A trip to Hayward becomes something more than a meeting: a family moves toward an uncertain future without leaving anyone behind. There is BART, peanut butter and jelly, grace, a new Vincentian home, time together afterward—and a friend who understands something essential: “Your children are your life.”
Tag Archives: Childhood Trauma
What Belongs to This Day
For three days, Dad’s sons have been teaching us how to live with an unknown future: Han helped us remain in the unknown, Justus helped us become oriented within it, and Proverb is teaching us how to live there. Sometimes what belongs to the day is not another heroic project to save the future. Sometimes it is cucumber sandwiches, twenty sit-ups, making the bed, turning on Solis’s little lights—and discovering that none of it is nothing.
We Know Where We Are
A smell of aftershave opened one door into the past. A bus carried us past an old life and toward somewhere new. At Sacred Heart, amid Spanish-language liturgy, childhood memory, uncertainty, and belonging, Solis opened his eyes and knew where we were: “This is our parish.”
But This Time, We Will All Be Known
In the summer of 1972, the world came apart. A summer later, it began to come back together. More than half a century later, Daniel took us back there—and helped us recognize an organizing story capable of holding memories we have carried all our lives. Perhaps our creation story is not about when we appeared, but how, through rupture after rupture, we remained. This time, we will all be known.
Dad’s Here
Solis looked up from the phone and, for a moment, the physical world became overwhelmingly concrete. We call it a terror peek. On a day when we asked a therapist for help, it brought us back to one of the most important questions in our family: Where is the adult? Dad’s here.
Dad Is Afraid
On Dad’s Day, fear finally becomes speakable. As we make chicken noodle soup, remember childhood, prepare to return to therapy, and face an uncertain financial future, we begin asking what sustainability really means for a plural family/system shaped by trauma, recovery, co-consciousness, faith, and love.
Watching the Wheels
What happens when the tools meant to make life more accessible begin demanding more of the life they are supposed to serve? From an iPhone Shortcut to a Heidelberg press, a 700-foot Ferris wheel, songs remembered from childhood, and an afternoon spent holding our sons, we found ourselves asking a different question: What is the work of our life—and what happens when we stop chasing the wheels and simply take care of our children?
You May Think You See a Person Losing Their Mind
A jagged Wednesday becomes a portrait of how a plural family holds itself together. Plans fail, the bedroom becomes unusable, memories and outside messages unsettle the day, and the family keeps adapting—through listening, boundaries, prayer, Greek salad, quesadillas, Hilda, making the bed, and one brother reminding Daddy: “I think you should be with Luke.” Along the way, an ordinary question about whether nine people sharing one physical body have quesadillas in their stomach or their stomachs opens onto something larger: anatomy, family, and the interior ways we know one another.
Understanding September 1
What happens when nobody is THE ONE? A classical analysis of Solis’s Day reveals an answer emerging through ordinary life: Daniel wakes Daddy, Jude imagines dinner, Hope changes the plan, Solis draws an ethical boundary, and the family adapts when a difficult afternoon makes rest impossible. September 1 becomes a study in functional multiplicity, consequential listening, and a new understanding of stability: when something happens, the family remains.
You Are Not the One
Yesterday was input. Today is processing. For a plural family/system, moving forward means more than making a plan—it means making sure everyone has been heard. As we begin imagining the next twenty years of our shared life, perhaps the most important question is also the simplest: Who haven’t we heard from yet?
