The V-Word

I haven’t seen my brother for 25 years. We were both in our 20s then; young enough to believe that aging was something that happened to other people. Our faces were unlined and our family wounds still fresh enough to be leading us around without our knowledge. Our family wounds went deep. Our parents’ divorce happened when stigma existed behind the word. Their subsequent pain, the ways they dealt...

“There are times when the actual experience of leaving something makes you wish desperately that you could stay, and then there are times when the leaving reminds you a hundred times over why exactly you had to leave in the first place.”  -Shauna Niequist

Leaving is bittersweet. Knowing when to leave is not always a simple equation. Even the departing itself is rarely an experience of simple...

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.” -Edna St. Vincent Millay

Three years ago today it was a Wednesday afternoon when a beautiful girl named Sydney went into a closet and ended her life with her father’s gun. It was a particularly humiliating high school break up that...

“I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.” -Elizabeth Barrett Browning

We are not a happy sexual bunch. According to a recent CNN poll nearly 40 million Americans are stuck in a sexual rut, and more than 52% of us are...

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.” -Helen Keller

When we end our relationships badly, we get stuck in a continuous rebound relationship cycle. Tragically, the most common and destructive bad endings that plague millions of relationships is when we use infidelity as an exit...

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. “ ~Richard P. Feynman

Not too long ago, my son got his first iPhone 4s and called me overjoyed. He exclaimed “my life is complete.” In my motherly way, I tried to explain that a phone doesn’t complete you, it is just a cool phone. Clearly I missed the point and I was in the process of...

“You can have no greater or lesser dominion than the one over yourself. The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” -Leonardo DaVinci

Infidelity is a topic on just about everyone’s mind at some point in their relationship. Whether it lives as a quiet fear, a desperate fantasy or a shame-filled memory, the occurrence of infidelity is so frequent and widespread that it is one of...

“When you feel that you have reached the end and that you cannot go one step further, when life seems to be drained of all purpose; what a wonderful opportunity to start all over again, to turn over a new page.”   -Eileen Caddy

These days I am starting over. All of the good habits that I could count on with ease are now feeling foreign. I am addicted to sugar in a way that I can’t remember. My...

“Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn reverence for life until we know how to understand sex.”  -Henry Ellis

Sex scandals are us. The news is replete with what seems an endless account of seemingly good people whose sexuality has literally transformed them into a criminal. The stories of childhood sexual abuse are deeply troubling and extend into the millions when you consider the...