It is natural, as parents, to focus on caring for our children. We find ourselves so focused on our loved ones that we often fail to do things for ourselves. It’s starts from the first day we bring them home from the hospital. We learn to function without sleep, skip meals, watch kids movies instead of… [Read More]

Hope Have you ever made a promise, you feared you couldn’t keep? On the last night at the community hospital, prior to being transferred to the Brain Tumor Research Center at UCSF, Brittany’s mood had naturally sunk. She had been abruptly told she had a fatal tumor as the doctor exited the room. I watched… [Read More]

This morning, I went through a shelf of old tennis shoes and hiking boots in our garage. There was a moment when I stopped, heart thumping and clutched a pair to my heart. Who knew a pair of shoes could conjure up such emotion? In my mind, I understand that they are simply rubber and… [Read More]

Mommies can fix things. At the age of 4, Brittany spent one morning watching me attempt to dig around our broken sprinkler with a trowel. We had just settled into our new home and I was determined to make life seem much like it had before the divorce. “We need Daddy,” she said, her little… [Read More]

A mother’s job is to fix things. Some things cannot be fixed. That was a difficult reality to wrap my brain around. As a mother, my job was to protect my child. My job was to help her. My job was to ease her pain. My job was to do what was needed. My job… [Read More]

Scanxiety: The fear that you experience before, during, or after a scan that might or might not provide life altering results. In the Beginning In the beginning, the doctors confused me. When they talked about my daughter’s brain, they used words like “shadow” on the brain or “lesion” on the brain. In my denial, these… [Read More]