Red Stick Mom

Disclaimer :: We believe it is important to celebrate this moment in history - the first Black female Vice President of the United States - and we did not want to let this moment pass because it is too significant to go unmentioned.  For weeks, I’ve joyfully and anxiously awaited the inauguration of the first female Vice President of the United States of America– the first BLACK female Vice President. I have thought of all of my African American female students, both past and present, and how much pride and hope they must be feeling during such a momentous and historic event. I have lived, somewhat vicariously, through them in this moment. And then, I saw a Facebook post from a...

Right now you’re in the trenches. The days are so long, and if a genie popped out of your coffee cup, your only wish would be more sleep. Blessed uninterrupted sleep. It feels like that day will never come. Whether it’s a colicky infant or a toddler who climbs in your bed at 5 am every morning (doesn’t he know it’s Sunday?!), there’s always a reason that you’re forced to face the day before you’re ready. You read about people who wake up at 4:30 in the morning each day to exercise – on purpose – and you wonder how anyone is ever well rested after they become parents. When Will It End? When many finally emerge depleted from the toddler stage...

As a little girl, as far back as I can remember, I was a worrier.  I’d often crawl into the comfort and safety of my parents’ bed, in the sweet spot right between them that we’d affectionately dubbed “the hole,” in the middle of the night because I had worried myself sick and inconsolable because of one of the many, many intrusive “what-ifs” that circled in my brain.  What if I have to talk out loud in front of the class?  What if a black hole develops and sucks us in and we all die?  What if my parents die? What if there is nothing after we die?  Rather embarrassingly, I was in my late 20s before I realized that...

Each day that passes creates a bigger canyon in my heart. Minute to minute, hour to hour, your silence is chipping away at all the hopes and dreams I had for our family. You recently said that if I was to leave that you would fight for me to stay. The time to do that is now. The time to pull out all of the stops is now. The time to throw away whatever insecurities and preconceived notions of what this should look like is now. By the time I decide to leave, it will be too late for any resuscitative actions. They will fall on deaf ears and a shattered heart that no amount of the right words could...

Our world has changed so much in the past year. Nothing that we are used to is normal anymore but this IS our normal, for now anyways. I am a big believer in choosing the way your day will be when you wake up. We choose our attitudes and we choose how we will treat others. That being said, I feel like our society as a whole could stand to show a little more grace. SOCIAL MEDIA These days our worlds revolve around social media. The pictures, the opinions, the memes, the fashion, etc. If you really stop and look at the things on social media ... none of it is real. They are things that people WANT you to see....