I’m so honored to be guest posting today in my sweet new friend (and fellow Aggie and For the Love launch team member) Claire Mummert’s Living Bravely series at Radically Broken: I never thought I would write about my stepmother on a blog dedicated to my mother. To be honest, Karen and I got off on the wrong foot. I…
I struggle with contentment. I’m a perfectionist, firstborn, type A, always looking for something better, worried about the future, and a slave to my own expectations. The week of my mother’s death was much more difficult than I had anticipated. I was just sure that after years of watching my mother suffer and decline in…
I have never been fashion savvy. In middle school, I lived in preppy clothes from the GAP that were two sizes too big and made me look like a small boy. In high school, I got angsty, discovered eye shadow and blue eyeliner, and wore Batman shirts at every opportunity. By the end of college, I got really…
I have struggled with depression, anxiety and even panic attacks since adolescence. Some of this has been hormonal, some has been situational. My mental health affects my physical health, zapping my energy, my appetite and my immune system, and I end up plagued by weight loss, frequent illness and chronic sinusitis. And, inevitably, it affects my marriage and my…
A counselor once told me that my mother would be more “accessible” to me after she died than when she was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease. I didn’t fully understand what she meant at the time. She thought I was going to be able to communicate with my dead mother? Yet, shortly after my mom died,…
