the /grace/ between
The grace poured out between.
On Keeping Them Safe
(Trigger warning: Brief mention of suicide and self harm.) When I turned forty, I thought I said goodbye to a decade of being tired. Chuckbob wasn’t even a thought. COVID was months away. // I remember when my Second Son was just weeks old, and I was a fresh mom...
On Connection and SEC Football
I promised myself connection these days but it’s been a hard two years of minimizing dysfunction and wild grief and depression and parenting hard things and pretending it’s all good in the moment. I went to a women’s fellowship for our church last night. I prayed...
On the Physical Nature of Grief
So here’s my new semi-terrible discovery. There is a nonlinear expression in the physical nature of grief, not just the intellectual and emotional, and nearing the anniversary of my daddy’s death, the two are not working in concert. Not at all. My body has...
Poured Out Like Water
2021 feels like a lament, a sacrifice, a burnt offering of time and sanity and presence. A series of goodbyes, both to the tangible and to the what-could-have-been. I haven’t been much of a friend. Or a mother, or a wife, or even a writer. I am stretched between...
The Five Stages of Grief
No matter what there is to say about grief, it's already been said. Still, this is new for us, so I am going to repeat them all. The Five Stages of Grief denial anger bargaining depression acceptance Denial The first week after dad died, I was mostly numb,...
My Father, An Unusual Man.
{Most of you know this already, but my father, David Anthony Maddox, passed away on February 13, 2021. Below is a slightly edited version of the remarks I made at his funeral. I can't bring myself to say anymore.} I’ve thought about this moment many times. I’m a...
Post Partum Update Part 1
{I originally wrote this at the beginning of Dec, but posting it here for posterity. Time for some real talk, the COVID postpartum edition. While my physical recovery has been the easiest one yet (go figure-5th kid and old lady pregnancy and my body is all “we got...
Welcome to the World
2020 is the year no one saw coming. A gut-wrenching, life-altering cascade of events that no one has escaped from unscathed. Even as I started writing this, it was Election Day, your birth day, in a deeply divisive season of discord, an election that even now is...