A diary holds what you write. This one writes back, and knows the trail besides. Jackson Hole, August 2021. Five years before the hug at eight inches, this one came without being asked. A week ago, my son Sam, 16, came and stood eight inches in front of me before school, gave me a sheepish grin, and angled his right cheek toward mine. Did he want me to put my cheek on his? What was he asking for in this strange stance he was taking? After those quick reflections, I seized the

There are a dozen versions of this ache this month. None of them need solving. An empty chair, still warm with light. (Photo: Behnam Mohsenzadeh, Unsplash) The Chair in My Office He comes and sits in the chair in the corner of my office most afternoons now. Doesn't say much. Scrolls on his phone while I work, one long leg hooked over the armrest, and every so often he'll read me something out loud that made him laugh, not because he needs me to laugh too, just because it's fu

A retreat buys you a weekend of it. LUMA helps you find it in the middle of a Tuesday. Some nights the only quiet left is the kind you scroll through. (Photo: Kev Costello, Unsplash) With an energetic teenager (and several of his friends around at any given point since it's summertime), the family room couch is the only quiet place left in the house by nine o'clock, and my phone is doing what phones do when the day is finally over, filling the last hour before sleep with othe

What Leonardo da Vinci, an empty inbox, and thirty years of Tuesdays have in common. A compass, an inkwell, a half-finished thought — the mess a mind makes when it refuses to stay in one lane. (Photo: Isa Bauptista, Unsplash) The Thing I Used to Apologize For For most of my career, I've had a version of the same conversation with people who ask what I do. I say speech-language pathologist, and then, almost involuntarily, I keep going — early interventionist, private practice/

What a very busy toddler, two paradoxes, and a man in a cardigan taught me about why relationship comes first. Different living room, different year — but similar enough to the one that held me still in 1968. (Photo: Joshua Coleman, Unsplash) I was, by every account my mother ever gave, a very busy toddler. Into everything. Always on the move, out the door before anyone noticed the door was open. And yet in February of 1968, at 14 months old, with

What a parenting AI search taught me about verification, caregivers, and the quiet work of separating what's true from what merely sounds true. A Sunday like any other — until it wasn't. (Photo: Jess Bailey, Unsplash) Every Sunday, Same Ritual Every Sunday I send the same notices — a gentle nudge to the families on my caseload that their early intervention visit is coming this week. Same time, same rhythm, years of Sundays behind this one. I had my planner open to check my we

On comparison-stress, two questions from 1771, and the tension our kids feel even when we don't say a word. A street like any other — where the math gets done quietly, behind closed doors. (Photo: Josue Michel, Unsplash) A Zip Code I Know by Heart I could draw you a map of 22101 with my eyes closed. Not because I studied it — because I lived it, twice, in different chapters of a life that kept circling back to the same square mile without ever quite meaning to. Steve's parent

On the children who fall through the space between a mother's instinct and a checked box. A quiet moment with a favorite book, one page at a time. (Photo: Curated Lifestyle, Unsplash) One Fish, Two Fish My daughter Stella, who is now 19, reports to me every now and again that she filled out her required reading log the same way every night in first, and then second, grade: One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. Not because it was her favorite. Because it was the only book she

What toddlers — and babies — actually need from the logical adult in the room Not every connection looks like rolling on the floor. Sometimes it looks like this — a real task, a willing child, and an adult who showed up for it. (Photo: Curated Lifestyle, Unsplash) The Voicemail My brother Ed is a CEO. He is precise, logical, direct, and not — by his own matter-of-fact admission — the goo-goo-gah-gah type. So when his wife had to fly to Arizona and left him to pick up his near

What your child is really asking when they want to help with dinner The dough will be uneven. The memory will not be. (Photo: Curated Lifestyle, Unsplash) You are twelve minutes from getting dinner on the table. The pasta water is almost boiling. The onion is translucent. You have successfully timed three things at once, which is a minor miracle, and you are — finally, briefly — on track. Then a small hand appears at your elbow. "Can I stir it?" And somewhere inside your very

When toddlers know exactly what they want — and don't yet have the words to say so. She has a very specific idea about this banana. (Photo: Luiza Braun, Unsplash) There's a particular kind of parental terror that has nothing to do with danger and everything to do with a banana. A mom I coached recently during an early intervention visit called it the "banana stage" — and she wasn't smiling when she said it the first time. With her older child, it had felt traumatic: hundreds

On the things we do that seem to disappear — and why they don't. W. Heath Robinson, The Moon's First Voyage (1916, reworked). Unpublished illustration, originally created for Peacock Pie by Walter de la Mare. Public domain. A Hospital Lounge. A Crescent Moon. A Hundred-Year Wait. It was Saturday late-morning this past weekend, and I was relegated to the hospital lounge while my daughter Stella's boyfriend, and then two friends, visited her. She was in good spirits, despite ha

You don't need a perfect boat to catch the wind. Two small paintings by my friend and artist Lucia — and the conversation they started. (@luartingk) Photo: Cindi Z. Stevens Copeland There is a moment many parents know but few name. It's not a crisis. No one is in the hospital. Nothing has shattered. The kids are fed, the permission slips are signed, the grocery order went through. Life, technically, is working. And yet. You're standing in your kitchen at 7

What 77% of parents are really asking — and the ancient Greek word that answers it. The metamorphosis is already happening. (Photo: Eva Zarpas, @aquariansecrets) The Number I Can't Stop Thinking About A new national report landed in my inbox recently and I have not been able to put it down. It's called Rattled: Tracking the Experiences of Families with Infants and Toddlers in 2025, published in May 2026 by Zero to Three. And one number in it stopped me completely. 77%. Sevent

On daughters, inherited weight, and the moment someone decides the boulder stops here Four generations. One decision. (Image created with AI / Concept: @constelacionesfamiliares.sfco) Last week I wrote about carrying. This week I need to talk about putting something down. The Silence of It It starts with a reel on Instagram. Four women — great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, young daughter — standing together against a warm ochre background. The great-grandmother holds a bo

A belated Mother's Day reflection on sons, separation, and the love that stays The carrying begins before they can ask for it. (Photo: Getty Images, Unsplash) There is a particular kind of love that begins in the body. Not the idea of love, not the promise of it — the actual, physical, gravitational fact of it. Nine months beneath your heart. The weight of him in your arms. The particular way a newborn finds your shoulder and exhales, as if he has finally arrived somewhere sa

The Revivalists at The Anthem, Washington, D.C. — February 29, 2020. A stranger with a camera captured something I didn't yet know was my last concert with Chip. I'm the one with my arms in the air. I am a word girl. Always have been. When a song I know begins — anywhere, but especially live, with thousands of strangers around me — something takes over. I don't decide to sing. I just do. Every word, from the first note to the last chord of the encore. It's involuntary. It's j

What Co-Regulation Really Means — and Why It Never Stops Mattering Two chairs. An open horizon. The floor beneath you is yours to build. Photo: A Chosen Soul / Unsplash+ There are seven minutes I will not forget. It was a Sunday late-afternoon. My daughter Calli — thirty years old, a Parisian by choice and by heart — was minutes away from leaving our home for the airport, hours away from the flight that would carry her back across the ocean after two weeks home. She was packe

Sometimes "raising" goes in both directions. Photo: Getty Images There's a country song that accidentally gets it exactly right. Easton Corbin wrote "Raising Humans" from the perspective of a rescue dog — a dog who arrives home in an old truck, spends hours on a couch with a heartbroken man, watches him heal, and finally drifts off at the vet thinking: he's going to be okay. The chorus goes: Raising humans ain't as easy as it looks / Raising humans don't come with instruction

Sometimes the kid staring out the window isn't checked out. They finished before everyone else. I was that kid. Not the kind of difficult that gets whispered about with concern and compassion. The kind that gets you sent to the principal's office at St. Michael Catholic School in the town where I grew up in Independence, Ohio. The kind where the phone calls home were so frequent my parents probably recognized the school's number before caller ID existed. I pushed back. I ques