For most of our life, people have looked at the extraordinary things we could do and the ordinary things we could not do and asked, “If you can do that, why can’t you do this?” Today, a trip to the mailbox helped our plural family of nine begin asking a different question: Under what conditions can we act?
Tag Archives: Parenting
You Get to Be Seven
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.
More Daniel
Daniel has always been Daniel, whether anyone recognized him or not. As our five-year-old son learns to say no, express anger, and tell us what he wants, the rest of us are learning something too: how to create a family in which he never has to become loud in order to matter.
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.
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.
