As moms, we know life is filled with big and little moments of joy and comparable moments of pain. We experience this with our children often. When people ask me how my two kids get along, my response is always the same: “It is heaven and hell.” I love my kids, but day to day (and even from one minute to the next), I do feel like I move from heaven to hell and back again. What keeps my hopes up during the hellish times is the...
The Link Between Trauma and Happiness
Everything must be balanced by something else — even happiness. Shadow and light, sweet and salty, good and bad, joy and pain. Our lives are filled and defined by paradoxes, an awe-inspiring ebb and flow through triumph and tragedy and back again. Nobody asks to have her world rocked by tragedy, but for many, these earthshaking moments often bring the surprising gift of clarity. Two tragic events helped define my sense of self, my...
TLC’s ‘Sister Wives’: The High Price of Polygamy
During the “twenty-year wedding anniversary” episode of “Sister Wives,” the pain that wife number one, Meri, was feeling was palpable. This was caused by Kody Brown, her husband, showing his giddy affection for young wife number four, Robin, who is just joining the family. Meri has been married to Kody for twenty years. “Sister Wives,” the TLC series that is shining a spotlight on the polygamist culture...
You Never Forget Your First Love
Remember your first love? That intense excitement seeing him in the school hallway that made you beg your mom to drive down his street after softball practice, only to slide way down in your car seat so he wouldn’t see you? The fear that your parents would walk into the living room and see you kissing? The crushing pain when he ended your perfect relationship via a folded-up letter delivered by his best friend? How you really thought you...
Washing Kids’ Mouths Out Really Works!
It began when I called my mom a “scumbag.” I was 12 and was now sitting in my bedroom in total fear, waiting for my dad to get home. My mom rarely told my dad when we did “bad” things, because she didn’t want to deal with his anger and just found it easier to handle us on her own. But my use of the word “scumbag” (spoken in the sassiest of tones and with utter disdain for my mom while I stomped up our...