A Lesson from the Feminine in France

After a full day on the TGV from Biarritz to Paris and Paris to Nice followed by a local train to Menton.  I find myself at the easternmost end of the French Riviera, just east of Monaco and just on the border with Italy. My Airbnb was a 6 block walk from the train station…

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Lessons from Mom – Choices

Ever since that morning over oatmeal when my mother told me that she was leaving, that she could no longer handle the burden of motherhood, that she needed to build her own life in her own way, my mother reflected to me the power of owning your own choices.  While I rarely agreed with the choices that my mother made after that, she did at least make her own choices.

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A mother’s lesson in integrity

By the time I was 25 I had graduated university, gotten married and began my career in Accounting. In those first two years after university, I and my then husband had moved to New York where I worked in New York City in a public accounting firm.

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A mother’s lesson in belonging

When I was 12, I was living with my father and my three little sisters, my father had met a woman who looked exactly like my mother albeit much younger. She and her 4-year-old son had moved in with us and that was when the trouble started. It was clear from the start that she wanted me, and my sisters gone as fast as possible. It was clear from the start that she wanted me gone first.

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Black Lives Matter

Today as I sit down to write this blog, I am finding difficulty in the words. I want to write about racism and how it is wrong and yet I feel wholly ill-equipped. I want to write about how we need to remember our connection to each other and just love and take care of each other but that feels insensitive and while my intentions would be in the right place, being insensitive to long standing suffering is not how I want to be.

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Questioning Last Week

Last week I was getting to know my kitchen again after years of only visiting to make coffee and weekend breakfasts. I spilled something on the counter and just like the commercials have told us to do, I reached for the roll of paper towel, but I stopped short, somehow that roll of paper towel now seemed extravagant, like an unnecessary luxury. I grabbed for a sponge instead wiping up the spill and rinsing it back out again. Last week, I stopped using paper towel altogether.

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