Have you ever wondered if God really has a purpose for you as a step-parent…especially the one who feels rejected by his/her stepchildren? I know how frustrating it can be to feel like you have no place in your own home. It can feel lonely, like you just don’t fit Read more…
I made my husband late for work today. As I handed him his egg sandwich on his way to get his shoes on, he told me there was a huge spider that ran behind the oven that I might want to kill. “You have to kill it before you go,” Read more…
“I’ve been feeling like a failure lately…and it hurts.” These were the words that caught my eye as I was mindlessly scrolling through my news feed. And out of sadness for this person, I wondered what kind of words had been swirling through their mind day in and day out. Read more…
“So, is life easier without me at home anymore?” These were the words my stepson asked my husband this weekend, his first weekend back home to visit from his freshman year in college. If you’ve read anything I’ve written about my stepson, you’ll know that things weren’t easy with him. Read more…
He reached into the candy bowl and pulled out an attractive-looking item. Once it was in his hand, however, he realized it was just an empty wrapper. The guilty culprit was a frail, elderly woman holding a bowl on her lap while biting into a chocolate bar, letting empty wrappers Read more…
“They need you,” he told me. The man I was starting to fall in love with looked at me intently over a couple of plates of the best pasta in town. “They need a mom.” “But they have mom,” I protested, curiously. “They need a mom who invests in them Read more…
We recently crossed into new territory as a stepfamily. With the departure of my stepson for his freshman year of college, and with my stepdaughter just entering her senior year of college, we have been confronted with a new stage in stepfamily living: No more stepchildren at home. Is it Read more…
This little girl…she has a firecracker personality. As an infant, she was big kid trapped in a baby’s body, who refused to conform to baby expectations. She defiantly resisted baby norms of sitting calmly in a stroller, or bouncing and cooing gently on my lap at a restaurant, or quietly Read more…
This article was originally published on Her View From Home. I was at the kitchen sink late in the evening, scrubbing the stoneware baking dish and serving spoons from dinner. Actually, I had been planning on turning my back on that forlorn mess of dinner dishes teetering in the sink. Read more…
I remember the days (not so long ago, in fact) when my kids were all 5 and under and I’d get it in my head that all I wanted to accomplish that day was to clean the house. Okay, maybe “cleaning” was an exaggeration. I mean, I would have even Read more…