Good Clean Reads

During May, Good Clean Love is donating 10% of proceeds from web sales to Every Mother Counts. Founded by Christy Turlington, Every Mother Counts is a non-profit organization dedicated to making pregnancy and childbirth safer for women everywhereby providing education and resources. More than 300,000 women die every year during pregnancy and childbirth. Every Mother Counts is working to change...

“A mother is not a person to lean on but a person to make leaning unnecessary.”  -Dorothy C. Fisher

For me, Mother’s Day has always been a mixed experience. As a daughter in a long line of wounded mothers, I have long struggled to reconcile myself with the painful history that I inherited. Learning to accept the mothering that I got and all that I didn’t was the foundation on which I built my own...

Worrying about how many calories you’re burning while having sex seems like one of the worst kinds of punishment. Instead of just noticing how your body is feeling, you’re distracted by thoughts like, “Does taking my clothes off burn 10 calories? 20?”

This article on woman empowerment encourages women to think about their bodies this way. Sex becomes an activity to enjoy not in itself, but as a...

A few weeks ago I started to feel a heaviness in my lungs that I was sure was pneumonia. I felt run down and my throat got irritated. I will be so sick in a few days, I thought, but then I wasn’t. I felt fine again. My mom called to tell me she had pneumonia.

I don’t believe anything spookier than coincidence happened here, except that it reminded me of what an intimate connection I still have...

“Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.”
― Rumi

The old saying that “time waits for no one” is why learning the art of letting go and holding on matter so much. Increasingly, I have the sensation that life is passing me by, days feel like they pass by in ten minutes and my Mondays become Fridays in...

“One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.” -Sigmund Freud

Last week I shared the revelations about how what I have been forcing myself to forget has caught up to me. I decided that I had to start remembering differently; so now, one week in to this new agreement with myself in my marriage, a few things have come clear. The thing is that the remedy is not...

“The most precious gift that marriage gave me was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant – in a word, real.”  -C.S. Lewis

Another powerful way to ground the idea of holding on and letting go in our intimate relationships is to reflect on our memory. The things that we choose to remember about the people we love, as well as what we...

“All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.” -Havelock Ellis

Back in the early days of mothering my days were full of the small details of children. What they ate, when they slept, who they played with, what they watched… The mundane was everything and my sense of mastery and control often clashed with a claustrophobia from how small my life had become. Looking...

The title of this post is from an essay by Sparrow, a poet. I love this essay because I think it captures so well how important small, private moments of joy are to our ability to be human. In my experience, searching for big happiness brings more disappointment than pleasure — those searches blind me to the small, beautiful things around me, like the flowers of muscari that are almost the same.