Ugh, I’ve been struggling to figure out how to write this post for several days, but no clever ideas have come to me so I suppose I may as well just dive in and vomit it out.  The last you heard from me, I was going to go curl up in the fetal position. Which wasn’t hyperbole. I was probably a couple of days out from complete nervous breakdown. As regular readers know, the last few years have not been kind to me and my family. It all culminated last summer with my husband leav

(I spent the weekend with Mr. Kennedy a couple of years earlier when his son Teddy got married.  We were both just-outside-the-inner-circle participants in the wedding.  My ex was the best man and Mr. Kennedy was the now sober  and present father.  I am quite certain that Mr. Kennedy absolutely laughed his ass off over the whole thing.  I mean, he valued his children more than men who never went without them sometimes do.  But the whole thing was pretty rich.  He would have s

In the course of talking I mentioned that I had 5 kids and was separated from their dad.  Turns out she was divorced as well.  I listened to her story and expressed sympathy for her painful experience.  And then she turned to me and said, “well, and I hate to be a Debby Downer here, but you do know you’re never going to get another man again.  Not with 5 kids you’re not.  No way.  You’re going to spend the rest of your life alone.”  At which point it took every ounce of self-

first world problems.) My favorite people have always been the ones who I could crack wise with to my heart’s content.  Part of the bond I always shared with the qxh (quasi-ex-husband) was the fact that I could say almost any outrageous over-the-top thing that popped into my head around him.  Which can create its own complications.  I had to sit him down a couple of years into our marriage to explain that we don’t actually live in a sitcom and if he didn’t tone it down, he wa

And then there are the cursing psalms.  In her memoir, Phyllis Pickle, who writes devotionals to help people “pray the hours” talks about  the revelation that discovering these psalms was for her.  These are not the ones, she points out, that are read much during church services.  They aren’t very uplifting or edifying. When they are talked about, it is usually under the heading of “difficult scripture verses” and the conversation is about how to understand how their often vi

Not The Pioneer Woman! For the 3 of you who do not know, The Pioneer Woman is Ree Drummond, a homeschooling mother of 4 who lives with her husband on a working ranch.  She has an enormously popular blog, is a talented photographer, cook and writer.  She is beautiful and stylish and has great taste.  Her kids and her house are comfortably imperfect, but are never so out of hand that someone will wonder what’s wrong with her.  She has a new show on Food Network, has written sev