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

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

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