The more I talk about my reboot this marriage blog with strangers, the more people open up to me with stories about their own marriages. Like the woman who told me this:

"I got divorced when my youngest child was ten. But my divorce didn't have anything to do with what was going on then--it had everything to do with all the stuff that had been building up for years. When the kids are young, there's just no time to talk about everything that's going on. But that doesn't mean it…

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So here’s the super-duper Get Out of Jail Free Card my therapist friend Scarlet gave me after I’d moaned and groaned my way through dinner, telling her how I completely lost my mind the other day. It's a super-neat trick that's already saved my ass on more than one occasion, and I hope it saves yours, too.

(Unfortunately for Scarlet, I happened to be wired on this particular evening. Below is a partial transcript, so you can listen in.)…

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A few days ago, Ken and I spent three hours trying to find a replacement countertop for the one that Home Depot messed up, and man alive, I'm not quite sure how I survived. I was ready to pass out after the first place, and by the time we hit the second store, I nearly laid down on the floor and went to sleep, never to awake again. We had to stop for an emergency coffee before we attempted the third store, and wow, am I glad I held in there because the…

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Lately, I've noticed that a lot of my mama friends are exhausted and grumpy--what a surprise! And if you're an older mom, like me, I'm guessing you're feeling this pain more than most. Luckily, I'm here to tell you what to do about it! (Duhn-da-duhn! Cue superhero power music)

Kinda, sorta. At the very least, I'm going to share a few tips that I've learned while tearing out my hair this past year.…

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We’ve had a busy few months with a lot of travel and visitors, and throughout it all, the same themes keep popping up. One is just how different Ken and I are in some pretty fundamental ways. For example, he’s an extrovert at heart, someone who should be out and about in the world, not stuck in the basement, working from home. And while I’m not exactly a shrinking violet myself, if I don’t balance my social time with some serious downtime, I quickly start to short out.



But it’s funny… Continue

OK, stay with me–this is a long one.

When I saw a mom feeding her kid a peanut butter energy bar in soccer class yesterday, I flipped.  My heart was in my throat and I couldn’t think.  What if Gabriel picked up a soccer ball after her son had touched it and went into anaphylactic shock? I’m not yet sure how serious his peanut allergy is (we’ll see his allergist in a few weeks) but I know enough about peanut allergies to know that they’re not something you mess around with.  Especially…

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On Friday, I found out I had walking pneumonia and boy did that stir some stuff up on the home front.  Ken’s been going through his own chronic illness stuff recently, so I’d been trying to give him some extra downtime so he can feel better.

 

But on Friday night, I realized just how resentful I’ve been feeling about all this sickness stuff.  Sure, I’ve been dancing around the issue by joking about Ken’s various maladies in my last few posts, but underneath it all, I’ve been…

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My husband has a strange affliction: he’s physically unable to complete a load of laundry. Surely, someone somewhere has categorized this terrible disease, given it a kingdom or phylum or Latin-sounding name in the name of science.

 

Don’t get me wrong; he’s great about starting the wash.  Especially if it happens to be a load of his own clothes.  Where he breaks down is in the physical moving of the laundry from washer to dryer.  A day or two later, I’ll discover his load of…

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The other day, I was talking to Nico's preschool teacher when she told me that she used to be a musician.  And by the sound of it, a pretty accomplished one.  She quit because the long hours and travel were too hard on her body (as if taking care of 3, 4 and 5-year-olds aren't?). And then she said something that really caught my attention: "It was just like taking care of kids, but the hours were longer and it was at night.  Which meant that we were taking care of drunk people," she said,… Continue