real, raw motherhood
Friend, I am far from you. Too far to lift the load off of your shoulders. Too far to hold you tight in my arms and wash your pain away with my own tears. I am far but I see you. I see you proudly carrying on, with your chin up and your shoulders squared.…
Dear officials and lawmakers, YOU are failing her. SHE is a seven year old innocent little girl. Born and raised in Kailua, Hawaii, what used to be one of the safest place on earth but she knows fear daily. She doesn’t feel safe in her small hometown. Every time we go out, we see someone…
It’s official. I am not her hero any more. I thought I would have had more time. But seven years is all I got. Halloween was last night. For the past three years, we’ve gone to the same neighborhood a few minutes drive from our house. Before sunset, everyone costumed gathers for an informal parade…
It’s been two years. I actually don’t remember many of the details now. I dropped him off and waited for the hospital to call me. When they did, about nine hours later, they informed me that the total colectomy procedure had gone well. When I saw my husband in the recovery ward, he was enjoying…
I did it. Faced the fears. Silenced the excuses. By telling my daughter that today would be the day, I had given myself no way out. The next generation was watching and learning. It only took five minutes to walk there. We went up one escalator, then two flights of stairs. “If the line is…
To read the backstory about the circumstances in which I wrote this essay (3 am on a particularly challenging parenting day), please head here. For the sake of transparency and “artistic honesty”, I decided to publish this essay knowing that I will probably be judged for its content. This is for all the moms who…
It’s been a rough morning. One of those mornings, when my daughter decides that she doesn’t want to do what I ask her to do (in this case, read a page from her early reader) and I have no patience to deal with it. One of those mornings when everything gets mixed up in my…
I have been working a lot lately. Working on a brand new website. A redesign has been due for years but was not a priority. We had other things on our plate. Things like buying a house, raising a baby and recovering from major surgery. In spring of this year, a friend, whose website we…
“I see no better option than surgery“, the gastro-enterologist said as we reviewed my husband’s colonoscopy results. It’s been a year. A year since that appointment. A year since the first surgery. We flew to Los Angeles in October 2015 and one of us came back home without a colon. Just like that. So easy…
“Will you write something today?” my husband asked as I was walking out the door. “I’m going to try” was my first answer but then I reconsidered: “Yes. I’m going to write something“. My first reply answered a question he hadn’t actually asked. “Will you write something good today?“, is what my brain had registered.…