Basement After-Dinner Theater

Our kids have taken to putting on shows for us in our basement. They take turns choosing the plot, often involving a pirate queen, the Incredible Hulk, and either a cowboy or sheriff or good pirate or Star Wars character (take your pick). There is always some battle involved and there is always some mid-scene break from character during which one of my children will protest or give another child their next line. 

Lydia is loud and uses a gravelly pirate voice to announce each character, including herself. Elvis is the director and producer. Beware taking any liberties with his script; he has in mind exactly what is supposed to happen next. Henry generally just wants to smash and tackle things. Take a guess which character he is.

Last night, they introduced commercial breaks between scenes, which were solo performances by Lydia, singing along to a band called One Girl Nation. We hear her yell-singing the lyrics in the basement through the floorboards throughout the day.

"Okay, commercial time!" Lydia shouted, in her gravelly pirate voice. The boys skittered off to change costumes. Lydia pressed play on her CD player and stood on her mini-trampoline, pigtails in her hair, hairbrush microphone in hand.

You heard me say my first words
Watched me crawl before I walked

I grinned and wept, of course.

"Bahhh, bahhh, bahhh, bahhh," Elvis and Henry chanted.

Lydia turned to them in exasperation and tried to keep singing.

People say I have your eyes
But I've always wanted to have your heart

"Bahhh, bahhh, bahhh, bahhh," the boys continued. To be fair, it was right to the beat.

"Guys, stop," I pleaded.

"We're singing along!" Elvis giggled.

"You're ruining it!" Lydia cried, near tears, turning off the CD player.

Sigh. On to the next scene.

It takes so long to learn how to love each other well, doesn't it? How to cooperate, to lead, to follow, to serve, to take direction, to give over the spotlight, to discover our roles and how they work with everyone else's, to take turns on the stage, to make space for each other in your basement theater. I know my role down there: I am the audience. I throw my bouquets of bravos, my kisses, my applause, and cheer my three actors on in their beautiful roles. Become who you are made to become, darlings.

Me, I couldn't handle much more of One Girl Nation's song, "Daddy's Girl," sung with such sincerity and passion by my sweet daughter. My cup overfloweth, and with all this rain we've been getting lately, I don't think our basement sump pump could handle all of the overfloweth coming from my cup.

My three thespians

The Things We Love

I am hanging out in the bright afternoon heat. Our kids have found other kids to be this afternoon's best friends. My husband is in a baseball uniform and catcher's gear, waiting for his next at-bat. It's Father's Day, and there's nowhere else I'd rather be, around this dusty diamond, squinting in the light.

There's nothing hotter than the person you love doing the thing that he loves. My husband loves baseball. He loves coaching it and playing it. He comes alive. He is the fullest and best version of himself here. I imagine when he plays he must feel the way I do in the grip of writing or reading, energized and deeply satisfied, even when it doesn't go well.

I think this is partly what it means to love someone - to be able to recognize who a person is and encourage them in the things they are passionate about. It can go so wrong. What would have happened to our marriage if Brandon said, "I don't like you writing about our lives"? What would have happened to our marriage if I had said, "you really need to stop this coaching and playing business." We would have strangled each other's lifeblood and become hollow shells of ourselves. How can we love fully and live fully when we have to deny an essential part of our being?

So here we are. Brandon just shouted, "Two, boys!" from behind home plate. My boys are playing dinosaurs and learning for themselves daily what makes their hearts beat, and I am writing on my phone in the sunshine. Finding the holy in our every day loves.

Two Herons

Can't shake the sadness over the shooting in Charleston, SC this morning.

My muse of late has been a heron I look for every morning on my drive to work. This morning there were two. Here's a poem that hopes to capture the conflict in me when I hear about these kinds of acts of violence.

Two Herons


Good morning, heron on my right,
who lifted in flight as I drove by,
who glided above still black waters
for a time. I think we met
eye for eye. You were there
with me, my speeding
my needing heart my
furrowed brow. Good
morning, heron on my left,
the one I expect each morning,
upright and erect, how are you
undisturbed this morning, this
mourning, this morning’s news,
how do you not lift and turn
away, how do you keep facing
this day, how do you stand
and pray and not take flight,
or fight, my heron, my heron.
Heron on my right, lift high
your sorrow, your indignation,
your praise, and I will rise
with your wings. Heron on my left,
how do you stay, why do you
stay. Please stay. I will
follow you to that place
on that log in the dark wake,
and try to be still, and try
to be calm.

The Desire to Be Desired

A couple of weeks ago was the River Teeth Nonfiction Conference, and leading up to that were lots of long nights getting ready. I've been feeling frustrated with my ability to make time for writing, here or anywhere else, but now that the conference is over and I've given my brain a little break from evening writing duties, I am ever hopeful that I can return to writing. I guess it's a season of scribbling notes on my iPhone notepad to get to later.

Well, I am writing, two blog posts a month for Off the Page, and I have a series of heron poems that keep coming to me like little mercies. I've been enjoying the blog posts I'm writing for Off the Page, but it is a different kind of writing than essaying. It's the essaying I miss right now. When I was whining about this to my friend Tania a couple weeks before the conference, she told me, "What, you can't write for the next 14 days? Big deal!" and grant yourself the space and permission not to write for now. I'm pretty sure that's what she said. So, okay, stop whining. There are worse things in the world than not writing for a small stretch of time.

Watching the Cavs game

In other news, it's SUMMER and baseball season. We spend a solid four to five nights a week at someone's baseball or softball game right now, and I loooooove it. There's nothing like sitting outside in late summer afternoons, the pace of a ballgame, an excuse to do nothing but enjoy the evening... ah. I love it. Have I mentioned that I love it?

We're also letting the kids - especially Elvis and Lydia - stay up a bit later now that it's summer, and they've been staying up to at least the half for the Cavs games the last two weeks. It's been fun spending that additional downtime with the two of them, even though it's intruding on my alone time with Brandon, which is always so guarded. Lydia sat on my lap last night for part of the game and now stretches out almost as long as I am. They are amazing people.

What I've been listening to:

I just finished up two books by Bill Bryson - At Home and In a Sunburned Country. I almost started One Summer and then changed my mind. There's only so much of the same voice reading to you that you can take. I loved both books. They were engaging and funny and informative. Before that I listened to Small Victories by Anne Lamott and LOVED it. I'll probably go back to Lamott again soon because she's so funny and tear-inducing, and I like that kind of writing.

I shifted gears and started listening to Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. For some reason it isn't at all what I thought it would be, but I also don't know exactly what I was expecting, so there's that. I'm really enjoying the switch to fiction for a spell, and I love the narrator's voice, the epistolary nature of the writing, and the gradual unfolding of the story. It's no wonder it won a Pulitzer.

What I've been up to:

If you are into Jo Ann Beard or you want to be, you might enjoy the presentation that Jill Christman and I did at the River Teeth Conference: "Negotiating the Plasmapause: Patterned Images, Delayed Revelation, and Sheer Awesomeness in Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth"

The series for Off the Page I mentioned in my last post, The Desire to Be Desired, has wrapped up. Here they are in summary with links to the full posts:

The Desire to Be Desired

I ran as fast as I could through the wood chips and up the wooden steps and beckoned from the highest point of the playground equipment. “You can’t catch me!” I shouted, grinning and staring down into the faces of Nick Germano and Jason Ream, and when they motioned for the steps, I squealed and giggled, sliding half-way down the stainless steel slide, its hot metal burning my hands and thighs. I stopped and waited to see which way they chose to go so I could make my break-away run, away from my chasers.


So went every day on the playground in first grade, then second, then third, sometimes different boys, eventually new playgrounds, but always the same game. Tag, freeze tag, TV tag, hide-and-go-seek tag, You can’t catch me! No one wanted to be caught, not really, anyway. What would you do when you were caught? That was the end of the game, the end of the chase. The thrill was in the running, the pursuit, the simple and potent knowledge that someone sought to catch you. Read More...

What Good Guys Do

One night, my husband and I were out at a country line-dancing bar. He got up to pay our tab and I watched the couples waltz on the floor.

“Hey, how ya doin’?” a voice came up from behind. I turned on my barstool and grinned at a guy obviously looking for a dance partner.

“I’m fine!” I said cheerily. He glanced down at my hand resting on the bar.

“Oh, you’re married!” he said, his arms flinging up in the air into the “I surrender” position. “I’m sorry!”

I nodded, still grinning as he walked away and Brandon came back. They exchanged glances, the guy smiling meekly and my husband giving him a nod of acknowledgement.

“Ready to go, Tiny Dancer?” Brandon asked.

“That guy was trying to hit on me!” I said with astonishment.


“Yeah, I figured,” he said, wrapping his arm around my waist and guiding me toward the door. I continued grinning, the warmth of admiration and the heat of my husband’s palm on the small of my back making me glow faintly on the way to the car. Read More...

Empty Houses

It has been three years since I sat in a dark bar on the dark side of town alone with a colleague, out for a drink to talk about writing and family and his failing marriage. It has been three years since he confessed to having a crush, his hand flitting like a fly on and off of my thigh. Three years since I laughed and blushed, stunned to be so openly admired by someone other than my husband. I didn’t know how to handle this advance, how to stand and stare down disaster before it could take root.

Instead, I wanted to be nice. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. My “no” was mushy and clouded with desire—not for this other man but for this other man’s words, this other man’s advances, the unabashed expression of his desire for me. Me! Goofy and ridiculous me, flabby around the middle me, mother of three, me! “But I love my husband,” I said, again and again, with a grin, because I also loved to hear how beautiful this other man found me, how lovely, how smart, how good.


I would like to say that I stood up and slapped him. After all, he had just shook hands with my husband in our living room, just stood in the presence of all our wedding pictures and smiling faces of our children. I would like to say that I insisted he drive me home, immediately. I would like to say that every email conversation and text message from there on was strictly professional and never slid slyly into flirtatious, that I reported his advances to my supervisor and ended it, ended the confusing, terrifying, anxiety-inducing friendship and work relationship. But I didn’t. Read More...

The Directions Desire Can Take Us

It’s tempting to conclude this series on desire with the pattest of pat answers: If I were truly holy and pursuing God, this fire would be quenched and I would never again face the dichotomy of flesh and spirit, as if my body is evil and my spirit is good.

Except God made me, body and spirit. Adam needed a helpmate and so he was given Eve, before the Fall, before separation from God. Sarah needs a helpmate and so she is given Brandon.

We are made for connection, with God and with others. This connection is rooted in two things: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself.


If God is love and we learn to love God by watching Jesus, then loving our neighbors as ourselves is one of the only ways we can express and experience that love for ourselves. It’s a give-and-get kind of relationship, a pay it forward, a pouring out to be filled again and again. Read More...

Back then --
2014: Holiday Greetings from Nine-Month-Contract Land
2013: Why Do We Need Men?
2012: Corrective Lenses and Parenting
2011: In the Center Ring: Motherhood vs. Work
2010: Maybe She's Born With It...
2009: Potty Training Adventures