Lessons on love and letting go. 6:40 am. Scrolling the internet, sipping coffee, procrastinating packing. I’m visiting my daughter, 24, now living 3,000 miles away. An amazing weekend together. Laughing, talking, long walks in the park. “How about I stay a little longer?” “I would love that.” So here I…

What I learned when my kids said college wasn’t for them — The other day, I saw this bumper sticker. Raise Good Humans. Crisp white font on a plain black background. Its simplicity stunned me, shuttled me back in time. When she called in tears that autumn day in 2017, my daughter 3,000 miles away, a freshman at a small liberal arts…

Seeking Peace, Finding Kindness. 2008. I’m 40. I write a short story about my search for my birth mother, how in 1998, after searching for six years — after a social worker said it was impossible— I found her but she was already dead. I write about how finding answers soothed my soul at…

On growing older and growing up. The white-haired man with a lined and pocked face told me he used to be a television sitcom director, he said humbly, “you may have heard of some shows” before telling me how a decade ago he collapsed under the pressure and found himself…

This week was my 26th wedding anniversary. Twenty-six years with the same man and my conclusion is this: the success of my marriage comes down to luck. Luck we didn’t want to divorce at the same time, luck the money returned after it ran out, luck the near fatal illnesses…

Psilocybin is helping me like nothing else has. The thing about microdosing psilocybin is, you don’t get high or trip, there’s no distinct before or after, no sudden euphoria or crashing come down. As I’ve written before, it’s a low grade incline to a sense of wellbeing with a shift…

The unfair cruelty of secrecy — Exhausted, sweaty, jet-lagged, and anxious, I got off the elevator with no idea where to go so I turned left and wow, there was my mother at the end of the long, antiseptic hallway. Her tiny body — four feet, eight inches — and gleaming white hair, gripping a walker…

Silence doesn’t serve us — Okay well, in retrospect, the bottle of pills, the tablets of Tylenol poured out on the yellow formica kitchen table, swallowed slowly, methodically, one by one, was a little misguided. 16. So young, empty, so afraid. I wish I had words back then, that cold January day so long ago…

In memory of the women who had no choice, turn despair into action. My daughter and I, side-by-side on the top bunk, cuddled under soft blankets, hidden by darkness. She was 7, in second grade. Her little brother, my son, was fast asleep on the bunk below us, so we…