Your child joins your life.
You don't join theirs.

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