When I was pregnant with my first child, I worked for a reproductive health organization that promoted safe abortion.

Interestingly, the more my belly rounded, jutting into table edges or obscuring a lap full of paperwork, the more people around me began to see my job as a contradiction and yet, in my mind, it made perfect sense. In fact, the longer my pregnancy went on, the more I believed in the right to safe abortion that I was fighting for.

Around the world, almost half of all pregnancies are unintended—meaning they’re either mistimed or unwanted altogether.

That means a lot of women, at any given time, are grappling with a life-changing situation with no advanced planning and often without the benefit of thorough discussion or sound advice on options.

In a perfect world, the root of unplanned pregnancy—sex—would always be consensual. It would take place between two partners of equal power and economic status and it would be accompanied by contraception every time a pregnancy was unwanted, using a method that matched the needs of both partners.

In reality, sex happens all the time in scenarios where power, economics or needs are not equal; where sex is transactional—a commodity stolen, traded or given in exchange for something else. Sex is used for companionship, control, currency, and survival. And even where sex between two partners is consensual, it still happens without planning (or contraception) and can result in an unintended pregnancy.

My own first pregnancy was unintended in that it was mistimed.

Following a miscarriage and a difficult time getting pregnant afterwards, I was told by my OB that a viable pregnancy would probably take a greater investment of time, resources and doctors than my partner and I had at that moment. We were in transition after several years of marriage, with a relocation on the horizon, so plans for a child were temporarily put on hold. I had just started my job with Ipas (a great reproductive health organization based in North Carolina promoting safe abortion) while my partner finished his post-doc in Brazil, an agreement that meant a year of long-distance living to eventually get us where we wanted to be—together—the year after.

Imagine my surprise, just weeks after my move, to discover that I was pregnant.

After years of working with community health workers and traditional birth attendants on pregnancy, I had somehow missed all signs of it myself. The nausea, exhaustion and delayed period I attributed to a stressful continental move, constant international travel (between several time zones) and a lingering tropical illness. I remember reassuring my doctor, when she asked if I could be pregnant, that it was highly unlikely. But before taking the pregnancy test she insisted on, I humored her by answering her questions:

“What would a negative test mean for you?” Relief. Some disappointment.

“What about a positive test?”

That was more complicated—and seemed, until that very moment, impossible.

“It would be highly inconvenient, but…welcome.”

Later that morning, with nothing more than good advice on how to ease my queasy stomach, I listed all the resources that would allow me to carry that pregnancy to term on my own: a good job, a good income, health insurance to cover my well visits and hospitalization, a supportive (though long-distance) partner, and an extended family that I could call on for help. I knew myself capable of surviving war, drought, malaria and long separations from family and friends. How much harder could a solitary pregnancy be?

How ignorant I was.

The next few months were hell.

With most of my work in East Africa and Europe, I continued my travels as if nothing had changed. But in addition to my growing nausea and general malaise, my body soon added the need to wretch and puke violently to my growing list of symptoms, tossing me into any number of humiliating situations: running out mid-speech at a UN conference; reaching for a paper bag from the seat back in front of me, mid-landing; searching for privacy on a ceremonial opening of a new clinic in Uganda with an entire village looking on.

In between travels, back in the U.S., I coped with no family nearby, a husband working between two continents that were neither of the ones I was working on, a new job and a reputation at stake, fighting my body the whole time.

Many a day I felt totally oppressed, having no control over how my body was reacting or with how my life had taken such an unexpected turn. And yet—I wanted that pregnancy. I was willing to put up with maximum discomfort, embarrassment, and difficulty because I wanted to carry that pregnancy to term. But the experience allowed me, in a new and personal way, to imagine what it might be like to continue a pregnancy that was not only mistimed, but truly unwanted. As my hormones raged, my body morphed and my expectations of what I could do and how, diminished, I could only imagine how a forced pregnancy might feel something like a form of torture.

Because we live in a culture where children are part of the fairy tale we’re all taught to want, we don’t talk enough about unwanted pregnancies. Yet most women spend the majority of their reproductive lives avoiding pregnancy.

In the U.S., on average, women report wanting 1-2 pregnancies over a lifetime. That means they will spend 2-3 years of their lives pregnant, pre- or post- partum but more than 3 decades avoiding pregnancy.

Why don’t we talk about this?

We also know that unplanned pregnancies increase the risk of partner violence—and in the U.S., increase a woman’s risk of homicide.

Unintended pregnancy, especially among younger women, lowers educational and employment potential, increases the chance of poverty, and leads to poorer outcomes for the children of those pregnancies.

Again—half of all pregnancies are unintended—and yet we rarely talk about the reality of unplanned pregnancies.

About halfway through my solo pregnancy, I realized that my loving, supportive partner barely thought about it. He was planning for a change of life once the baby arrived, but I was already living it, a situation reflected every time I saw the reality of other pregnant women in the world, on my visits to clinics and villages for work.

Women of childbearing age assume most, if not all, the responsibility of pregnancy. In addition to their other responsibilities of work, family, home life, and farming (women do most farm work where I’ve lived) they often manage, too, the daily logistics of organizing other people’s lives: parents, children, in-laws. With pregnancy, many of those standard obligations get more difficult and rarely is any work eased. Women with social and financial support may rise to the new challenge, but for those without support, an unwanted pregnancy can easily overwhelm the balance they need to maintain the responsibilities of daily life.

From research, we know there’s almost never just one reason a woman chooses to end a pregnancy: financial reasons play a key role, but also the wish for child spacing or delayed childbirth, partner-related reasons, or the need to focus on other children. The fact that so many women seek an abortion to improve their chances of being a better mother to a current child or a better-prepared mother later on is rarely recognized or discussed in the debate around abortion. Rather, the discussion is often framed along lines that categorize women seeking abortion as selfish or irresponsible.

And yet, most women, in my experience, are more than capable of processing the many possible ramifications of both an unplanned pregnancy or an abortion on both themselves and the people around them and are best able to take that into consideration before making a choice they feel increases their chance for a safe, manageable and better life.

Why do we not honor their thought process with our respect for their choice?

As my second trimester edged into my third, many of the discomforts of pregnancy eased. I still had to deal with massively swelling feet every time I got on a plane and dissolved into tears over the decision of whether to take malaria prophylactics or not during my trips to East Africa, but more and more I settled into my situation. Meanwhile, everywhere I traveled, I met women with vastly different experiences of pregnancy than mine. I was reminded, over and over, that women who do not want or are not able to carry a pregnancy to term will seek a way to terminate that pregnancy whether there is a safe method available or not. They will harm themselves, put their life, their livelihood, their survival at risk because an unwanted pregnancy very often puts all of those things at risk anyhow and the gamble of an unsafe abortion offers them, potentially, a solution that childbirth does not.

This is perhaps the most critical piece of information that is missing from discussions of abortion today in the U.S. because we are far from the days when women had to seek unsafe abortion. But if you look at the health record of the U.S. before Roe v. Wade, unsafe abortion was the most common reason for admission to hospital gynecological services. Many women died from unsafe abortion every year—as they continue to do so around the world where there is no access to safe abortion. I could fill pages with gruesome stories and tragic outcomes but the greatest pity is that those tragedies are avoidable.

By the time I rolled around to my 8th month of pregnancy—less sick, still traveling—I joined my two nearest African counterparts in Nairobi for a conference on reproductive health.

At the time, all three of us were hugely pregnant.

Between us, we were married, partnered and single. Two of us were pregnant for the first time, and one had a nine-year old daughter. We were Kenyan, Uganda, American and we had each chosen our pregnancy. We entered the conference building like three full-bellied ships sailing into port, an armada ready to fight for the right of other women to choose their reproductive health outcomes the way we had.

Although we spoke most vociferously about the right to safe abortion, we also tied that right to expanded reproductive health services that allowed women the right to plan their pregnancies, to expect healthy pregnancies and to have access to trained medical practitioners. We wanted contraception to include men—not only in the discussion of it, but in the responsibility for it.

We didn’t see safe abortion as a topic on its own but as part of a whole new dialogue around women and health care centered on their needs and choices. And we recognized—even among ourselves as reproductive health professionals—what a difficult and tricky continuum it was to define the morals and codes that normally diffuse the topic of abortion from its place as one of the safest, most standard medical practices into something fraught with judgment.

In fact, one of the most mind-expanding experiences of working for Ipas was the realization that even among those of us who were pro-abortion, each of us still held our own understandings about it: our own questions, our own discomforts. We thought about it personally, based on our own family and upbringing and culture and religion—which is exactly how the decision should be framed. Personally. Independently—or in consultation with the family and friends chosen by the woman to guide her through that decision.

During my time at Ipas, not unexpectedly, a few beloved friends shared with me their news of an unintended pregnancy. Most wanted to talk about what to do next, and those discussions often included abortion. My response was always directed to the woman according to her own individual situation. What was the context of her life, her support system, her finances, her wishes, her wants? Because even as I fought for abortion rights, I didn’t believe it was the only choice for an unintended pregnancy.

I just always wanted it to be a safe one.

By the time my own pregnancy ended—with a hospital birth at the experienced hands of a trained midwife—I had discovered through a screening process that I had a genetic disposition for hemorrhage, the leading cause of maternal death. Luckily, for my birth I had access to a hematologist, an expensive IV drug to stop my bleeding, trained nurses all around, and the proximity of high-end care if anything went wrong. Once again, I reflected on how differently my pregnancy might have gone had I been anywhere else in the world. And I thought about the risk of death that my pregnancy brought with it—one that comes automatically, still, for so many other women around the world.

I could not have been happier with my own pregnancy outcome, but I recognize all the many and varied supports that gave me a healthy child at the end of that process. There were a thousand other ways, and a million other scenarios how my pregnancy could have gone.

For a useful discussion of abortion, I think it’s essential to think outside our own lives and imagine all the practicalities, the risks, the myriad situations that women find themselves in—and offer them the greatest ability to choose for themselves the options and risks they are willing to take to build the life they want for themselves.


Two weeks ago Friday was the start of Passover, an eight-day remembrance commemorating one of the most significant events in Jewish history, a day shared by Christians as Good Friday and leading to the holiest day of the Christian calendar, Easter. Muslims just finished celebrating Ramadan, a month of fasting and prayer that ended with the feast of Eid al-Fitr on the weekend. Just before that came Vaisakhi, a feast of harvest for the Hindus, a celebration that also acts as the commemoration of the founding of the Sikh religion. Ridván, for the Baha’i, just passed as well, a twelve-day period of reflection and festivity. April—around the world—seems a celebratory time for religion.

And yet, sitting at my breakfast table this Good Friday, I realized that in the midst of all these celebrations, for me this time holds loss.

In my youth, Holy Week was the busiest, most solemn, most celebratory week of the year. It started the Sunday before Easter, Palm Sunday, when our whole congregation would process from the church, accompanied by the resounding sound of organ and choir, our palm fronds held aloft, their poky ends dripping the last drops of holy water still left from the priest’s soggy blessing.

That service marked the beginning of the end of a long forty days: weeks of no sweets, no eating between meals, and maybe even giving up a favorite television show or two. It was a time we saved our allowance money for offerings to Catholic missions overseas and tried not to fight with our siblings. During that week, we’d pray Stations of the Cross—restaging the last footfalls of Christ—and booked our turn in the confessional booth, atoning for our sins. On Thursday night, we’d be back in Mass for a celebration of the Last Supper, a two-hour event that included the Washing of the Feet and the commemoration of Christianity’s first Mass. Once old enough, my sisters and I would spend part of that night praying beside my grandma with all the other old ladies, keeping vigil with Our Lord, trying not to sleep as we clicked our rosary beads in prayer, keeping Christ company throughout the night and being witness to his ordeal. On Friday, we’d be in church again, gathering before noon, staying until three, when the sky was rent, leaving us almost in tears as we spent those hours accompanying Jesus on His torture and death, watching Scripture be fulfilled. Saturday’s Easter Vigil—a bit of a letdown after Friday’s drama—was a Mass spent blessing all objects in the church in one endless, monotonous litany of song, in preparation for Easter Sunday. And then came, The Day. The day of celebration that gave the rest of all days meaning in the Catholic faith.

Nothing could have felt more all-encompassing than that week. A week of ritual, and pageantry; recrimination, jubilation, and triumph. Even as children, we were asked to be a part of the guilt, the betrayal, the horror and finally—the celebration. Easter for us was more than jelly beans and egg hunts, it was an act of communal suffering, of joy and salvation. It was the participatory act of redemption.

To this day, when I describe my Holy Week adventure, with all its emotions, to my kids—who know nothing of it themselves—I am overwhelmed by how strongly its sensations come back. That belonging. The importance of it. The magic of that week. Which is what leads, now, to that feeling of loss that I no longer have access to it.

In college, I was still regularly going to Mass. Several college friends were, by chance, Catholic and for all of us Saturday evening was a chance to ditch homework for a few hours in a socially-approved, guilt-free way. We’d leave campus, see “real people” (not just students), gather and sing. It was a time to be quiet and thoughtful in a different way than studying; it offered a peace and solitude that helped me feel full and present in my life. It gave me a chance to question my place in the world; to prioritize its message of social justice and love. It gave me a sense of comfort and home. Drawing me back, week after week.

But college was also a time of growth, of questioning, of looking at things in life you’ve always known and accepted, and developing enough consciousness to ask questions of those things—and boy, did I have questions. And growing reservations.

In my junior year of college, after classes in feminist studies; after co-organizing a local PFLAG chapter (an organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people, their parents, families, and allies); and after having lived several years with non-Catholics, non-Christians, and generally, in a wider cultural and geographical sphere than the one within which I was raised, I took my first trip overseas.

I joined a study abroad program in Seville, Spain, not knowing what to expect. At the time, Spain had only been recently released from the grip of Franco’s Fascist, dictatorial regime, so when I arrived, Spain was a mere 11-years-old in democratic time. Seville was a beautiful city—but also provincial, old-fashioned, a second city of Europe located in a country cut-off from its continental neighbors, making it look and feel like an impoverished lesser cousin.  

What I remember of my Catholicism at that point was that I had become critical of the system of the church. Its rules. Its patriarchy. Its wealth. The misogyny entrenched in a lack of feminine roles; roles dominated by saints and whores, and a feminine ideal that was both mother and virgin—a role, unsurprisingly, impossible to attain.

And then in Spain, standing at the altar of the largest Gothic church in the world, the Seville Cathedral, with its Christopher Columbus tomb—whose American voyage had been both sponsored and blessed by the Spanish King and Queen on behalf of God and led to the mass extinction of a continent—where, through a fog of incense, I saw gold fixtures at every turn; where the height of the ceiling extended so high it almost hurt to look into its peaks—a design strategy of the church’s own architects to make sure its supplicants felt not just awed, but afraid. And it was there I pondered that planned powerlessness of the Church’s followers; the planned acceptance of my paltry fate beneath an all-knowing, all-controlling, (male) God; I felt the dissonance of the church’s luxury, its affluence, opulence, with the abject poverty right outside its doors. And I realized, with blunt trauma, the such a structure spoke to me of all I couldn’t accept. I still remember the feeling of that moment—that lighting strike of belief—when I knew that Catholicism was over for me. In one fell blow it happened, the same way it had for the Biblical Saul, just in reverse. And because Catholicism was not just a religion but so intertwined with who I was and what I’d come from, there was no possibility to look for faith elsewhere. With the vessel of belief so totally broken, nothing could replace it.

Over the years, of course, I’ve questioned that decision. But on the occasions when I’ve gone to Mass since, I can’t un-listen to the actual words being spoken without thinking about what they refer to; what they say in the larger context of that church, its history, the world. I can’t un-question the things I disagree with. So as much as anything else nowadays, a visit to church leaves me frustrated; feeling homeless and lonely and sad.

I have, over the years, still had positive experiences of religion and religious people in my life. I worked with a sweet Imam in Mombasa, who helped me find passages from the Koran to support the AIDS education project we were doing in his community. I witnessed the years-long dedication of Sister (Dr.) Julia from Peru, who ran a hospital in the middle-of-nowhere-Kenya and who single-handedly, single-mindedly saved many a rural Turkana from death. I experienced many Catholic schools in Kenya that offered—almost always—a better education for anyone than the one available from the public school system. In Brazil, I myself worked for a Catholic organization that traveled up and down the Amazon helping indigenous people demarcate their land, find access to healthcare, and figure out how to cope with the prevailing society who only really wanted them gone. And when my children asked to be baptized, my partner’s lovely aunt connected us with Pater Korbinius, a gentle, giant German monk, who helped answer their questions and guide them through the process that I no longer believed in.

Because I have also seen the worst of religion. Wars fought in its name. How it’s used, over and over, for justification of inequality and systems of inequity around the world where I’ve worked. I’ve met many missionaries (far too many) who have seemed the opposite of God to me: the couple in Wundanyi, Kenya who couldn’t live without their American washing machine, even as the people around them had no piped water. Or my fellow Portuguese-learners in Manaus, who, in bringing the word of God to the Amazonian tribes, had already decided that even if they brought disease, too, it would be better for the newly-contacted tribes to die after hearing the word of God than not at all. There have also been people like the middle-aged white man from somewhere in the Southern US whose singular, selfish goal to unload all my vaccines from the supply plane in South Sudan meant he could smuggle his bibles into the country while hundreds of children would die of preventable disease.

In my experience, religion has a lot to answer for—the good and the bad—but unfortunately, most strikingly, the bad.

And yet, I still understand the pull of religion. The purpose it gives people. The community it builds. I recognize the strength it provides, allowing people to get through really tough times. I understand how my grandmother’s belief made her difficult life not just bearable, but meaningful in its difficulty, as she interpreted those struggles as a test of her faith, a process of hope, giving her optimism in adversity.

Sometimes, when I think about my own upbringing and how it was so entrenched in religion, I mourn for my children the security that comes with such belief. Because there is comfort in believing someone else is in charge of the difficult things; there is grace in believing that someone benevolent and kind is the life force around us; there is relief in believing that someone is watching out for us, seeing all, knowing all and responsible for making things right.

But because I couldn’t accept my Catholicism anymore, because I didn’t have faith in that form, I could not pass it on to my children, even if I recognize that there are still moments when I notice its remnants in me. That subtle, certain feeling, stuck in the corners of my brain that allows me to trust in something, somewhere, thinking it will help. A belief in a general goodness, a hopefulness that doesn’t leave me. And maybe having God in those moments, if only in the background—is enough. Giving me something to turn to when I feel incapable of understanding what’s going on or how I’ll survive it on my own. A leftover from all those hours, all those years, watching a son-turned-God tortured on a cross, knowing there’d still be salvation at the end.


Mathias PR Reding

This last week brought us nearer something that many of us thought belonged to the past: war in Europe.  A war near enough, its victims familiar enough, its burden close enough to feel.

Wars have always raged, but given our luck—of geography mostly—Americans, historically, have been at least one continent away from the day-to-day ravage of war.  Of course, some Americans have been more affected than others in recent years: soldiers, social workers or aid workers who live it daily, but most of the time, war happens so far from our daily lives that it doesn’t fully impact us the way it should.  It takes something out of the ordinary, like this current war, to remind us of all its hazards.

Yesterday, my partner and I were listening to a podcast from Germany. A reporter in Berlin was interviewing people who still remember the last time the Russians came with war.  It was 1945, as the Third Reich was in its final days and Hitler already dead, with the Allies streaming into Germany from all sides and the Allied Russians closing in on Berlin from the East. Perhaps it was the Russians’ lived experience of the brutalities of Leningrad, where German troops encircled the city for three years and starved its population to death; or maybe it was the non-aggression pact signed between the two countries that Germany ignored as soon as Hitler wanted more living space; perhaps it was Stalin’s own scorched earth policy used by the Russians as a deterrent to oncoming German forces; but it was probably a mix of all that and four excruciatingly deadly years of war that pushed the Russians over the edge on their return to German soil.  Whatever trauma they had learned from the Germans, the Russians were keen to pay it back, ten-fold.  In the podcast, we heard older German women say they wouldn’t live through that again.  They’d ask their children for cyanide, as death at their own hands would be easier to face than Russian troops. This was yesterday, by the way, not seventy-odd years ago.

Yesterday, in Berlin.  The lifelong trauma of war.

In my normal, everyday life, I have a hard time with war.  I don’t like war films anymore.  I hate the sound of guns.  When I first came home from South Sudan, I got nervous every time a plane or helicopter flew overhead.

There is something about the experience of war that thrills people who have never experienced it.  Maybe because we’re told so many stories in movies and lore.  It’s a life or death question in a world where we don’t face that option very often, and I can see its appeal—the rush of adrenaline, the heroics that inevitably rise to the surface—and for some in it, it’s surely energizing, adventurous, “bringing out their best.” But for many more, I would guess, war is the thing they’ll spend the rest of their lives recovering from.

What stories can’t convey of war are this: the smells, the annihilation, the exhaustion. The cynicism that hardens the longer the fighting goes on. The understanding that even if there are Good Guys and Bad Guys—and maybe even a God—there is no chance that the innocent won’t be ruined.  There is certainty—a learned and definite certainty—that rules will be broken; rules written in normal life to bring order and justice and calm.  There is also the inevitability that in all wars, stupidity or ignorance or big egos or the wrong person in charge at an important moment will mean unnecessary death and preventable violence, either by accident or design—but serially—and usually with massive moral and existential costs. Even while responsible people look on in impotence and frustration and anger.

There is a constant uncertainty, too, within the certainty of war, that resolves itself into a general mistrust—of anyone, or anything, or if up is still up, or if life is worth living.  The cost of that uncertainty is mind-bending and mind-breaking and comes within a chaos that births a new understanding. The knowledge of seeing and experiencing the absolute worst things that humans can do to each another.

Although most people who live outside warzones never have to know all the ways that one person can starve, wound, maim, kill, dismember, and terrorize another human being, that confrontation—and realization—is unmistakable in war.  Whether experienced as a victim, a perpetrator or a witness, that knowledge creates a new understanding of humans that is, in itself, inhuman.  It resets the most basic expectation of life: that killing is wrong.

Luckily, most humans never need to learn this horror personally, because that experience is psyche-breaking.  And once known or lived, it can’t be unknown. Unlived.

When I think of all the brave Ukrainians joining to defend their cities, I am inspired and impressed like everyone else, but I am also gutted to know they will never be the same whole humans they were before this.  The tech guy who left his computer to grab a gun handed out at the library; the student from Germany who returned to take up arms; they will learn—more quickly than other soldiers in more tidy wars—the true extent of evil that humans can perpetrate.  They will realize, too, the evil they, themselves, are capable of, in a moment of instinct or power or fear. 

That is the piece they are most likely never to recover from.

This war will be over at some point.  It may be weeks or months or years.  By the time I left South Sudan, in the tenth year of the second iteration of a war that looked never ending, I was less human myself.  More cynical, more hate-filled, more caustic and angry than I’ve ever been before or since.  And yet, fifteen years after I left, South Sudan gained its independence. I was shocked, amazed, having given up hope of peace in all my cynicism.  And then, only two years later, my cynicism was rewarded and civil war broke out again.  War is too good for too many people.  Not the ones on the ground. Not the ones losing their souls and lives fighting.  War is good for the people sitting in their cozy offices, getting rich and powerful and making the decisions.  Planning their next attack, which is also their next success, paid for by the lives of others. 

In our hospitals and clinics, we treated mostly women and children while the soldiers fighting for them, protecting them, supposedly giving their lives for them, stole our medicines and food stocks for themselves. The civilians often said they didn’t mind—because without the soldiers, what did they have?  Even less, I guess, although I was never sure and grew to believe the longer I stayed that the relief we tried to bring might only have prolonged the fighting. 

War is never simple enough for a right or wrong answer.

Europe speaks now of a seventy-year peace broken, but if we consider the Cold War; the Soviet takeovers of Hungary and Czechoslovakia; the Croatian, Bosnian, and Kosovan wars; Russia’s takeover of Crimea just a few years ago, peace on that continent hasn’t been so trustworthy. It’s just that most of those wars happened away from our attention.  There is a complaint of racism in the coverage of this war.  The argument that Western journalists are identifying more with these people than others—from Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kherson. But I think it’s human nature, something built into our brains. “These people look just like us,” we think, watching women in their winter jackets and knit beanies; their kids holding the same teddy bears our children clutch; their teenagers scrolling cold fingers across their phones; the Nigerian medical student trekking to Lviv who speaks with the accent of a dear friend; the Indian students standing at the border, twinned by a couple I pass on my daily jog in Ithaca. 

It is all too familiar.  These people could be us; we could be them. We aren’t in their situation, of course, but it’s our ability to think we could be that also reminds me of another piece of humanity.  The better one.  The trait that might be the one thing that saves us in the end.

I would like to think that I’d be one of the people today, standing at the main train station in Berlin, holding up a welcome sign.  I’d like to think that when I send my donation to IRC or CARE that it will be funding the kind of essential work I used to do in another war for other people.  I’d like to believe that there are enough good folks who will open their homes and wallets and minds to the current refugees because all these things tell me that I am still human. 

One of the heroes in my life has always been Mr. Rogers.  When asked what to do in the face of fear, he once told children, “Find the helpers.” I don’t think that’s dated or childish advice. I think it’s very current. Because someone has to do the hard work of taking care, of making repairs, fixing broken laws and abandoned ideals. Someone has to mend the minds and souls and bodies of those affected by war. 

Because they could be any of us.


This blog was bound to come around to parenting at some point as my posts are always the result of some thought that gets stuck in my brain for so many days or weeks—or in this case, years—that the only way forward is to duel it out in my head, often while driving or doing dishes or lying awake at 3 a.m. until the idea comes into clearer shape through words.  That doesn’t mean I solve it; writing is just a way of making more sense of something that doesn’t inherently make sense to me…which is a long way of saying that I’m writing about parenting not because I’ve figured it out, but because after doing it for over two decades, I‘m still struggling at the job.   

What is parenting?

A responsibility? A reason to celebrate? A source for Instagram and Facebook posts?

A career? A part-time job? A reason to drink?

All of the above?

At its heart, parenting is the cultivation of a child into who he/she/they will become. 

Farmers across the world cultivate crops. A thankless, tireless, devoted job that’s essential to life and yet most of us never give it any extended thought.  If we did, we’d be stunned why anyone would choose such an endeavor. In a good season, crops can be ruined by multiple calamities; forces of nature, fate, genes and simple luck play an outsized role in production.  When farmers do well, their produce is sent off for the benefit of other people, making it look like they spent a lot of time doing nothing. When they fail, there is recrimination and guilt, a lot of second-guessing, and a whole lot of other voices spewing blame.

The similarities between the two jobs are not lost on me.

But if farming is the hard work of raising crops, then parenting is the hard work of raising children; helping those small seeds of life given into our care mature into the vegetables and flowers and trees and shrubs and grass and nettles that populate our human world.

It’s not the same thing as “birthing” kids—let’s specify that. Although if someone had told me mid-partum, or worse, post-partum, that I’d just done the easy bit—when I felt so far out of my depth AND like I’d been run over by a tractor—I’m sure I would have cried even harder; completely overwhelmed by a task I had taken on in utter ignorance and wondering why anyone, anywhere thought childrearing was a good idea. 

Because parenting isn’t the easy job of being able to say, “I brought this child into the world,” and being good with it. It’s not the bragging rights earned because something wonderful got placed in your hands; it’s not the sharing of only the glories of the job.  If truth be told—or rather, if my truth of parenting be told—the essentials of the job are probably the things we tend NOT to talk about. The things we would never brag about. The times when our doubts are the only thing we’re sure of; when our kiddos are in pain or struggling and not only do we not have the answers, but our parenting ignorance might be at least partially at fault for how our kids are suffering in the first place. 

Parenting is fraught with indecision.  The bad decisions we regret.  The waking up in the middle of the night, worrying, so that the next day, we can wake up and worry some more.  It’s asking ourselves all the time if what we’re doing is right. If our advice, our rules, or the decisions we make for them are the right choices; and if they’re the wrong ones, wondering who will bear the consequences.  Because mostly—and it’s a secret mostly for many of us—parenting is the shame of thinking we’re doing it all wrong. Not realizing that sometimes our shame bleeds over, onto our kids.  Wondering if they’re wrong.  As in, the wrong thing. Worrying that not only have we failed our job, but we’ve failed them, too. 

And yet, if we’re doing the main job of parenting, we are—at the very least—being present, and in those moments of rest and quiet and attention, we’re seeing them. We’re hearing them, learning from them.  The kind of learning that happens when we actively listen—even if it’s only after we’ve run out of things to say.

In those times, our greatest work is reflecting back to them what we’re hearing and seeing.  Taking them seriously. Recognizing something big about the little People-In-Evolution before us. Appreciating their smallest ideas, their smallest independent decisions, their ‘unimportant characteristics’ that the rest of the world doesn’t see, or chooses to overlook and that make them exactly who they are. 

That last bit of parenting might be the most important. 

Because if “being seen” is the validation that we exist in the world, then the act of “seeing” someone as the unique individual they are is perhaps the most essential work of cultivating a child.  And it doesn’t have to come from the person who gave birth to a particular soul, but from anyone who can see their special magic. A teacher. A neighbor. A family member. I have a lovely cousin who has birthed no children but “sees”—in all that word’s depth and wealth—her adoring nephews, her step-daughter, her young mentee, and therein, parents them all.

So, what is about parenting that makes it feel like such an impossible job?

Maybe it’s that we’re entrusted with a complete unknown; a soul no one has ever seen before, or imagined before, and although we know their importance to us—perhaps the most precious thing life will ever give us—we don’t actually have the information we need to do the job. We’re given no instructions, no directions, no specific rules or understanding except that old adage: How hard can it be? People have been raising kids for centuries. 

Yet, none of us know what we’re raising. 

We’re given the kernel, the nucleus, the source of a person—but we have no idea what it will become.   

We could be raising a colorful cherry tree. Or a great big willow. It could be a delicate, vibrant, Gerber daisy that looks amazing but has trouble raising its head. It could be a raspberry bush, prickly and juicy and thriving—or a tangy red currant that we first mistake for chokeberry.  It could be a dandelion that goes through its own phases of ticklish delight: bright, flowering joy that turns wispy and fading, disappearing over time; cycling in and out of a tricky balance of existence.    

The bummer is, kids don’t come in seed packages, as handy as that would be. 

Because the main dilemma of cultivating a child is that even though we don’t know what we’ve got, it’s still our job to help them become the supremely distinctive thing they’re supposed to be. Our job is to support and tend them; protect them; care for them long enough for them to find their own determination, their own field, to grow into their own life and soul, and eventually exist without us.

In that process, it becomes our job to step back and watch, knowing that each being on this earth will have its own, singular experience of life that isn’t ours and can’t be ours, and might not even fit the idea of a life we can imagine—and we have to be okay with that.  With the fact that our seedlings might grow into something that doesn’t resemble a plant or shrub or flower we’ve ever seen, in any garden, in any terrain.  And know that it’s a good thing.  Because we’ve raised that seedling to become something of its very own. 

I wish someone had told me when I started out my parenting gig, “This child will be amazing!” and not meant, as most did, ‘this child, because it’s yours, will go on to great and wonderful things!’ but had instead meant, ‘this child will be amazing because it will be the very first of its kind; the one and only of its kind, and it will need your support to figure out what that will be.’ 

Because even if our kids take all the classes we sign them up for, the violin lessons, the travel sports, the theater shows; even if they dress in all the clothes we buy them and end up applying to the colleges we recommend, our best parenting moments will be the ones when they do none of those things, or try and give up on all of those things, and we still say, “I see you building yourself with this decision, and I am so proud of you.”

For at the root of parenting, apart from the basics of teaching children how to stay alive and sane in this insane world of ours, the truth is, how can we know what’s best for them? We don’t know yet who they are because they don’t know yet who they are. They’re discovering it as they go and if we’re doing our job right, we’re discovering it right alongside them.

Which also means, we’re going to fuck up.

Not once or twice, but on a regular basis.

Because we’re going to try to make decisions that would be good for us. We’re going to push them in a way that feels comfortable for us, because we’re still thinking about them from our point of view. We’re going to insist and ask and demand things that feel wrong to them but feel right to us in the moment—and if we’re lucky, later in life they will forgive us for that and those situations will have given them good information for making their own decisions later on, when they better know what’s right for them, having done it already the wrong way at our behest.  And it will be a lesson for us, too, in those moments later, to hear their anger about the bad decisions we made for them and be gracious and humble and able to say, “I’m sorry.”

And hopefully, along our parenting way, we will learn to better listen and hear them when they say, “No, that’s not for me,” or “No, I can’t do it that way.” And we will learn to ask, “What do you think you need?”

For those of you with smaller kids, this might not feel like it makes sense.  You are still the Rule Setter, the Adjudicator, the Master of All Decisions. But those days pass quickly and suddenly you are faced with actual people in your household, wondering how the hell they got there when you weren’t looking.

In my house, once they appeared, I still mistook them for children.  For the beings I was raising in all my abundant wisdom—which meant, I wasn’t listening enough. 

I didn’t hear them when they said, “I can’t do this” or “I hate this” or “This isn’t for me,” mis-translating their words into, “I’m complaining about this but really, I’ll suck it up and keep going because that’s what you and everyone around me wants.”

If I’d been listening properly, I would have heard, “I’m miserable doing this thing that goes against what I want or who I am.” I would have been better equipped to see that the systems and roles I was trying to fit them into just weren’t the right shape or size.  I would have told them earlier that there are many ways to live life—and encouraged them, harder, to find their own.

We all figured it out eventually, but they figured it out first.  I was behind the trend more often than not, because I misunderstood not just their words, but the situation; I believed they were still mere children in the backseat, with me, firmly in charge, at the wheel.  Yet, at their best, my saplings figured out how to reach around me from behind, wrap their spindly, leafy hands around the wheel and get the car going in the right direction. At my worst, I kept control, convinced of my own authority and sureness even as I drove them wildly off track, finally forced to stop; and while I was busy digging around the glove compartment for some out-of-date Google Parenting map, they ditched the car and started walking in their own direction.

Which is to say, what? That leafy tree trunks should be driving cars?

Just this: that we help our children most when we listen; when we take them seriously, when we give them the controls earlier than we see fit. When we encourage them to be themselves and teach them to trust their own instincts, and when we model that trust by trusting their instincts, too, even when—or especially when—they go against ours.  We parent best when we show our pride in their early, small, unique manifestations of self that make them feel wholly themselves.  Believing they’ll grow best when they point themselves in the direction of their own sun as we stand in their shadows, not trying to bask in their glow, but appreciating the view of them, in all their glory, in whatever shape or size they might grow into.

Content that their creation is their own.

On Grief

Photo by Magda Ehlers from Pexels



And so starts the long, hard process of grief. 




That’s different from what we do here.



A reminder.  A warning.  A shared experience. 

When did our grief become so solitary?







Those were long, hard journeys.




I hated those crossings.





Which, of course, elicited the opposite reaction. 














A Year Ago

One year ago Friday, we’d planned a gathering at our house.  A few people had already announced they wouldn’t come ‘out of an abundance of caution’ a new phrase invented by Corona.  We debated whether to leave our invite open, but in the end canceled rather than make people uncomfortable by forcing them into a decision given the little information we all had at the time.  What we knew about the virus then, was that it was transmitted from person to person, it was not airborne (which later proved false), and that it was not necessarily deadly (see previous comment). 

That night, instead of hosting a party, we went out to our favorite restaurant and wondered how things would unfold. 

Within days, lockdown was declared and our upstate NY college town had emptied, my mother had moved in with us from Florida, and the dialogue around the virus had changed.  Data proved it might be deadly after all—although only to older people or those with underlying health conditions—yet suddenly everything seemed more precarious than the day before.  And that was the only certainty as days passed.

With two over-70-year-olds in the house (my mother and her Canadian partner), a high school senior suddenly homeschooling, a travel-loving husband abruptly homebound, and a dog who chose that moment to get life-threateningly sick, our life got very small and very nerve-wracking all at once.  Since I was the only one leaving the house, I felt like the designated Emissary-to-the-Outside-World as we adapted, inside, to a new normal. 

For the first several weeks (or months) I remember feeling petrified that I would kill my mother—unintentionally, of course—not careful enough at the grocery store or the gas station, as hospitals filled to capacity in nearby NYC and we watched their temporary morgues overflow.  All I could imagine, if anything happened to my mom, was not only would I be responsible for her death, but that I’d have to answer to my sisters, too, and how they would hate me.  Added to that, in one of those how-could-it-possibly-get-worse scenarios, I phoned my oldest daughter, an ocean away, who told me she had a cold.  A few days later, she updated me via text: “It’s probably Corona.”  Three grueling days of silence followed.

 I started waking at night in cold sweats—anxiety or Covid? 

It was a nervous time for everyone—and yet, as we realized that our one-month lockdown would probably go much longer—people started to adapt. 

Humans are massively resilient beings—that’s something I’m convinced of, having lived in strange or unbearable places myself and borne it; or having experienced how others, enduring even more, have borne it even longer. 

If I believe in one truth in life it’s this: humans can adapt to anything.   

So as people started discussing masks, we started sewing ours in the living room, using leftover fabric from old doll clothes projects.  At the supermarket, it turned out we weren’t the only ones; a new world of floating eyes emerged over colorful, mini-quilts as masked people started populating our town.  Neighbors offered or traded mask patterns and sewed for other neighbors. 

Overnight, plastic went up in front of cashiers, at first only lowly, see-through shower curtains that later morphed into improvised hanging plexiglass, before becoming more durable structures, demonstrating how everyone’s adaptations got more sophisticated as time went on. 

We got used to washing our groceries outside the door (before we discovered it wasn’t necessary), and figured out ways to meet up once Spring arrived, spacing our lawn chairs around the backyard at the required 6-foot distance.  Some people shopped online for the first time and we all learned to Zoom.  My daughter graduated in our living room, in a ceremony that felt both meaningful and well-organized—as we continually learned how to cope. 

As summer turned to fall and we grew tired of—but also used to—the new requirements of life: sitting in parking lots to be called in for appointments, getting swabbed twice a week to teach or study during the semester, sanitizing hands on both ends of a grocery run, we also came to understand that Covid was here for the long haul.  My early optimism of getting it under control (not impossible if we had followed the science), faded as November arrived and Thanksgiving kick-started a new explosion of cases, just as we were relocating for a half-year to Germany, a country which removed most Covid restrictions for Christmas, so everyone could enjoy the holidays.  (???)  Luckily, the Germans re-thought that strategy as hospitals imploded and another life lesson was reiterated: that although humans are amazingly adaptable, they can also be incredibly stupid. 

Now, exactly one year from the date when we first went on lockdown, it’s a good time to reflect. 

People have continued to adapt—surprisingly, so—and we have gotten used to so many things we never expected we could.  When we first got to Germany, where masks are only used indoors, I discovered how used I was to not seeing people’s faces—and how nervous it made me to see so many people unmasked.  And now, used to wearing my required N95 indoors, I will probably panic at home when people are still wearing their homemade face-coverings. 

But to a great extent, as we think about our migration back home in Spring, at least in the US, it seems as if there’s a glimmer of a post-lockdown hope—because of vaccines.  And if anything has surprised me most this year, it’s the speed of the vaccine roll-out.  I never would have anticipated a year ago that already the people I worry about most would be vaccinated against the virus. 

One of the jobs I did back in East Africa was running vaccination programs in war-drenched South Sudan, a place that could break your heart with all its suffering.  Between fighting and bombings, droughts, Nile flooding, crop failures, malnutrition, evacuations and population relocations, vaccines provided protection from at least one type of terror that could kill.  Our teams regularly vaccinated against diseases like Polio, Diptheria, Tetanus, Pertussis and Measles.  

This was an effort.

When we’d arrive at a new location, we had to start by figuring out how many people were there—mainly counting the children, our strategic target.  Then we’d ask local elders to identify community members who we could train and hire as Immunization Workers.  After several weeks of training, our new team members would be ready for vaccines. 

 I don’t even know what goes into vaccine production—certainly another long and complex procedure—but starting with ready vaccines, the most important step in the process for us was getting the vaccines on site.  We benefited from ‘The Cold Chain’ system, an organization of people and logistics that started at the World Health Organization headquarters in Nairobi and ended at our location in South Sudan, almost a thousand kilometers away.  Two flights, several cool boxes, people to load and unload; ice packs, working thermometers and speed was all necessary to get the vaccines to us.  Once we got them, we needed our kerosene-powered fridges up and running perfectly and adjusted every day to keep the vaccines viable.  It was a system, not just of logistics, but of amazing people power—communal power—negotiated between with two countries, several aid organizations, rebel leaders, commanders on the ground, our vaccine teams and the local population.

Each morning in the field, the team would gather at the fridge to unload the tiny glass vials into cool boxes for transport to the community.  If we had done our information campaigns well, mothers and children would already be waiting at the various stations we’d organized, at clinics if we had them or under large trees if we didn’t.  One line would distribute drops of Oral Polio Vaccine; another DPT; Measles vaccines for mothers and children in yet another line.  At the end of the day, each vaccinated person held a little yellow vaccine card stored in a plastic hull—a much-revered possession that many guarded like gold. 

Because of war, populations were always moving and we almost never could stay in one place long enough to complete a 9-month vaccination schedule.  Yet every time we started over at a new location, there would be families proudly waving their little yellow cards.  

Vaccines in South Sudan were nothing to take for granted.  They were the difference between life and death in a place where death from vaccine-preventable disease was a daily occurrence. 

Although I know there are vaccine doubters in this world, they are not the people who have ever seen a whole village of twisted children scuttling about on mangled limbs from polio; or those who have watched a mother sob after losing all her children from measles; or witnessed the body of a seven-year-old boy, muscle-locked and asphyxiating as he dies, slowly, excruciatingly from tetanus.

This is the reality of death by vaccine-preventable disease.  Only those who live in the luxury of health can believe that vaccines are not a privilege, or, when offered: a responsibility. 

Which is why, as I scroll through my neighborhood list serve from Upstate NY, with all its complaints about the difficulty of booking appointments, or the hours spent online being told to check back later, or the broadcast dilemma of figuring out which vaccine is best, I get frustrated.  Or when I read about a nurse somewhere in the US who ‘believes it is his choice’ not to get the vaccination although he puts his patients at risk.  Or when others say it’s too much of a hassle for something they’re not really worried about getting. 

Because I know how valuable vaccines are.  And how much work it takes to get those vaccines out.  And how much good they can do. 

I also find it disturbing, that whole privileged line of thought, when I’m sitting now in a country who can’t seem to get their vaccine roll-out under way, and where my almost 80-year-old father-in-law was told last week that he’s still ‘too young’ to sign up for a vaccine. 

That’s the reality, actually, in most of the world.  In Germany, they’ll get the vaccines eventually, but as Covid is now a vaccine-preventable disease, I know how urgent the timing is to reign it in now.  And while the vaccine roll-out here is probably mere months away, there are other places in the world, places like the rural communities where I used to work, that still lack Cold Chains and health workers and infrastructure and vaccines—and they will wait longer for their protection.  Possibly years. 

So, get your vaccine as soon as you can and encourage others to get it, too.

And then, be grateful.

Because many people have worked very hard, so you can have this protection. 

Looking Forward

Our rotating star

There’s been so much talk this year of a Christmas ‘not like any other.’ But for many of us, life has been out of sorts since March, when we first went into lockdown, and even as the new year starts and vaccines flicker on the horizon, we’re still hunkered down and living a rather strangely exceptional version of life.  Which gave me a chance to think back on other years when Christmas was ‘not like any other.’

My first Christmas to have that distinction was my first year out of college, when instead of spending it with family, I spent Christmas with seven other Peace Corps volunteers on the slopes of Mt. Kenya.  In a place and time with no phones, internet, or Zoom calls to connect us, we had to figure out how to make a Christmas celebration out of nothing. 

I’d known my fellow volunteers for only four months at that point and we’d all just recently left our group training base for the permanent sites we’d be living in for the next two years, scattered around the country.  Christmas was our first opportunity for a reunion and something to look forward to after those first strange days of settling in and starting our new lives at our sites, all on our own.  My new home was a little village on the eastern side of Kenya, in the middle of a game park famous for its lions and elephants.  Meeting up with the others, then, meant taking an overnight train from Mombasa, where I rocked away the night in the top bunk of a rickety old cabin that had once been part of the glamourous (and since, rightly-maligned) colonial legacy of the Brits.  For breakfast, I drank my tea from a tarnished silver teapot still engraved with East African Railway in loopy script and watched ostrich, zebra and graceful giraffe racing alongside the tracks as we sped towards Nairobi, the nation’s capital.  From there, I had to catch a ‘speed taxi’—a Peugeot 504 station wagon packed full of people and luggage and chickens—into the foothills of Mt. Kenya to meet the others.  Reunited, we cooked a celebratory pineapple upside-down cake over a kerosene camp stove using two huge aluminum cooking pots and three rocks, a strategy devised by former volunteers and described in the legendary Peace Corps Kenya Cook Book gifted each new volunteer.  In place of a Christmas tree, we crafted a wreath from foraged greens and listened to a cassette tape someone from home had sent, playing songs from Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer as we prepared our pasta dinner.  Afterwards, we went to the local, one-room, candle-lit church for a midnight mass where we were welcomed broadly by the local congregation and invited to sing for them.  Which is how a group of mixed-faith/no-faith Americans from California, North Dakota, Illinois, Washington D.C., Minnesota and Michigan ended up singing an off-key rendition of Silent Night in the darkened shadows of one of Africa’s tallest peaks. 

It was a memorable Christmas, to say the least. 

Several years later, still in Africa, I enjoyed my oddest Christmas ever.  As a new hire and one of a small group of relief workers left behind as an Emergency Team at our location in South Sudan, I didn’t know what to expect.  I knew nothing of Sudan or its civil war—only that I’d been told to stay ‘vigilant’ amidst the increased fighting and indeed, just days into the new year, we did actually get evacuated under heavy fire.  But before that, Christmas happened, with several days of celebration that included traditional Nuer dancing—high jumps launching young men several feet into the air—combined with a strange, imported form of evangelism where dozens of people marched in bright white dresses (among an otherwise naked population) while parading crosses before them in military fashion.  With a mix of horror and humor, I watched in my sun-battered, red sleeveless shirt, absorbing yet another version of what had been done in the name of ‘Civilization’ by decades of missionaries in Africa. 

That evening, my Kenyan colleague and I hosted the other remaining relief workers for dinner: a goofy New Zealander working for the Adventists, a dour French female doctor, and a logistician from Paris named Pierre.  Pierre was a retired chef, so for dessert he treated us to a banana flambe, carrying it, ablaze, through the door of our mud and thatched dining hut.  Unfortunately, on the way in he tripped, shooting flames of rum across our floor, almost setting us and our tukal on fire.  (Months later, after hearing about a fire at Pierre’s new location, I asked jokingly if banana flambe had been the culprit and was told in all seriousness, “Pineapple!”) 

That year in South Sudan, post-dinner, as I stood outside peacefully brushing my teeth in the dark, open air, I searched the sky and located the constellation of Orion, a constant in my life.  Watching its brightest star glow, I reflected on the story of the Christmas star and its supposed reach across the world.  That night, I let it mark for me the long connection between home and where I found myself; thinking how my family at home might be seeing the same star; making me think even more about the connection between all people across time and space. 

Two years (and a lot of war) later, I celebrated my first German Christmas—something that would become a tradition for many of my Christmases since, although maybe it’s good I didn’t know it at the time.  It was not a roaring success.  Maybe because I was surrounded by the trappings of family and Christmas—but none that were my own—I felt more homesick than ever.  I listened to Christmas melodies I didn’t recognize, with words I didn’t understand.  There was no Christmas tree until the 24th and Christmas Day was almost an afterthought.  We ate tongue (?!) for Christmas dinner and cold salads for Christmas Eve.  The crowning glory came on the 26th, when the extended family gathered for coffee, the great aunts and uncles of the ‘War Generation’ sharing their reminiscences, who stared my way every time they said, “Die Amerikaner.” I felt singled out and shamed by what I couldn’t understand.  Only years later, once I spoke German myself, did I realize how often those stories they shared of ‘The Americans’ were mostly positive ones; a return to justice and sanity after years of war.

But it was nearly twenty years later that I celebrated my worst Christmas ever—and the one truly most unlike any other.  It was exactly ten days after my mother-in-law’s passing.  In a household steeped in grief, and lacking all her planning and organizational prowess, we felt obliged to pull ourselves together for the holiday, knowing that’s what she had wished for.  But that year, it felt almost impossible to find moments of joy.  In the wake of such raw loss, we wrapped ourselves in the motions of the holiday, hoping that might be enough.  Unpacking the manger amidst the sobbing of my girls; sorting through Christmas ornaments while holding my husband tight; preparing dinner with my father-in-law as our eyes stung and leaked; all of us taking our first bold steps into that heavy new world of absence. 

Yet even that year, one positive memory stands out.  As part of the family tradition I married into, we hold the responsibility of keeping the family Christmas star.  Handed down from the 1800’s, it’s a rather spikey thing that sits atop the tree and balances a twelve-armed star on its tip that rotates horizontally around.  Each arm, shaped like a windmill blade, holds a small figure hanging down from its end, originally carved from wax.  Over the star’s hundred-year-plus history, as the wax figures have melted away, they’ve been replaced with tiny wooden cut-outs each representing one of the twelve months.  Every year, the star is unpacked from its special, hand-built box and everything is straightened and adjusted: the monthly figures ordered and hung, the blades fine-tuned, so everything can find its balance.  Sometimes it takes an hour or more to fix the star atop the tree just so, so when we light the candles below (yes, real candles!) the heat from the beeswax rises up, pushing the blades around, creating in the dark of the Christmas Eve night a beautiful kaleidoscope of light and shadow on the ceiling.  Family lore states that if the star rotates quickly, the year ahead will be a good one.  And that year, more than any other, we needed that.   I’m not sure how many times we adjusted the blades or the branches below, tweaking the exact the location of each candle, to make sure that when the relatives called to ask about the star, we could reassure them that it was racing. 

My memory tells me now that the star that year spun faster than any we’ve seen.

Alas, for Christmas this year we didn’t have the star, or the reassurance that we’re used to it giving us.  We weren’t in Munich celebrating with my father-in-law in person; he didn’t even get a tree.  Like so many other families, we shared a Zoom holiday on lockdown, trouble-shooting tech problems and talking over each other, but at least sharing the same time zone so it was dark for all of us when we lit the candles on our tree and sang together some of those once-unrecognizable songs that have now become for me, too, the sound of Christmas. 

Recently, another writer reflected on the ‘difficulties’ of Christmas this year compared to those of people living during World War II, when again, so many people were separated, often for many holidays in a row.  I tried to imagine that level of loss and distance and restriction and lack of security; the rationing of food and movement and safety to that extent, not just in the short term but year after year after year.    

My step-father used to tell stories of how he spent World War II as a child in Amsterdam and of that last horrific winter—the “Hunger Winter” as the Dutch call it—when his family had to burn their furniture and floorboards to keep from freezing, and dug up tulip bulbs for food.  Or how my mother-in-law, also a child in the war—on the other side—told of being strafed on her way to school and forced to move every few months as women and children were evacuated from the bombing.  I wondered if either of them mourned their Christmases the way we have mourned ours this year?  Or if they were able, back then, to have anything that resembled the Christmas celebrations I later shared with them both? 

It’s too late for those conversations now, but I wish I had thought to ask.

Yet that lack of knowledge made me think even more about what we’ll remember of this year.  What we’ll talk about later—or share once this is all behind us.  Because although we’ve lost out on some of our traditions this year—and the unluckiest of us have lost out on more, maybe even beloved people in our lives—there will still be memories that we’ll carry forward from this time.

It might be that, looking back, we’ll have a source of wonder that we managed to pull off something celebratory at all.  Or pride at how we adapted and learned to take small joys as the important ones.  It might be that we recognize all the things we took for granted before this, and how their lack this year will make them so much more meaningful in the future. 

For me, I’m not yet sure what this year’s standout moments will be.  Like much of life, I tend to realize what was most important only once I look back, after things have settled in my mind.  But the past is always part of the present, too, the way the light from the star I saw in Sudan and shared with my family back home, was really a light blasted out long before, one we could only enjoy many, many years later.

What matters most, then, I hope, is remembering that important moments have already happened for us and will continue happening no matter what comes.  Small moments of grace or meaning or gratefulness connecting us to the people around us—whoever they are and however it happens—or those unusual moments that we mark when something is vastly different; those realizations that force us to recognize what it is that matters most.  And it’s the act of holding these moments with us, and drawing on them later that is the start of memory.   

Maybe that’s what can reassure us, then, in this year of absence: that life will keep happening, that experiences—good and bad—will be shared, marked, and will be the kernel of memory down the road.  Because like our rotating star overhead, it’s the mix of dark and light that creates the intricate pattern that so fascinates us.  The movement and the momentum that guarantees we’ll keep racing ahead like our star, creating our own reassurance that next year will be a better one. And that from all those small moments we’re making right now, when gathered together, that will be a story worth sharing. 

Election Day

It’s election day and I didn’t know how to spend it.



So that’s what I did with my day.

Today was busy. 















Because a mom is happy to help her son.


And it all happens when people think outside themselves. 





There is goodness in that.

And for that, I am very grateful.


















So, what was it?












There was so much joy.






And belonging. 

And home. 






















That’s what it required to bring food to South Sudan.

What’s our excuse? 


That’s harder for most people to see here. 



That’s always stuck with me. 






We have to humanize hunger before we can treat it. 


At least that feels like a good start.