his stomach to suck out all the infection and help heal the large portion of his abdominal muscle they had to remove, so getting him fitted prior to that wasn’t an option.

As the man at the store took his measurements, I choked up, seeing this tall, extremely thin man-boy, who had just been through a war with his body, standing there realizing how good he looked in his suit. He gave me a thumbs-up to reiterate what I noticed he was seeing. He knew he looked good. I exhaled behind my mask and prayed to all the gods of everything he could make it to Britt’s wedding. When he went back in for his last surgery, he promptly notified the surgeon of when the date was and said he needed to be there for that.

Three days before the wedding, Britt and Blair broke the news that they were expecting. The tears kept flowing that week. As we got to the day, I kept staring at them both-my child who had just been through hell and back and my daughter who was now carrying my grandchild and I felt this incredible warmth wash over my body. In that moment, I felt true peace. I’m not really sure I ever felt that before. I don’t think I knew what it was before that moment.

That night, Ben and Britt joined hands and danced like nothing had ever happened. They were brother and sister holding hands and jumping to the beat of the music. I watched, still unable to believe what I was seeing. I never thought he’d make it there and she was carrying our grandchild. I could’ve died that night and I would’ve died happy.

So much can happen in a year. Steve and I got married, Addi B was born and Ben went off to college.

Me and Steve are constantly saying,”things will slow down when…” full-well knowing our lives will not, in fact, slow down. We had a house-full of Ben’s friends here, Steve’s kids and Addi B’s infectious presence all summer and we wouldn’t trade any of it.

I always say that life is made up of moments living at the corner of bitter and sweet. There’s no other way. Heartache proceeds gratitude and joy and Vice-versa and that’s the way it will always be. Nobody can escape it. Life will make sure of it.

I know how quickly it can all be gone and change. I don’t take that for granted, anymore. I’m more selective about who I spend my time with and give my energy to, now. I’m spending more days living the way Ben taught me to-exactly where I am in this moment and not worrying about the ones I can’t control.

This year, I also found out that none of us can do life alone. The outpouring of support we received made it possible to survive. I have never felt more overwhelmed with gratitude. It gave me hope that humans are inherently good and we all need to hold one another to that.

I think we’ve always known that life is like the river and the rocks and the sediment. It always seems murky, at first, but once it settles, it reveals its beauty and color.

We eventually heal and life goes on. Or something like that…

Thirty years. Sometimes the years fly by easily and some years, with every milestone of celebration in your new world without them, the pain comes back.

Sometimes when I try and make heads or tales of it, I come up short of truly understanding where I sit with everything. The memories of my father, no matter how few I have left, are vivid, but the few memories I have left are just that-so few and far between, anymore.

Ben being born the day before the day my father died, always left a certain reminder of what there is to really live for. It leant a certain levity to the anniversary. After all-we almost lost Ben when I was pregnant, and I bargained with my dad to take care of him, should he not make it. It seemed like his gift that Ben be born the day before, to heal the parts that were still broken in me.

Watching Ben fight so hard to live, flipped everything on its head for me, this year, and reminded me of the actuality that existed surrounding our dad’s suicide.

Ben’s brain worked to tell him to keep pushing forward and helped his body fight to get better. His brain is perfectly healthy and helped him mentally work through what he’s endured, and my father, while physically healthy in every way, had a brain that wouldn’t let him live.

In thirty years I’ve learned a lot about suicide and mental health. I’m forever grateful for the relationships I’ve formed with people who have shared their stories and some information I’ve learned I wish I didn’t know.

The amount of mental pain I know my dad must have experienced shifted my thoughts of, “how dare you give up”, to, “I’m so glad he stayed as long as he did. That must’ve been painful to live like that”.

Gaining that perspective wasn’t easy. The anger and the shame attached to suicide left me distant from my dad, even in his death. Forgiveness doesn’t always come easy. Over the years it did come and I hope with time it will for others who have experienced this type of loss. The knowledge of understanding mental health and its complexities is a gift in dealing with grief.

When I look at Ben and the overlap of his life and dad’s death, I have to believe that Ben’s a little bit of dad, reincarnated. That somehow, he’s the living form of the way dad would’ve loved to have lived. If life gave him a second chance, this is the way he would personify existing to the fullest.

I can’t know for sure how dad would be if he were alive today, but I have to think the lessons I’ve taught my children about the power of their minds and the importance of human connection has created a space where they can always feel safe to fight whatever it is they’re faced with.

Teaching my kids to live and giving myself permission to do the same, even after extreme heartbreak, is the greatest lesson I learned from my dad’s death.

Thirty long years of heartbreaking, significant, beautiful lessons and I wouldn’t trade any of them…

As I sit here contemplating, I first must remind myself to breathe-in and out. In and out. One week.

As I sit here trying to put together the words of what I feel about Britt getting married, I realize there will never be any perfect words for this. We’ve waited for over a year and through a pandemic and here we are.

We’re up to our eyeballs in wedding decor and all the things to make this day and I still can’t believe it’s real. I still can’t believe the baby I had at almost twenty is about to walk down the aisle and into adulthood with another person. To figure out bills and work and kid’s schedules and how to remain sane through it all.

I remember when I first held her, thinking there was no way they would let me take her home. I had babysat plenty of times, but actually letting me take this living, being home and just hope that it all comes together, was far more than I could fathom. I was terrified.

Britt and I raised each other. She forced me to figure it out really fast. With all the other emotions I could fake my way through in life, she wasn’t one of them. She had my heart wrapped so tightly, it absolutely terrified me.

I worked my way through parenthood the way most people do-on a wish and a prayer and vowed to her one thing-I would always be honest. I knew, no matter what-I would always tell her the hard things.

There were far too many secrets in my family growing up and it never ended up protecting us from anything. I forged ahead with that in my heart and over the years, it proved harder than I thought.

There were SO many nights with her in my room, having gut-wrenching conversations about boys and friendships and the reality of why things don’t work sometimes. There were also difficult conversations about overly-tweezed brows when asked my opinion, that sometimes didn’t go over well. I learned that truth can also mean reserving your judgement when necessary.

There were also mounds of truth directed back at me. Like when I didn’t follow through on something I had promised, or when I pushed too much at a time I didn’t need to. She checked me, consistently, and I was better for it.

The trust flowed freely between us. We never let the other off the hook. It was hard. It was necessary and it was how we grew the love we have. It is the basis of our relationship today.

Britt threw me into adulthood before I was ready, but she 100% healed my soul. I was a child stuck in a woman’s body, still healing from my dad. The hole in my soul felt unbearable and she came along-this tiny human-and patched all the spaces that were so empty.

It’s no coincidence she became a nurse. She learned to heal before she was even born. Even though she’s already grown up, this point in her life feels complete, somehow.

Her worth as a woman isn’t because she’s getting married, but because she’s always known who she was, well before this time. Her ability to come home and fill our house with laughter and song and dance is exactly how she’s always been and it’s what I know she’ll always be.

My wish for her as she enters this new space and experience in her life is to never forget that she was and always will be, Brittany. She’ll become a mom. A wife. She’s a nurse. But she’s always Brittany. I never want her to lose the self she created, long before anyone else came to be.

I want her to fight for herself, the way she will her kids. I want her to chase her dreams, the way she’ll encourage theirs. I want her to fight for her space in her own world because it will always matter as much as her husband’s or her kids.

Dragging out all the pictures this week and seeing the elaborate costumes she devised and the over-the-top productions she once orchestrated-I hope she doesn’t lose that sense of wonderment and desire to discover herself as she grows with her life. I want to wrap my arms around her, tight and whisper, “you are going to learn so much more about you and I can’t wait to see it all”.

The best part of raising kids is this. Seeing the hard stuff you went through together, all make sense, is what it’s about. It’s the golden prize of parenting.

Put the work in. Do the hard things. It’s so damn worth it…

I’m not sure where to start. Do I dive in to the chaos or do I jump straight to how this ends?

August 4th changed everything. Ben got diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. What we thought would be a manageable situation quickly turned into nearly forty days in and out of the hospital.

There were meds-oh so many meds. Sleepless nights. Scary situations where you realize things could go south. When I say “south”, I mean the kind of things where you start swearing you’ll sacrifice anything you’ve got to make sure your kid makes it through.

There were procedures and surgeries and tests and pain. Lots of pain. The physical kind he struggled to bear and the emotional kind I struggled to watch.

The only thing I know for sure about being a mom is that it’s not normal in any way to see your kids in pain. Not for this long or this much. They’re not supposed to be there before we are and the soul doesn’t know what to do with that. Mine didn’t.

People keep asking me how I am and the truth is that I’m living to learn in a perfect dichotomy, of sorts. Living in a space where I hold two opposing thoughts in my head and my heart, all the time.

In two weeks, I’ll get ready to watch Britt walk down the aisle and Ben will be there with her. He has all the tubes out and for now, we’re holding on. He’ll stand there with her, when only three weeks ago, he could hardly stand up at all, and I’ll feel like I’ll die. The magnitude of her getting married and the happiness I feel for her and the new life she’s starting and the hope of Ben getting stronger and healthy again, might just make me collapse.

Life is like that, though, right? It pushes and pulls and weighs you down and lifts you up. It stops your heart and resuscitates you and you never know when any of it will happen.

The things I’ve learned over the last three months are that your best laid plans sometimes aren’t the best ones at all. Sometimes the art and act of planning out a life only serves to prove that life will never let you get by with not learning because it always knows better. It always seeks to teach and if you’re open to it, you can be a good student.

The last few months, I’ve learned patience, the art of breathing and staying calm when you want to scream and how to listen better. I’ve learned that letting your children go to become adults is sometimes about them learning to make their own medical decisions and sometimes it’s about where they’ll live after they get married.

Most of you who know me well, know I’m slightly obsessed with my kids. Not in the helicopter-y mom way, but the way in which I’m obsessed with watching who they are trying to be. I love figuring out how they think and why and what they’ll do with it. We all love each other, fiercely. We celebrate big and we rally, when called.

Going through the act of planning for Britt’s wedding and watching Ben battle this horrific disease has been nothing short of mind-bending. I don’t know how to feel sometimes when I feel happy and then I know I can’t live in the sad, either.

Sitting in the presence at the cross-walk of bitter and sweet makes me realize we’re all already there, or have been. It’s just how life is. It is a juggling act that comes uninvited and it doesn’t ask your permission. It takes and gives and doesn’t really care how you do with it.

In two weeks, I’ll help her get dressed. I’ll think back to when she was a baby and talked about nursing and becoming a momma and I’ll ugly-cry because somewhere years ago, I already knew this day would come. And when it’s over and I’ve sat back to see Ben gaining weight and getting better, I’ll ugly-cry because I know the kid whose motto has been,”mom-this is temporary and I can do temporary”, is stronger than anyone I’ve ever known and I know he’s right.

Every moment we’re in is always temporary. We’re never promised anything. We’re not owed anything. The only thing I’ve really learned is that I have to keep loving my way through it all. You stop living, otherwise.

When COVID is over and the stuff clears, I hope the remnants of all that’s left in your life will mean what you hope it does. I’m going to hold on to mine, daily…

Lots of memories of this day. Twenty 9/11’s. Twenty years of remembering where we all were on that day.

I’ll never forget where I was and neither will you. It’s not something you can ever forget. We don’t need the endless loop of planes hitting and towers falling because on that day, everything stopped.

The weeks that followed 9/11 seemed the strongest that we’d seen in our lifetime. For my generation, it was our WWll. Every soul came together and every nation embraced our mourning. Strangers became friends and we all marched towards a common goal-defeating our enemy. We wanted justice for the blood shed on our soil and we’d spend the next twenty years trying to get that.

Twenty years stretched long, and so did divisions. Our enemy was that of “other”. Other lands, other faces but all an enemy that was named and could be seen.

The enemy created was within us, though. The doubt was laid within ourselves and each other. On our land, our doubt and fears were growing between the ones who thought our nation was to be protected at all costs and those who believed the inscription laid at Lady Liberty’s feet. “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, was just a footnote, to most. The application of that declaration was only a formality.

The tape, fast-forwarding twenty years and a silent enemy crippling, not just our nation, but every land. An enemy that knows no religious boundary or political divide, but one that seeks to destroy because by its very definition, it exists only to be that-a destroyer.

Much like the men who drove the planes into our lands that day, COVID hit us, terroristically. It came with a vengeance. If COVID destructed at the rate 9/11 happened, we’d lose 33,000 people a year.

On September 12th, 2001, we all stopped and wrapped each other in humanity. We didn’t ask about anything, we just were. We did whatever was necessary to protect each other. We didn’t question our leaders. We knew who the enemy was and we wanted to ensure that we’d never suffer again the way we just had.

As we watch year after year, the towers collapsing and we name the men who come from another place, it strikes me that this thing we cannot see has taken us down more then two hundred times the amount those planes ever did.

This enemy we cannot see has wreaked a destruction on our nation unlike any personified version of what came to us twenty years ago. It has broken us. It’s divided us. It is, in fact, the most successful enemy we’ve ever had.

It kills us unapologetically and will keep doing so, until we realize that the only way to stop this particular enemy is to go back to exactly what we were on September 12th. An America that truly loved its neighbor. An America that would do anything to protect its citizens.

Last week Ben and I went to a hematology clinic to get his dressing on his PICC line changed. As we entered that space, I realized how protected it was. Every child in there was extremely ill with cancer or some sort of other immune-compromising disease. Everyone wore a mask and nobody complained. They didn’t because it was expected of them and it had been done years before COVID and it will always be done after COVID.

I wondered that day if it were your child in that clinic if you’d ever think twice about wearing a mask. Do you think twice about taking your shoes off at the airport?

It’s amazing how quickly we fight the enemy when we know what they look like. It’s sad the enemy has turned out to be us.