****Trigger Warning For Content Related to Sexual Assault**** It took almost twenty years for me to acknowledge the break-in that happened a few short weeks before I left for college wasn't an attempted robbery but was in fact an attempted rape. Waking up …

Back when I was first making the decision to quit practicing law and do, well, anything other than work in a law firm, I spent A LOT of time agonizing over what my "purpose" was. "If money was no object, what would you do?" I remember being asked, "what's …

Yesterday I made tomato soup from scratch. The fact that I made soup is unremarkable because I make soup all the time, and being that it is September and tomatoes are in full swing, me making tomato soup should be no big deal. But without even realizing …

It's not the being that is hard, it is the becoming. It's being on the verge.What am I on the verge of? Everything. Nothing. All of it at once.No, these are not fortunes from a cookie, or daily meditations sent from my emailed horoscope. These are truths e …

Mother’s Day is one of those holidays that I face with ambivalence, not because I think it’s some artificial Hallmark holiday, or because it reinforces antiquated notions of gender, but because, for all intents and purposes I was motherless most of my life …

I’ve spent a great deal of my 6+years as a mother making peace with my own troubled relationship with my mom, a fact I doubt places me in a different position than countless other women.  The process has been one of starting and stopping, largely because m …

Boy this topic couldn't come fast enough.  Life is moving at a pace I've come to call "dedicated frenzy" and my job as a political blogger and teacher has not left a lot of room for laughs.  Seriously.  Even my political satire workshop with the ever aweso …

I’m not a particularly religious person.  In fact, I’ve always been proud of a certain midwestern sense of self-reliance and steely independence that comes from growing up in the Nebraska prairies.  Pioneer roots, I like to call it.  The problem with those …

We’re having a bit of a January thaw here in Minnesota.    And while January is really the dregs of the deep freeze, the longest stretch of unbearable cold in a state where unbearable cold is the norm, already there have been some small and subtle reminder …