A seven-year-old goes quiet. Daddy realizes that love has accidentally become a burden. A day of memories, friendship, repair, and the unseen work of a plural family becomes a lesson in what it means to let a child be seven.
Tag Archives: Healing
It Smells Like Home
What is it like when an adult and eight children share a body, mind, inner world, memories, relationships, trauma, and an ordinary life? Sometimes the questions are enormous. Sometimes being Dad means admitting you need help. And sometimes it means chopping an onion and making dinner.
Your Children Are Your Life
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.”
If We Cried Today, It Was Over the Red Onion
A therapist said they couldn’t work with us, and fear rushed to fill the blank space. On Hope’s Day, we returned to a principle our family knows well: err on the side of life. We called our children by name, kept Daddy’s appointment with his sons, ate cucumber sandwiches, and let tomorrow’s Greek salad marinate.
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.”
The Cloud of Unknowing Has Bean and Cheese Quesadillas
On Han’s Day, we went looking for something profound from our ten-year-old spiritual animator. He wanted bean and cheese quesadillas. In the Cloud of Unknowing, we are learning to stop inhabiting painful places and frightening futures, to receive what is given without grasping for certainty—and to let a ten-year-old simply be ten.
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.
Nine Lives Here
Solis’s Day, a seven-year-old’s question—What are we supposed to be doing?—becomes a question about work, authority, safety, uncertainty and belonging. An almanac entry from a plural family learning that there are nine lives here, and practicing how to live like there are.
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.
