“Mom, the bucket!” Lilly cried from the middle seat of our minivan. It was June of 2010, and we were taking a summer trip to Tuscany from our base house in Germany. We were only fifteen minutes into the nine-hour drive. “Last night’s chicken noodle soup,” Lilly weakly observed after emptying the contents of her…
parenting
Stop. See. Feel.
This Monday, will you sleep a little later? Will you check the weather over your morning coffee, and curse the rainclouds? Will you stop at the store to grab packages of hot dog buns, bottles of ketchup, and charcoal briquettes? Will you ice down beverages and season hamburger patties? Will you plug in strings of…
The truth about our son
“It’s a boy,” Doc Walker said as plainly as, “Please pass the salt.” It was April 4, 1995, at the hospital in Monterey, California. After twelve hours of labor turned the whites of my eyes blood red, I eagerly grasped the waxy, bluish, nine-pound baby boy we named Hayden. Two weeks later, when Hayden wouldn’t…
Surviving military spouses get the suicide ‘postvention’ they need
Every time I hear the gut-wrenching statistic that twenty military veterans commit suicide every day, my throat catches. The shocking reality that more lives have been lost to veteran suicide in the past 15 years than in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan is an obvious tragedy that finally has the attention of the Pentagon,…
What I believe about Hell and hand baskets