In tattered jeans and a Bible study T-shirt, I arrived home to a beautiful three-story house nestled in a gated community of the no-man’s-land of Pasco County, Florida. I had just spent two months in Bethlehem, where I sweated out my summer days shoveling gravel to pave a parking lot for a

I didn’t set out to be a crunchy granola hippie mom. Sure, I breastfed my son until he was 2, and I made all his baby food from scratch, and I cloth-diapered, but that was more about saving money than being an Earth momma. And my childhood growing up in Seattle — taking ballet classes in the

I walked into my mother’s hospital room expecting to find her at least cognizant, if not her usual buzzing self. She’d undergone surgery a few months earlier for broken ribs and vertebrae and had dealt with a touch of bronchitis, but both issues were resolved without incident as far as I knew.

Trigger warning: Rape; physical, mental, sexual abuse; suicide attempts; food deprivationI was somewhere between 2 and 3 when my father began raping me. I don't remember exactly when because my brain has tried to let me forget as much as possible ever since. It has mostly ...Continue reading 

As many of you will remember, my cat companion, Brandy, died in April.She was an international cat of mystery who left a little cat-shaped hole in my heart. I suspect that hole will never completely heal, but I'm OK with that. I'm just now getting to the point where I can start to reach for