Menopausal Mommy

I'm still here. It's been a while. I've felt a bit stuck. I've been writing songs, sending my book query/proposal out to agents. A whole lotta silence out there, but I believe in Menopausal Mommy: A Symphony In Four Trimesters (even if the working title reads a bit bougie). Not gonna lie. This has been…

My son brought me flowers this morning. He is three and knows most of the alphabet song ("m-el-o-p"). He can sing along with me to "Moon River" and will sing "It's raining it's pouring..." 10 times in a row in the back of the car. He sings on pitch, which doesn't surprise me, coming from…

"Write one good sentence," wrote Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast. I'm reading this book now as I lay on the white sandy beach of the Carribean sea. I came here for a week on the prodding of a friend, also a non-drinker, who needed a break and knew I did too. She put it…

The event of bringing back from the dead. Ashes to ashes... It's a word I've always known but rarely took apart. Not to get all latin geeky on you (but I did take Latin in high school, mostly because my Mom nudged me, but I'll tell you, algebra has never served me in adulthood but…

March 16, 2018 Every March 15th, for the past 2 years, we do this ritual. We lay in bed and tell each other stories of this night, on that year. I'm sure we will do this the rest of our lives. My parents had driven down a few days before from Maryland. I had taken…

Today is my birthday. No big party. No candles. No friends to come over to celebrate. I'm in a quiet place, in a reflective state of mind. One friend came by with a gift and stayed a while. She's vaccinated and it was the first hug I've had in so long I can't remember. I…

I always joked that being a poet was just a step fiscally below being a folk singer, while I aspired secretly to really be a poet, as, although none of us make much money, to me, poets have always been heroines and heroes. Today, Amanda Gorman proved that poets have the power to truly change…

On Thanksgiving Eve, 2006, I flew alone to London, England for the second time in my life to play The 12 Bar Club. I never made it through Heathrow. I’d been to London twice before, once to play a show there at the 12 Bar. It was a tiny music club in the Soho district.  The…

Election Day. It's 4:15pm, Tuesday, November 3rd, and I'm sweating and shaking and, if I weren't sober, I'd be plugging down multiple bottles of wine. Instead, I'm scarfing all the leftover Halloween candy from our untouched plastic pumpkin stuffed with full-size candy bars. Incidentally, just 2 days ago in the calm before the storm, I…

I had a dream last night. I was hanging out at a larger party, like a weekend of parties, like a music conference, but in a smaller party, like in my house with Taylor Swift. Yep. That's right. And we were watching on TV a video she had just made of a song she wrote…