Filling Time: TwinLife Empty-Nesting

I do not have time for my email.

January 27, 2026

I’m at my computer at 10:00 at night, sifting through my personal email. Basically this involves deleting “promotions, social, updates, and forums” while managing whatever came into the “primary” tab on my gmail. I appreciate that Google sorts them. I know that I could enable an AI agent to help me do the sifting. But overall, contemplating it all completely overwhelms me.

I do not have time to keep up with my personal email.

This week, I’m asking why.

My kids are both back at school, so I should have plenty of time. And if you looked at the clock, I probably do. I’ve been pretty good about keeping my work days (including at least one weekend day) limited to a just-more-than 8 hour day (usually without a break) but less than a ridiculous-amount-of-time, but this was the first week of the semester. And as any teacher knows, the first week is… exhausting. Actually, the first three weeks are exhausting. Your body needs to get a rhythm before it settles in, and getting into that groove takes time.

Additionally, I am teaching adolescents for the first time in… a VERY long time. It’s a different kind of energy required. I have to say that it’s an energizing kind of experience – much more so than dealing with accreditors and state requirements, which has been my life for nearly a decade – and after two days, I already love my students and working with them. BUT, it’s a different rhythm. And my body feels it.

This makes filling my time meaningfully outside of work a bit difficult since all I want to do is lay on the couch and play games on my phone, which is exactly what I did during the snowstorm this weekend. My ScreenTime average is going to be through the roof.

I was intending this week to write about my homeowner issues. I spent time finishing baseboard molding to replace what was ruined by our water damage. I intended to write about how I learned to add a coat of wood conditioner before I stained and to sand between coats of poly from my years of watching my parents restore a 150-year-old farmhouse and my dad’s patience teaching me as we remodeled my basement in my first home. I figured I could tell stories about the fort that my dad built with my kids in our backyard during Covid. I could even slip in the trips with the Appalachia Service Project and how I installed baseboards using all the tricks I knew from my past.

Then, just this weekend, I found water near our basement ejector pump, and I spent time diagnosing and solving this problem. As I got out the screwdriver to tighten couplings to see if I could get the water to stop spewing like Niagara Falls, I thought to myself, “Yes, I need to write about home ownership this week.” Given that we also had to have our furnace replaced this week, I felt like I had my theme.

But I know that home repair and remodeling is not how I actually want to spend my free time. It’s just what I had to do this week. I watched my parents do it for most of their lives during their free time, and I appreciate what they did. But it’s not my thing.

So rather than the myriad of home-life things that actually did take my time, I’m contemplating my need to take a break from work and relax on a snow day. I didn’t have kids at home to frolic in the snow – also not my thing – so I just crashed on the couch, listening to podcasts and playing on my phone.

Content to know I have some skills to contribute to a renovation, if ever needed.
What Parenting, Teaching, and Purring Cats Taught Me This Week about Reframing

January 20, 2026

College students, it turns out, are not all that different from babies. They sleep. They eat. They play. Seeing my kids fall into that pattern over their semester break reminded me of early TwinLife, before things got activity-busy. My kids’ lives were organized around very basic needs; my husband and I had to adjust to their rhythms.

The difference this time (aside from the fact I didn’t have to change any diapers) was that I was not the rule maker. Rather, I had stepped fully into the role of mentor – watching, listening, sometimes nudging, but mostly trusting them to create their own rules and make their own decisions. That shift has been happening gradually over the past year, accelerating after graduation, and becoming unmistakably real when they went off to college. People have told me that it can be tense when the kids come home – they want the freedom they have had in the dorms yet parents expect them to follow the rules of the house. Over this first semester break, I tried really hard to minimize the tension, choosing to see my kids as emerging adults who needed a mentor more than a task master.

Mentoring was on my mind quite a bit last week as I prepared for the semester. I spent much of the week designing and testing an AI agent—an Ikigai coach to help students think through their sense of purpose: what they’re good at, what they love, how they can contribute to the world, and how they might make a living doing so. Part of my task in designing the new college at my university is to rethink the role of a faculty member. If knowledge can be accessed anytime, anyplace, then the proverbial “sage,” a faculty member who is an expert in a particular (slice of a) discipline, is not as important as a guide who can help students curate the knowledge and skills they need to reach their goals in life. The role feels far less like designing traditional instruction and much more like mentoring—helping students design their own pathways rather than handing them a predetermined one.

As part of preparing for the semester, I was also getting a physical space ready for the first cohort of students in the new college. The small building had previously been used as administrative office space. It had been emptied, but not yet transformed into a learning environment. My students and I will be tackling the design of the space together, but in an effort to spend some meaningful time with my daughter before she headed back to school, I asked her to go to the thrift store.

As we walked in, joking and bantering, she asked, “So what are we shopping for?” I hadn’t fully articulated it until that moment. “I’m looking for things to inspire the design of my new space at the college,” I said. “Let’s see what speaks to us.”

Almost immediately, I spotted a monkey jar. We both loved it. Seriously, we were cooing over its cuteness. We wandered the store, but I kept circling back to that jar, imagining it filled with candy. It was playful; it had character; it was an invitation to think a little differently, to be a little different. Then my daughter noticed a sign sitting high on a shelf that simply read: THINK. She said, “This feels like the space you and your students are going to create.” She was right.

Before we left, I found a coffee urn. I make a lot of coffee for gatherings and events, and it felt practical and symbolic all at once. I walked out of the store with three things: a monkey jar, a sign that says THINK, and a coffee urn—the beginnings of a space designed not just for work, but for connection. I’m reframing my learning space as one of connections, where my team of learners can show up as they are and chart their own paths.

This is a complete reframing of how traditional college courses operate. While many faculty invite their students to connect and to think, the overwhelming majority of the work is driven by syllabus expectations, not by the students’ passions, interests, and personal life goals. Reframing puts students truly at the center – and I’m hoping they take my invitation to monkey around a bit on our path of learning to think.

I had some more quality time with my daughter as I drove her back to school, stopping at my parents’ house to visit along the way. While we were chatting, their cat was sleeping nearby, purring so loudly it filled the room. I commented that since it was asleep, it wasn’t really purring; it was snoring. We joked that human snoring wasn’t as tolerable, and I suggested that maybe if I reframed my husband’s snoring as purring, I would find it more tolerable. The irony, of course, is that my husband hates cats, so we had a good laugh–which woke up the cat!

The idea stuck with me through the weekend–not seeing my husband as purring (though I still find it hilarious) but of reframing what we know so that we can imagine a different experience or future. Perhaps this is why it was a little easier this time to step back into the empty nest as both my children headed back to college. Reframing my “kids” as “adults” helps our relationship grow into the next phase and makes it easier to let them go each time they take another step down their own path. There’s a lot of reframing happening in my life right now. And I’m excited to see where my path is headed.
Skiers for Life

January 13, 2026

When my husband was about 6 years old, his parents purchased a small vacation home on a lake in Vermont. Because my mother-in-law won a motor boat by getting the secret square on Hollywood Squares (that’s a fun story!), my husband started water skiing when he was young. More importantly, because the house was just a mile or so from a ski mountain, he also started snow skiing before he started most of the sports that dominated his athletic life. To this day, I am awed when I watch him ski.

My husband and I bonded over the fact we were both athletes. He was an all-state soccer player. I was a female who played on the boys’ team because my high school didn’t have girls’ soccer. He was a varsity tennis player. I was all-conference first-team in basketball. We both understood what it took to be an athlete.

But there is something about skiing that is not innate to someone who first hitches skis to their feet when they are an adult. It’s harder to learn when your center of gravity is not close to the ground, I think.

My husband and I started dating our freshman year in college, and at spring break that year he asked me to go to his family’s Vermont house to ski. I was young and in love and somewhat athletic, so of course, I said, “I’d love to!” My experience with skiing to that point had been a few trips around our family farm on cross-country skis, which included a short, 4.75% grade down our “back hill” (totally making up the slope in order to get my dad to comment on this post) and a single trip to a small hill in the Poconos on downhill skis when I was either in middle or high school. I literally don’t remember much about it other than what I needed to do in order to survive. The answer was “pizza.” I could do that. In my experience, all I knew about skiing was that going down a hill wasn’t all that difficult for this varsity athlete.

However, I had never actually been on a real ski mountain. It was a new challenge, to say the least.

After that first trip, I knew I had fallen in love with a boy who (1) taught me to ski by taking me up the first lift and then, literally, pushing me down the mountain, and then (2) patiently skied with me the rest of the day. I’m pretty sure he knew at the end of the day that he had fallen in love with the girl who survived it.

Over the last three decades (plus!), he has taught me to ski – both on water and on land – but it wasn’t easy for me, and to this day, I am the worst in my family. But I’m okay with last place because it means we gave the gift of skiing to our children. Even though it was hard to get to Vermont with our work schedules and our kids’ activities, I knew it was important that they have the same opportunity their dad did. Learning to ski as a child — just like any other talent – is much easier than learning as an adult. The pain just doesn’t hit you in the same way, so the fear just doesn’t grow. Starting as a child was a gift I could give to them, and I made sure it happened.

While my kids were learning to ski, I was getting better. From that pizza-gate moment when my husband pushed me down the hill to my adult life, I have skied an average of 1-2 times per year, and I have developed competence (if not love for) black diamonds in Vermont. I did not, however, love the “not groomed” trails at the ski mountain last week when we took our family vacation to the resort where my kids had been skiing since they were in pre-school. My husband has skillz. My kids have no fear. I, on the other hand, should never listen to their assurances that I could absolutely handle the “very short” cut-off trail that was marked “ungroomed.”

After getting my ski stuck in a tree branch that had fallen across the path and then sliding backward, out of control, down the icy trail until I stopped screaming (swearing) at my son to get out of my way, I looked to the beautiful, Vermont sky and said a small thanks that my children had learned to ski when they were young, not an adult. I also praised the time I got to spend with them on the mountain.

Later that day, I was sitting in the outdoor hot tub next to an 86-year-old man who had competed in a downhill race as part of the “70+ Ski Club” and who was traveling to France next month to ski more challenging terrain. The hotel was filled with 70+ skiers (plus the 65-year-old we met at the bar and told us she had a fake ID to get into the group), who traveled the world to ski together. I thought to myself, “Why would anyone want to do this to their bodies when they are older than I am right now? Why am I even doing this now?” But as I listened to that man talk about his life of skiing, his military service, and most of all, his kids and grandkids, I understood why I was there. I was celebrating the gift my husband and I had given our kids.

I spent my time this last week reflecting on my past, congratulating my parenting, and wondering about my future. I know I won’t be joining the 70+ ski club, but the community they have created around a common love makes me wonder how I can better fill my time.
Doing All the Things–But Mostly Work

January 6, 2026

When I work alone, it takes two hours to deconstruct my house of Christmas decorations. This is always how I spend my time on New Year’s Day. It was not how I spent the bulk of my time last week, however.

Though most people assume that professors get lots of time off–summer, fall, winter, and spring break–I have never really had that time off. For the first part of my professor career, when I was raising young twins, I spent every break either taking care of my kids or writing toward tenure. After tenure, I took on more administrative responsibility, so even though my kids were more self-sufficient, I still spent time writing or administrating. Since taking over as administrative leader for a 1-year graduate program nearly nine years ago, I haven’t really had time to take a break. Even when my colleagues are “on break,” I am not. The only week I have any time away from email and the challenges of work is between Christmas and New Year’s.

But last year I had to write an accreditation report. I had hoped to have it done by the end of the semester, but the world had different plans for me, and I spent the only week that I actually get a vacation each year writing that report. Because I have been giving a lot to work over the last decade, I was determined to take my “only” week this year. But, again, the world had different plans.

In several recent posts I have hinted that something big happened at work. Here’s the big blog reveal. My university has been taking a hard look at what we do as a higher education institution. We know that the world is changing, and higher ed (all of ed) is slow to catch up. We also know that more and more teens are electing not to attend college after high school. And more foundationally, we know that higher ed is just not accessible to many people.

When we look at these truths in the mirror, we know that the system needs to change, and I have been working with my colleagues over the last year to imagine what that change might be. This fall, our Board of Trustees approved the creation of a new school at our university–one that would be focused on reimagining higher education. I have been asked to lead it.

As a career educator who has been arguing for over two decades that schools need to change in fundamental ways, the challenge of building a school from the ground up is also an incredible opportunity. As someone who started this blog with the commitment not to fill her time as an empty-nester with work… well, that’s going to be a challenge for me to tackle in 2026.

I spent the last week of 2025 working with the hopes that 2026 will bring something great to my professional life. But I also spent it cleaning out closets, taking down holiday ornaments (and sweeping up tree needles), setting up a home office for my husband (who has been using our dining room since Covid), dealing with unexpected water damage, and cherishing every minute my kids spent in the house. In hindsight, I had a pretty full week! Because my kiddos were so busy connecting with friends over break, I didn’t have to feel too guilty about putting so much into work last week. As I move into the new year, I want to be intentional about “saying yes” to opportunities to fill time that do not involve my new–and exciting–role at work.
A Different Kind of Christmas

December 30, 2025

This was a different kind of Christmas. Something had fundamentally shifted. It wasn’t just that we changed the traditions, though that’s where the story starts.

For as long as my kids have been alive, Christmas has happened at our house. My brother usually comes back to the East Coast, and because he’s home—and because I made the same commitment to my children that my mom made to hers—we never traveled on Christmas day. Anyone who wanted to come to our house was welcome, but we stayed put, allowing Christmas magic to reside in TwinLife. Because we were the only ones with grandchildren on either side, everyone congregated at our house. Ten people around the Christmas dinner table. My brother and I in the kitchen. The kids spending time with their grandparents. Year after year.

This year, though, my brother couldn’t make it due to scheduling complications. It was going to leave a big hole in our tradition. As I wrote in another post, I hosted Thanksgiving for the first time, which meant I poured a lot of energy into that holiday. At the same time, I was finishing the semester and launching a new job (I promise I will write that post very soon!). As I faced another holiday that would already be different without my brother, I decided that the best thing I could do was not host Christmas. In addition to giving me time off in the kitchen, if we travelled, I could give each set of grandparents uninterrupted time with the kids. However, I wanted to stay true to TwinLife tradition and wake up on Christmas morning in our home.

So I set the plan in motion.

Last week was full of travel! First we went to my parents’ house, an old farmhouse they’ve lovingly restored over the past (almost) fifty years. My mom decorates for Christmas meticulously. Almost every decoration comes down and is replaced with something holiday-specific. It’s a beautiful, intentional space to be in during the holiday season, and in honor of her past commitment to her own kids to always be home at Christmas, I wanted to wake up at the farm on Christmas Eve. After a white-knuckling drive through a snowstorm, we made it to their house, enjoyed an early Christmas dinner (not cooked by me!) and exchanged presents. We woke up on the 24th to my dad’s roaring fire in the kitchen hearth, and headed home later in the day, ready to celebrate Christmas day as a family of four.

The plan was to stay home all day, hanging out together, watching Stranger Things and football. I was even going to make lasagna for dinner – not something we usually eat on Christmas but a dish that requires much love for my family for me to prepare, a fitting choice for a family-oriented holiday. We were then headed to my in-laws on the 26th for breakfast (also not prepared by me!). However, on the drive back from my parents’, I checked the weather app, and I noticed a snowstorm loomed for the day after Christmas. Because my daughter’s work schedule ramped up starting the 27th, we realized we wouldn’t be able to see my in-laws at all if we stuck to the plan.

So we shifted gears and for the first time in my kids’ lives, we drove somewhere else on Christmas day.

After the kids pulled their teenage selves out of bed, opened presents, and ate french toast (yes, I did cook something on Christmas) and drank our traditional hot mulled apple cider, we hopped in the car and drove to my in-laws’ house. Because they hadn’t planned on us being with them for Christmas dinner, my father-in-law, who was in charge of the meal, decided to combine the small ham they had planned for them with the sausage and eggs they were going to make for us for breakfast. We had a “Committed Pig” protein-packed dinner. There wasn’t a vegetable in sight (unless you count the unbaked potato we decided not to bake)! It was absolutely perfect–mostly because I wasn’t in charge. For the first time in a long time, I got to experience Christmas outside of the kitchen.

What truly made this year different, though, wasn’t where we were or what we ate. It was the time with my kids. I asked them how they felt about splitting the grandparents and not having our “normal” Christmas. They paused. I could tell it felt different to them. It felt different to me. It’s a tradition, and traditions matter. But they also understood that this was the right move in a transitional year, as they enter into adulthood.

“Yeah,” they said. “It’s okay. New traditions.”

And in that moment—and in the way we moved through those days—I realized something. My kids are adults now.

Even last year, when they were seniors in high school, Christmas still carried that familiar childhood energy: surprises, anticipation, the magic of not knowing what was under the tree. This year, all four of us had essentially picked out our own gifts. There weren’t many surprises, and nobody missed them. My kids’ stockings were filled with practical things they needed in their dorm rooms–deoderant, immunity booster, lip balm. The social media meme about the difference between opening socks as a kid and as an adult rang true. My son was genuinely excited to get the socks and sweatpants he had picked out.

The shift from childhood to adulthood was palpable. The new traditions made it visible, but it was the underlying change—the way we filled the time, the way we made decisions together, the way joy showed up differently—that made this Christmas feel fundamentally different.

And, in its own quiet way, just right.

We were back in our own home before bedtime on Christmas day, and we spent the next day filling time individually. I did end up cooking the lasagna that night. Normally I would sneak some spinach into it, but because I hadn’t gone to the grocery store to prepare to host Christmas and our CSA had ended the week before, there was no green to hide among the cheese. We didn’t have vegetables. Just layers of pasta, sauce, and cheese.

My husband said it was a particularly delicious lasagna.

And that compliment felt like the perfect closing note to this different kind of Christmas.
Time Collapsed

December 23, 2025

“Where is it?” I muttered to myself as I looked around the attic, mentally checking each pile of boxes. I had uncovered my teaching files, the kids’ early pictures, Tae Kwon Do trophies, and even my wedding basket. But the one box I wanted wasn’t appearing in my visual scan.

I knew it was there. I had looked at the pictures briefly when I had cleaned out the photo closet in our guest room during Covid. I had added them to my “teaching memories” box in the attic. I only had a few minutes to find the box before I had to change out of my “cookie party” outfit and into something more suitable for a 20th reunion.

I had started my day baking “crack,” what my friends and I jokingly have named pretzel bark. Most people at the annual cookie exchange agree that it is addicting, and typically, as soon as I walk in the door, someone asks, “Did you make crack?” I always do. This year I baked two trays, determined to bring home enough to satisfy my cravings while also giving everyone else a chance to take their fill.

Then I went to the party, decked out in my rainbow tree Christmas shirt. My husband, who thought I was going to wear an ugly sweater to the party, remarked “That’s not an ugly sweater. That’s a cute shirt!” I enjoyed the compliment, smiling as I headed out the door.

After some easy conversation with the cookie ladies, I headed back home, knowing I had just an hour to change for the 20th reunion of one of the first classes at a magnet school where I was one of the founding teachers. It was a school focused on STEM, and I ran the humanities program, combining English and social studies into a team-taught course. I taught this group of students their freshman and sophomore years, which meant I knew them well. It was a small cohort, but we had big conversations. It’s the kind of teaching experience that stays with an educator.

The reunion almost didn’t happen. Months earlier, while my son was navigating his own college process, I reached out to one of these former students who had attended a school my son was considering. At the end of the conversation, my thoughts drifted to 20 years ago, and I asked, “Remember the time capsule your class made freshman year that you were supposed to open at your 20th reunion? Shouldn’t that be this year?”

That question, it turns out, planted a seed.

This former student—who is no longer particularly young, who has children of his own, and who is now a university professor—nudged his classmates. Messages were sent. Plans were made. A reunion took shape. A few teachers were invited, and I was honored to be one of them.

I was excited to see them, even though it was my second social event of the day. As an introvert, I had to dig deep to face the social inputs. I knew that bringing the old pictures would give us something to talk about, a way to ignite easy conversation. I was frustrated that I couldn’t uncover them. As I scanned the attic – and sifted through the rollerdeck in my memory – my eyes landed on the back corner. A tickle in my brain told me that there was a good chance the box was back there. I started digging, and squealed with glee when I finally uncovered it, clearly labeled “Teaching Memories.” I hauled it down from the crawlspace and realized that the box contained so much more than the pictures. There were several artifacts that would inspire conversation and unlock memories.

Having spent so much time unearthing the box, I didn’t have a lot of time to change, so I was pleased when, for the second time that day, my husband complimented my outfit as I walked out the door. When I got to the restaurant, I immediately bumped into one of my former colleagues in the parking lot, followed immediately with greetings for the first of the students I would see that night. Everyone looked the same in my mind’s eye. We hugged, we laughed, we shared stories prompted by scenes in the pictures and artifacts I had scattered across the tables.

Ultimately, we didn’t have a time capsule to open, but we filled time sharing memories and life updates. There is something profoundly grounding about seeing former students as adults, not as the people they were, but as the people they became. It reminds you that the work you did mattered in ways you couldn’t see then and that the relationships you formed didn’t end when the class did. In some ways, time collapsed, and 20 years both existed and was erased as we reconnected, reflected, and shared time together.
15,000 Steps of Volunteering

December 16, 2025

I was moving Christmas trees to be loaded onto a delivery truck when my phone rang. “We decided to head to my parents,” my husband said. My heart did a little flip-flop because I knew that I would not be able to say a proper goodbye to my son, who was heading back to college to take a final exam.

He and his sister had come home after classes were finished since neither had exams scheduled until the end of finals period. Between his social schedule and my schedule, we had barely seen each other since I had picked him up at the train station and spent an hour in the car debriefing the end of the semester.

His train to go back to school was scheduled to leave at 7:55 Sunday morning, and Saturday we realized that a snowstorm was likely going to hit the area. My husband’s parents live much closer to the train so I suggested that they head there Saturday night. Because I was volunteering for the local Festival of Trees, a large fundraiser for the Senior Resource Center in our town, getting to the train station was on my husband.

“I think that’s a good idea,” I responded, glad I had hugged my boy as I left the house earlier.

It was, in fact, a good idea. Sunday morning I woke early to over 6 inches of snow. Though my son would be able to get to the train station, I was left facing the challenge of getting to my volunteer responsibilities without our SUV, which was with my husband and son.

I have been volunteering for the Festival of Trees for 15 years. I started decorating trees with my mom after attending the event when my children were little. As a decorator, I focused entirely on the trees we were making, paying little attention to the effort being put in behind the scenes to make the fundraiser happen each year. My job was to prepare my trees, and if any did not sell, to show up on breakdown day to undecorate the ones we created. With young twins at home, I didn’t have much more time that I could devote to the process. I would sneak in, pack up my decorations, and sneak out as quickly as possible.

But as my kids became more independent, I started to notice all of the work that other people were doing on breakdown day. As the seniors in charge of the event struggled to carry tables, platforms, and boxes to the moving truck, which would take everything from the event location to the storage location, I started to help. In talking to one of the committee members, I learned that they really did not have a lot of people working to plan the event and that the back-breaking labor of setup and breakdown was – quite literally – breaking them.

So I joined the committee. My primary role was to recruit and organize teen volunteers to help with the manual labor, but I quickly realized that I could also help the committee to digitize and centralize its operations. My kids and mom joined me in volunteering more of our time to the event, and over the last few years, we have been able to streamline and improve the process of setup and breakdown.

With the kids going to college this year, I not only lost my two best helpers, but I also lost some of the time I could give to the committee and the process, as parenting college students has proven to be a time filler I was not necessarily expecting! However, this year I still organized teens to help, and I was scheduled to run the breakdown day – now blanketed by snow.

As I stared at the white blanket outside my window, I made the decision to delay the start of breakdown day, giving teen families and myself time to dig out. And then I sighed heavily because dealing with our long, hilly driveway in the snow has always been my husband’s job. In the 18 winters we have lived in our house, I’ve only started the snowblower twice.

Luckily, my hubby gave great instructions over the phone, and the machine started on the first pull! Unfortunately, the snow was so wet and heavy that the snowblower packed itself up and started to overheat before I finished.

Figuring I go to the gym six days a week for this exact purpose (this is not why I go to the gym), I abandoned the snowblower with its mechanical stench and stomped through the snow to the shed to find the shovels. About an hour later, I had dug out the car and cleared a path to the street – which still hadn’t been plowed. Yes, I beat DPW to the finish line!

About an hour after that, my husband arrived home with the SUV at the same time the plow came through our street. Off to the Festival of Trees breakdown I went. 15,000 steps later (not counting my work on the driveway), the hall was clear, and I was bone tired. My body ached from 8 hours of physical labor, and my muscles screamed at me. I capped off the night with an epsom salt bath and glass of wine, the satisfaction of filling time by testing my physical limits and supporting a great cause sending me to bed before 8PM.
Putting the Crib in the Attic

December 10, 2025

When my daughter was home at Thanksgiving, she told me that she didn’t fit in her bed anymore. I was surprised because I thought she had already stopped growing (taller) even though I knew at the same time that she had grown so much since she had gone to college. It was a moment of mental paradox.

What made me wobble even more, however, was the fact I needed to get her a new bed. You see, I haven’t bought either of my kids a bed since they were born.

Having to buy two of everything made me both frugal and a future thinker. Back then I told my husband we needed to spend just a bit more on the convertible cribs in order to get the most use out of the furniture. Cribs became toddler beds, which turned into full beds. Both kids slept in their full-sized beds until my son jumped too hard and broke his. After spending a few months sleeping on the mattress on the floor, he decided he liked that layout, so I never bought him a new frame.

But the Black Friday sales called to me, and I quickly decided to make my daughter’s home sleeping arrangements as comfortable as I could. I mean, after all, shouldn’t she love sleeping at home more than in her dorm?

The box arrived, and I was surprised at how small it was. How could a bed fit in there? Then, I opened it, outwardly groaning as I saw how many pieces there were. It was Sunday evening, and I had been away for the weekend, visiting with my parents and watching my daughter dance. It had been a long week at work (more on that to come in a future post!). Needless to say, by the time Sunday evening rolled around, all I wanted to do was take a bath and watch TV. But instead, I faced the challenge of creating a new bed for my grownup daughter.

When she got home from college yesterday, I asked her to help me move the pieces of her old bed to the attic. “Why are you keeping it?” she asked. She thought I should just donate it since she clearly wasn’t going to need it anymore. I made a joke about needing a crib if she ever had a baby and a more serious quip about the fact that the bed matched the dressers she was still using. But what I really meant, and didn’t say, was that I wasn’t ready, just quite yet, to let my own baby go. So we put the crib in the attic, where it will fill time until I’m ready.
Permission Not to Have Thanksgiving

December 3, 2025

November was a full month. Between visiting my kids at their respective colleges and my professional commitments, I had little time to fill. In fact, this year I backed off of some volunteer commitments that normally fill my time Thanksgiving weekend simply because I knew I could not physically (nor mentally) handle them.

I also gave myself permission not to have Thanksgiving.

For most of my adult life, Thanksgiving has been a holiday that has not consumed my time and energy in terms of planning and execution. I attend a professional conference the weekend before the holiday, where I typically present multiple sessions and participate in many meetings. The four days of the conference are long ones, and by the time I get home late Sunday night or sometime on Monday, I’m beat. Since my students also need my attention, especially after having been away from campus for a few days, the short week before Thanksgiving is filled with professional obligations. I have never had the capacity to plan a meal or to host family. On Thanksgiving, we travelled to others who took care of the prep work.

This year, however, my kids would be home for only a few days, and they wanted to be in their own beds with opportunities to see their hometown friends. Of course, they also wanted to see their grandparents, who are important influences in their lives.

I struggled with what to do. How could I maintain my sanity – and quite frankly, my physical health – if I did what I said I would never do and host everyone on Thanksgiving? How could I give everyone what they wanted and still relish in the short time I had with both kids in the house?

The tension between “mom who gives” and “mom who needs” was palpable as I went back and forth in my head about what to do. And then I let it all go and gave myself permission not to have Thanksgiving. Instead, I’d take that day off completely – no work and no family responsibilities and absolutely no kitchen prep – and come up with another way to bring people together.

Common politeness in American society requires people to ask, “How was your Thanksgiving?” And with each time I was asked, I was able to answer completely honestly, “It was great. I did absolutely nothing!” In reality, my daughter and I went to see Wicked: For Good while my son and husband watched Stranger Things. We ate whatever each of us found in the fridge or freezer and just turned our brains off for the day. Both kids needed it. My husband and I needed it. And we were thankful for the low-key holiday.

Of course, the next morning we were out of the house at 8:15 to head to the Christmas tree farm for our annual family adventure, and I spent the day prepping for the Friendsgiving we planned for Saturday that would bring some of the kids’ close friends, some of my husband’s and my sideline parent crew, and all the grandparents together to celebrate the season. By then, I had the energy to prep. And it was good to fill time with my kids in the house, celebrating the start of the holiday season.
Overcoming Exhaustion

November 25, 2025
November is always a full month, and this year was particularly busy. I spent the first weekend with my son, the second weekend with my daughter, and this past weekend with my professional family at a conference in Denver. I’m currently reflecting on my last week from a hotel room in Virginia, where I’m waiting to drive my son home for Thanksgiving.

I’m tired.

I was tired even before I got on the plane to Denver last Wednesday. I’ve had a lot going on at work that required a lot of time, and I was facing six presentations ahead of me at the conference. Prepping for them had also required time, so I had basically filled most of my time in November outside of my weekend trips with work – something I have been trying not to do in my empty-nesting life.

But last Wednesday was a travel day, and I committed to myself that after I cleared out my email and spent a few hours collating my professional notes from the past few weeks, I would enjoy the day as much as possible, focusing on the little moments more than on the jobs to be done.

Here are some of those moments:
- Brittany, our flight purser, clearly loved her job. She used the cabin phone like a microphone, her hands as emotional magic wands, and her voice as a mood lifter. Her partner Takako was Robin to her Batman. It was one of the most enjoyable flight experiences I’ve had, even though I spent most of the flight collating those notes!
- The weather in Denver was lovely when I landed, and the rooftop bar at my hotel presented me with a view that made me smile.
- I had one of the best drinks I’ve ever had as I chatted with a friend on that rooftop. I liked it so much that I went back later in the weekend with a different friend and had it again.
- I met up with some extended family members who are definitely “my people.”
- My friends and I stepped out of the conference and into a Bluegrass jam session that was inspiring.
- I wandered the city with a former student and again with friends I typically only see once a year – at this conference – yet somehow they are family. Denver was decorated for Christmas, and it was magical.
- While waiting for my plane home, I met Graeme (pronounced Graham), a precocious five-year-old who definitely knows how to spell his name. He and I became buddies pretty quickly, which gave his mom a short breather. It felt good to give her that peace, and I thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with Graeme.
I got home around midnight on Sunday and then left yesterday morning with my daughter on a road trip to pick up my son, closing out nearly a week of small moments that helped fill my time within an otherwise professionally dominated space. And now I can relish in the time I will have with my kiddos for a few days. I don’t feel quite so tired today. The infusion of TwinLife is just what I needed.

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