I could not stay home. That was not a feeling — it was a fact, the way some things become facts when you stop arguing with them. My husband had died eleven months before and Christmas was coming and I could not sit in San Diego and do that. Not the first one. Not with the routines and the shape of everything exactly where it used to be. I had also started thinking about leaving. Not the trip — leaving leaving. Moving. Starting over somewhere that didn't know me as the person

I have never been particularly attached to Thanksgiving. The food, I could take or leave — it is the one holiday where the meal is somehow both the entire point and reliably underwhelming. The obligation to be somewhere specific for it, even less so. Thanksgiving week is one of the easiest vacations to engineer in a corporate calendar: take one or two PTO days on either side of the holiday and you have nine days off. Nine days. Most people spend them at someone else's table e

Columbus Day weekend. No PTO required. A ninety-minute flight from San Diego to Sacramento, friends who picked me up from the airport, and a homecoming game at Cal. I hadn't been to a game in years. My friends suggested I come up and finally see the new stadium and I said yes without thinking too hard about it. That was the whole decision. I went to Cal. When I was there, Cal football was genuinely good — the PAC-10 was something, the players went on to the NFL, I cared in th

In 2017 my husband and I ran SeaWheeze together. It's Lululemon's half marathon in Vancouver, one of those races that's become as much a festival as a finish line, and he coached me the entire thirteen miles. It was one of the best weekends we'd had. I got a spot in 2018 and was realistic about it. I had just had a baby. I deferred and told myself 2019 was the year. I won the lottery again in 2019. One year post baby, one year into all of it, and the race fell on my son's fir

A solo road trip through Sedona, Arizona and Durango, Colorado.

One PTO day. That's all it cost. Memorial Day weekend is three days. But the Friday before it is a dead day at work and everyone knows it. Take Thursday afternoon at minimum, burn Friday, and you have five days away for a day and a half of leave. I have done this math so many times it's automatic now. The calendar has these windows everywhere if you're willing to look for them. One strategic day of PTO before a long weekend resets you as completely as a week. Sometimes more,

My husband had been dead for four months when I saw Mother's Day on the calendar. I knew immediately I was not staying home. I was not going to sit in San Diego and watch everyone else get celebrated by their intact families on social media while I figured out what this holiday meant now. Hawaii had been an annual spring trip before my son. I booked a flight to Maui before I could think too hard about it. My mother decided to come. I didn't ask her to — she just said she was

My husband died on January 4th, 2019. My son was four and a half months old. We were supposed to go to Whistler that month — MLK weekend, our first family ski trip. That trip didn't happen. A lot of things didn't happen that winter. What happened instead was that my friend called. She had a house in Cabo. I'd been there the years before when I'd visited without a baby, without any of this. She said come. She had a car. She had a second bedroom and a second set of hands and a

How one night in the woods reminded me who I was. I found out I was pregnant and cried. Not because I was unhappy — I wasn't — but because I had a list. Kilimanjaro was on it. A lot of things were on it. And suddenly the timeline felt very uncertain. I hit my birthday that October with a 10-week-old and postpartum fog thick enough to lose yourself in. When my husband asked what I wanted for my birthday, I didn't want a dinner out or no physical gifts or a spa day. I wanted on