Filling Time: TwinLife Empty-Nesting

A Year of FillingTime (with AI Thinking Partners)

August 26, 2026

The kids went back to school, and my husband and I drove over 1000 miles and climbed a lot of stairs last weekend. We returned to a quiet house.

But this week’s post is not going to be about that. Instead, it’s a time to stop and reflect on one year of FillingTime. To do that, I’m merging my personal and professional identities and bringing AI into the conversation. I will admit that I’ve been experimenting with AI throughout this year of FillingTime, just as I have in my professional life. I do not think I could have published weekly for a year without AI. Let me explain…

I started writing TwinLife: Having It All in order to work through my feelings, struggles, and celebrations during my life as a mother of twins who worked outside the home in a pretty demanding job. It was a way to stay engaged with my inner, personal writing self while I was pursuing tenure. I did not want to lose my voice while I was focused on publishing professionally.

But writing is hard, and my time and energy was limited as I focused on my job and my kids. So I only wrote on TwinLife when I had something to say. It became a space for me to emote when needed, not one I curated regularly.

This past year of writing FillingTime was different. I challenged myself to write weekly, and it forced me to look at my week (and reflect through my camera roll) on a regular basis. I needed to find something to say, which sometimes forced me to curate my empty time and sometimes left me wondering at the end of the week what was worth emoting.

There were weeks where I faced the blank screen and just wrote, posting nearly first draft pieces like I did when I was writing TwinLife. There were weeks when I didn’t have the focus, nor did I have the energy to write my way through it (as I do in my professional writing). In those moments, with my self-imposed deadline looming, I’d talk it out like I used to do with my mom when I was struggling to write – except now I used Voice Memo. Whether I was driving home from work, making dinner, or sitting in the hot tub, I could turn on the recorder and just talk through my week. Then with a click of a button or two, I could grab the transcript and drop it into AI.

AI would take my transcript, which came in a single, very long paragraph, and break it into a clean paragraph form that I could read and reflect on. If my thoughts had coherence, I copied the clean version of my spoken words and started editing. If I was a little all over the place, I used AI as a thinking partner to help me find a thread worth writing about.

Every once in a while, I asked AI to generate a full draft based on my initial input. I never used that draft. It was always crap and never really me. In fact, in one conversation with ChatGPT, where I tried repeatedly to get it to edit its output to be something I found acceptable, I told it that it was crap. It agreed with me and told me my blog was much stronger when I drafted. It was right.

I’ve had fun playing with AI through this writing process, and recently, I’ve been bringing multiple AI chatbots into conversation with each other. I ask one or more for feedback on my writing, and then I give the feedback to the other one to see what it says. I feel like I have my own personal writing group, and to be honest, it’s making my writing better.

All this to say, I’ve been writing for a year, and I thought it would be useful to pause this week and see how my writing partners thought I should start filling my time based on everything I have posted on FillingTime. AI is particularly good at thematic analysis, so I asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to analyze FillingTime.org. Importantly, I told them not to use any of the chat history in their analysis and to focus only on the blog itself. I asked for the output to include a description of the author and recommendations for how this person could fill their time.

Gemini’s response came quickest, but it was the most superficial. It didn’t teach me anything I hadn’t already considered. ChatGPT and Claude (which took the longest in its analysis) gave me different insights, some of them overlapping and some of them distinct. I used them as thinking partners, feeding them each other’s responses and asking them to incorporate ideas that could enhance their own analysis.

By the time I was done, I had a pretty clear picture of where I might go in this next year of FillingTime.

First, here is Claude’s final analysis.

I particularly liked the way Claude characterized my husband’s and my partnership of being “co-conspirator[s] on spontaneous adventures” and a “companionate team.” Like Chat, Claude thinks I should convene, create, and protect unscheduled time.

ChatGPT’s executive summary complements Claude’s more detailed report and gets to the heart of the recommendations for FillingTime.

In Chat’s first analysis, it said my time this past year led to this equation:

The purpose is important, I think.

One thing missing from both of the analyses is that I need to find my purpose for giving back. Volunteering has been a core part of my identity for as long as I can remember. Moving forward that purpose might be in convening women over 50 (Claude suggested I start a podcast!), but I’m not sure that’s it. During TwinLife, my life was full of volunteering. I did relatively little of it this year comparatively. I want to get back into the community and find a place, not tied to my kids, that can use my talents and skills.

As I continue to search for that right fit, I think my AI thinking partners are correct: I need to convene, create, and give myself permission to leave space empty. I’m already working on the plan to fill my time!
Bags in the Hallway

August 19, 2026

For the second time in six months, California wouldn’t let me leave. Both times I got stuck for an extra night because of weather on the East Coast, and last week, it meant that I did not have any time to recover before I went directly back to work. I should have been exhausted, but instead, I had an incredibly productive week – perhaps making up for the week when I had been sick.

Meetings. Planning. Writing. Decisions. I moved a lot of projects forward in a few short days.

And then I hit the weekend with the realization it was going to be the last one with both my kids at home for a very long time.

Of course, they weren’t really home. They were both consumed by fitting in as many things as possible before they left for school. Hours at work turned into evenings with friends, and whenever they could squeeze the time in, packing and cleaning their rooms.

I returned from California to find five garbage bags full of clothes and shoes and who knows what else from my daughter’s room to be donated. It was a proud mom moment, especially because a year ago when I wanted her to purge, she wasn’t ready.

Her effort made me realize that my workforce was about to disappear. Earlier in the summer, we had lost our every-other-week house cleaner, which is admittedly among the most first-world of first-world problems. But somewhere in the craziness of summer, a month had passed, and none of us had actually cleaned the house. I had decided to kick that can down the road, and the road had suddenly come to a dead end.

So while everyone else was out one night, I made a four-column-list and assigned each of us tasks to get the house cleaned before the kids moved back to college. I left the list on the table where everyone could find it, and I waited for the response. I knew they all knew how to clean – Covid had forced us into family-cleaning mode – but I also knew that everyone was busy.

Without going into the details of everyone’s reaction to their individual list, I’ll just say that it all got done. I personally spent a rainy Sunday tackling the kitchen (which I had assigned to myself because it’s the hardest job) and my other tasks while I contemplated the growing unease in my gut. I needed to stay busy so I didn’t focus on the fact it was the last weekend.

After finishing my downstairs tasks, I walked up the stairs and passed the five bags my daughter had left in the hallway. With my gut anxiety rising, I decided a closet purge might calm me. I was brutal in my decisions, and by the time I was done, I dumped two more bags onto the pile to be donated – one filled with bags I had collected over the years from my teaching conferences (teachers love bags!), and one filled with clothes I decided I would never pick to wear. I still liked some of these clothes, but I hadn’t worn them in over a year. I wanted a cleaner closet; I wanted someone else to have the option to choose these clothes.

So I purged things that had made it through the two purges I had already done in the past year.

By Sunday night, the kitchen was clean. My closet was cleaner. Five bags of my daughter’s plus two of mine were lined up in the hallway, waiting to leave the house just like my kids were. I was settled in bed, ready for the work week, when my husband walked into the room.

“He’s outside, building a ramp. It’s 10:00 at night, and he’s building a ramp with a chop saw. He’s going to be out there forever.”

I knew what my son was doing. He had spent the summer interning with a nonprofit that serves food to people in a nearby city, and the ramp was part of a project he wanted to complete in order to help the volunteers more easily move the food from storage to the distribution location. He identified and took on this project himself, and at 10:00 at night, with the end of summer bearing down on him, he was outside building it without the best tools to accomplish the task.

So I got out of bed, and I helped.

There was something reflective about working with him as he tried to finish a project at the last possible moment. The intensity was familiar to me, as I often butt up against deadlines. But the moment was different, as I was just the support mechanism, not the driver. This was his work. His commitment. His project. I was just there to hold the wood steady and offer another set of hands.

I went to bed before the ramp was finished, but he did finish it. And the next morning, as I walked downstairs to go to work, I passed all the bags in the hall. I knew that those bags would soon be replaced by the blue bags of college waiting to leave too.

I knew that soon the house would feel empty again.

Last year, I thought a lot about what I might be losing when they left. This year feels different. I know they are headed off to grow and to learn, and I look forward to meeting the different people who come back home. I also know that they do come back home, and they are never entirely gone.

This past week was about pushing forward, sorting through what belonged in the past, finishing what needed to be finished, and deciding what to take forward. And fortunately, in the process, my house got cleaned.

Despite the fact that we all had our own things going on this past week, we did spend one night together as a family, watching the sunset. This was the best way of FillingTime this last weekend together before summer ends.
Ten Miles in the California Sun

August 12, 2026

Despite the fact I’m East Coast bred, I was born on the West Coast. The six months that I spent there as a baby have somehow seeped into my soul, and perhaps this is why I love hot summer days and the sunshine on my face. I’ve always credited my blonde hair and blue eyes to the fact I was born in the proverbial California sun, and the fact I married a man whose family hails from the West Coast somehow seems metaphorically perfect. Even today, I have family that lives there, and so whenever I have the opportunity to cross into Pacific Time, I try to arrange my schedule for a visit.

I was invited to give a keynote at a conference in San Francisco this past weekend, and ironically, it marked the second time in six months that I put on my professional hat in San Fran before hopping a short flight to LA to engage in the tangent thinking that only my brother and I can do together. The entire trip actually fueled my professional brain, so the irony in the name of my hotel bar, “Study Hall”, was not lost on me. This trip to the California sun was not a vacation. I shared some of my latest thinking at the conference and then “beat it up” with my brother shortly thereafter.

Of course, it can’t all be about work, so I forced my bro to get out of the house, and we did an urban hike on Sunday. The rest of this narrative documents our hike, from the perspective of two kids who have hiked Mount Washington several times and who have spent many miles on the trail with our father.

The fact we had no idea that we were embarking on what would become a ten mile hike is a glimpse into how the two of us can just go with only a concept of a plan and then get lost in a story. In this case, the story occurred on two levels. One was at a professional level as he and I shared our current work situations. Peppering that more serious storytelling was our narrative that transformed the urban, West Coast scenery into a wilderness hike along an East Coast trail of our past. To our credit, the side questing was beautifully woven into the professional arc.

Here is the story of Our Ten Mile Day.

———————-

We started in the urban forest, where we quickly found the first blaze for the orange trail. Like on East Coast trails where you need to sometimes search for the blazes to keep you on track, this trail also made us work hard cognitively. It was actually pretty clearly marked as the orange trail, but the blaze markers changed depending on the section of trail we were on.

There were several water features along the trail, including a waterfall with local wildlife. Local wildlife was in abundance, though it does look a little different than the bears, snakes, and other living beings we have seen on our past hikes. For the most part, the wildlife was friendly – and colorful – and luckily the trail keepers made sure we were safe from the more aggressive beasts, which were in a migration pattern during our hike.

We refueled with some tea and coffee, exclaiming, as we always do, “Everything tastes better on the trail!” and then discovered that someone had not cinched their food bag tightly enough. What a mess! We were pretty sure the trail keepers were not going to be happy with those through hikers.

As we entered a particularly serene portion of the trail, we were greeted by the local trail keeper, who did not ask us to sign the hiker log. We did not think to bring our iodine tablets, so we decided not to refill our water bottle at the local watering hole nearby. Ultimately, the amount of water we had packed was just fine. Despite the hot weather, the terrain was relatively easy. Only in the last third of the hike did we encounter a steep grade that proved to be any kind of effort.

That being said, while we were traversing through the area dominated by the migrating wildlife, my hips started screaming at me. I asked my brother, “How many miles have we done?”

Looking at his watch, then realizing (1) it was in kilometers, and (2) he had reset it when we had taken a side quest, following the double blaze into the jungle of Target, he simply said, “I don’t know. Maybe 5?”

I immediately questioned my hiking prowess because I thought it was closer to ten. But he had the watch. And he is the one who thinks in km, so I trusted his quick math but replied, in homage to all the younger generations, “I think it’s probably 6 or 7.”

Ultimately, we made it back to his place, both of us complaining about our middle-aged bodies and wondering how 6 or 7 miles of relatively flat terrain could hurt so much. After he looked up the actual route we had taken, he let out a yelp. “It was 10!” I knew it. My hips didn’t lie.

He went for a nap, and I went to the local swimming hole to rest.

Our ten mile urban hike was a good way to fill time. In fact, it made time go quickly. As we chatted about our present and future, we connected to our past. It was almost like we were in the mountains.
Getting Caught in the Rain

August 5, 2026

I spent most of last week fighting sickness. I crashed on Tuesday, missing the gym and most of the work day while languishing in bed or on the couch. My respite gave me enough power to be back at it on Wednesday with just a nap in the afternoon. I’ve been enjoying the golden hour solo lately with my kids off working or friending and my hubby dealing with his long commute. Like most days when I’m alone, I went for a walk under the sun. I didn’t check the weather. I simply said bye to my daughter, who was getting ready to leave herself, and walked out the door and down the street on my typical 5,000 step route. My body needed the activity.

The route takes me through our small neighborhood and then across the road up into a field. The farmer swaps out corn for pumpkins each year, and this year it is corn, and the stalks have grown high in the last month. They tower over me. Always aware of bears and deer and foxes, which can dart out of the crop without warning, I was happily listening to my podcasts as I hiked the small hill through the field, oblivious to the darkening sky.

And then the air shifted. The prickle of wind and drop in barometric pressure that signals a storm is coming was palpable. I was near the top of the hill and picked up my pace to make the turn to head home before I got caught in the storm that was brewing. I was a little more than a half mile from home at that point.

My problem solving brain ticked off my options: (1) call to see if my daughter had left yet and if she could pick me up; (2) run; (3) walk faster and pray.

Since I knew my daughter had already left, and I hate to run, I chose 3. It didn’t work. I made it to the bottom of the hill and crossed the road into our neighborhood when the downpour came. Then I started to run.

There’s something freeing about running to shelter in the rain. As the water pelted my face and soaked my clothes, I embraced the joy in it. It felt surprisingly good. Not the running part, of course, because I definitely hate running, but the getting caught in the rain.

After I had a good laugh at myself, I took a hot shower and started to assemble my kids’ birthday presents. We had to celebrate a week early because my son was travelling abroad for his birthday, and I was headed to a conference across the country. Because it was going to be the first time my kids and I had been apart on their birthday, I wanted to do something special. So I arts and craftsed my way to a special gift for each of them, and the next two days I planned a mini-party for the four of us at our local cider mill. I made sandwiches and a fruit platter. I got store-bought sushi and a gluten-free crumb cake at the local Peach Festival. I recycled my birthday balloons, which deflated almost as soon as I took them out into the hot night air, and I spent most of the evening trying to get them not to float into our food.

The celebration was perfect, despite the sad balloons. The four of us chatted, adulted, and generally enjoyed each other’s company.

The week was filled with small, beautiful moments that countered the struggle. I’d spent most of the week coughing and generally feeling awful. I got caught in a downpour I never saw coming. My son was leaving the country, and I was leaving for work, which meant we were celebrating my twins’ birthdays on the wrong day. None of this was what I would have planned for one of the last week’s of summer with my kids.

But joy isn’t always found in perfectly executed plans. Sometimes it’s found getting caught in the rain.
Pure Joy

July 29, 2026

I spent four days last week immersed in work. It was mentally taxing, and by the time Thursday night came around, I had used up most of my mental capacity. I really needed the weekend to recover.

Music is part of who we are as a family. When I went to college, my dad jokingly told me to find a guy with a big CD collection. Ironically, my guy was still playing cassette tapes, but he did love music. He could name virtually any singer or band of any song we heard, and it became my family’s joke that he would be their “phone-a-friend” for music trivia. When Jeff Probst hosted Rock & Roll Jeopardy for a short time, we watched with my husband in his element.

When the kids came along, music became even more important. Whether is was music at bedtime or dancing in the kitchen, my daughter always asked, “Tunes, Daddy” with the joy only a young child brings to the world. Though I shared singing and performing with my children, my husband shared their generation’s version of the mixed-tape: playlists. They have curated our “party list” to about 1000 songs, and they love talking about music in the backyard, in the car, or generally anywhere.

When my daughter was nine, my husband took her to her first concert – The Killers. He loves to tell the story about how everyone was high fiving her. Since then, he has taken both the kids to numerous concerts and supported their ticket purchasing power at many more. All three of them definitely enjoy live music.

I like it too, but it’s not something I love. Unless I know enough of the words to sing along, I get bored, and there are very few bands or artists that inspire me to listen on repeat enough for my brain to absorb the songs. Because my brain works differently than the rest of my family’s, I’m usually not in the mix when we talk about concert lineups. This summer had a long list of possibilities, but only one that everyone said, “Mom, you should definitely go to this one!”

So months ago, we coordinated with family friends to take everyone to see Train, Barenaked Ladies, and Matt Nathanson. I was even on board! Still, for a variety of reasons, we talked about it much longer than we acted on it. By Thursday night, we still hadn’t bought tickets for the Friday show. My daughter had decided to go on a trip with a friend, so was no longer available, my husband was ambivalent about it, and similarly, there were some hiccups with our friends’ schedules. I was ready to just abandon the idea and sleep off the long week at work!

BUT – this is my year of yes, and ultimately we went to the concert. Sometimes the things that almost don’t happen turn out to be exactly what you need. I was completely relaxed in the space of the music, and I knew more of the songs than I realized I would. Each one seemed to carry a memory with it, and I loved my internal reminiscence with the external joy of the concert goers. The music belonged to different years and different versions of me, but somehow all of those versions were there together, singing along on a summer night with people I love.

It was pure joy.

And the weekend had just started! The next morning I tagged along with my son to his volunteer gig, a once-a-month food distribution to fight food insecurity in Newark. By Saturday afternoon I was hanging at our local cider mill, tasting the various flavors and drinking in the beautiful weather and getting to know our son’s girlfriend better. We followed that with dinner with our daughter, who told us all about her trip. The joy radiating off my children was infectious.

Earlier in the week, my son had texted to ask if we could go to a Mets game while his girlfriend was visiting. My husband, a die-hard Mets fan who takes every disappointing season personally, did not immediately jump on board. I did. After months of trying to coordinate four increasingly independent lives, I recognized the invitation for what it was: a chance to spend time together.

So all five of us headed to Citi Field, where we relaxed in the sunshine, took pictures with Mr. and Mrs. Met, ate a bucket of pickles, and cheered as the underdogs (our team) took the game.

The car ride home from Queens is always more joyful when the Mets win, so we were all in a pretty good mood. As we chatted, I told them there was a lot to write about for the blog this week and that I already knew what I wanted to title it: “Pure Joy.”

The title wasn’t only about the Mets game. It was the entire weekend: live music and baseball, old friends and new additions, smiles from strangers, cider in the sunshine and singing songs I have loved for years. I have spent a lot of time lately wondering how I want to fill the next stage of my life. Last weekend offered a beautifully simple answer. Fill it with the people who make you laugh. Say yes when your children ask to spend time with you. Buy the concert tickets. Go to the game. Find the joy by making it happen.
Do It

July 22, 2026

There are moments in life that invite us to stop, look at the path we’re on, and ask, “If I’m not doing my current job, then what?” For those of us in higher education, it’s a societal moment as we face an uncertain future. For people celebrating a milestone birthday, it’s a natural time to take stock. For parents entering empty-nesting, it’s part of the need for an evolving identity.

I am sitting at the intersection of these three identities right now.

My answer to the question, “If not this job, then what” has always been rooted in humor. “A party planner,” I say with a smile, “except I don’t want to work nights and weekends all the time.”

I have a sticky note on my computer at home that says, “You are good at bringing people together. Do it.” The note reminds me that I am, in fact, good at producing an event. I enjoy the organization, but even more, I love the execution of figuring out how to get people who don’t know one another talking, laughing, and perhaps making a connection they otherwise never would have made. Seeing people interacting, happy and animated gives me a natural high.

If I look back on my younger self, I’m surprised that party planning is something that has become part of my identity. I am an introvert, and I’m not especially comfortable walking into a room and making conversation. But over the years, I’ve realized that being an introvert is not the same as wanting to be alone. Human connection fuels me. I host events that bring people together, not because I want to be the center of attention, but because I enjoy creating spaces where others can connect. That part of my identity has shaped my professional life: at work I create programs, workshops, and communities that give people reasons to come together. And it has also shaped my personal life: how I have gotten involved in my community and how my family has always opened our home to others.

My husband and I used to entertain regularly. In fact, we created spaces in our basement “pub” and backyard that were intended for gathering. Similarly, I used to organize monthly Girls’ Night Out (GNO) Gives Back events that brought women together for an evening of socialization, conversation, and giving back to local charities. Over the years, however, our lives focused more on work and the kids, and our energy for hosting parties focused on our adult friendships waned.

I miss the “bar parties” of our past. I miss GNO. And now that the kids are off to college, I even miss the egg hunts, where I filled about 1000 eggs and spread them across my lawn, and the various other kinds of parties I planned for and with my children over the years. Party planning was always a lot of work – but it held a lot of reward for me.

On Sunday I turned 50, a milestone that I felt was worth celebrating, especially as it fell toward the end of my year of writing about FillingTime and in the heart of my transition at work. My week was filled with preparation for a party that my family had planned for me. Sadly, we had to cancel the party due to the threat of severe storms. It was a hard decision, one that affected me deeply because the event represented something I had been truly missing – bringing my friends together in my home.

Despite the disappointment, my weekend turned out pretty perfect all the same. I spent time with my family eating cake, playing “evil” Uno (as my son has dubbed the game Uno No Mercy), and laughing at the picture board my mom put together of all my hairstyles from 1976 – 2026. Then I spent time chatting with my girlfriends, who showed up with mimosas the morning after the cancelled party, just to make sure I celebrated. People still came together, smiled, and made connections. It was good.

Maybe “party planner” isn’t my real answer to “If not an educator or academic, then what?” But creating spaces where people connect is almost certainly part of it. As I round the bend into the second half of my first century (I plan to live to at least 102), I want to make more room for that part of myself. I have spent enough time missing it. Now I need to follow the instruction on my sticky note: Do it.
Summer Squashcakes

July 15, 2026

My current kitchen routine relies on my local farm box. This past week it warned me that I should expect a whole lot of summer squash. I dismissed the email until I opened my box… and that’s when I knew I needed to dig deep into everything I’ve learned about food and cooking.

Fourteen years ago I had a health scare that forced me out of my processed food pantry and into real food cooking. I had made it into my mid-thirties by faking my way through a kitchen, and, if I’m honest, my specialty back then was a pasta bake that I discovered when I found a “no cook, just add water, sauce, and bake” pasta. I only topped that dinner when I learned how to turn a crescent roll into a burger pie, something my husband absolutely loved! The burger pie still shows up now and again in my dinner prep (and I’ve figured out how to make it gluten free), but my reliance on pre-made or easy prep pantry items has seriously diminished over the years. I’ve learned a lot about how our bodies react to what we put into them, and I try – despite all the temptations to make it easier/better/tastier – to eat healthy and make my body happy.

I’ve danced the line between hard core (e.g., making my own almond milk and turning the leftovers into almond meal) and a full week of takeout every night (usually during baseball season). I cannot say that I am consistently great with my diet, but the two constants I’ve had over the last decade are (1) I eat gluten free and never knowingly cheat (and I KNOW if I get glutened accidentally), and (2) I have tried to keep a relationship with an organic, grass-fed company for both veggies and meat. #1 is all on me, and it’s non-negotiable. I know better, feel better, do better without gluten. I am (likely) Celiac, something I wish I had known earlier in my life.

#2 is harder, as access to companies that can financially commit to organic and grass-fed farming has varied over the years. Because I can’t always have perfection, I choose real over perfect whenever I can. This is why I always have a farm box, despite their commitment to organic farming. A farm box gives me challenges in meal prep that I have come to welcome, and it forces me to prep with real food in mind.

Every week I get ingredients I may not have picked up at the grocery store. It forces me to learn in the kitchen. Sometimes, I get way more of one ingredient than I would have ever purchased. This past week it was summer squash. Over the years, I have leaned into various forms of squash to add as a side, make noodles, or become “squasage,” my version of hashbrowns with sausage with the potatoes replaced by squash. I once made zucchini bread/muffins, but that wasn’t a hit so I filed those recipes.

This past week, my farm emailed to say that summer squash was rampant. I didn’t actually realize how many squash would be in my box despite this warning. I’m going to be honest. I will eat the “noodles” and the side of squash. I might be able to get my family to eat some squasage. But there is no way we were eating the rampant squash that showed up last week without some new ideas.

Enter ChatGPT. I could write an entire post on how I have been experimenting and using AI to help me solve problems (that’s more a work issue than a personal life issue so not necessarily for this blog), but this conundrum is the perfect example of how AI has helped me in my personal life. I simply asked it to give me five recipes I could use with an abundance of squash.

One recipe I had never seen before or considered was fritters. It sounded good, so I tried it. It WAS good. It was so good that I vacuum-sealed some to give to my mom, who also thought it was good and named them squashcakes.

All this to say in the spirit of FillingTime, I’m not a chef, and I don’t want to fill time with cooking. It’s something I’ve had to learn to do, but it’s not something I love for the art of it. In this instance, however, I was pleased to tackle the puzzle and come up with a solution that was pretty darn yummy. Maybe, if I approach time in the kitchen as a problem to be solved, I will not only fill time, but become a better chef!
A More Perfect Union

July 8, 2026

As a child, I knew I was a bicentennial baby. It must have been a phenomenon in 1976 because I was proud of it, to have been born in a celebratory year for our nation. Perhaps the internal fascination with the term “bicentennial baby” helped me to love July 4th. More likely it was the amazing celebration our small, rural town put on each year. Parade, featuring John Deere tractors, fire trucks, and more candy than a kid could want. Pool Games, complete with relay races, dive competitions, and the super duper coin toss (sponsored by the local bank). Park Carnival, calling us with hot dogs, dunk tank, and Bingo. And Fireworks, of course, by the river to end the day. I spent every July 4th of my childhood and high school memory in town, celebrating.

It was truly small town America, and it was ingrained in me. At my core, it is who I am, even if I’ve lived more of my life outside of that space than in it.

Perhaps it was the connection to the 4th and to 1976 that made me fascinated by American history, so much so that I became a history major with a concentration in American history. More likely it was the stories told by my high school history teacher, who inserted the tiniest details that captured my interest and who always included the juicier aspects of our country’s development, often as side notes to the major events, but always in a way that made my ears perk up during the long lectures. I was so eager to know more about the Lindbergh kidnapping that I may have married my husband simply because I learned he lived on the road where the baby had been found. (Side note: Been listening to a podcast recently about the kidnapping, and I wish I could talk to Mr. Corman about all the theories presented!)

All this to say, I love this country. I love its history, even when it makes me uncomfortable. I love the promise it presents. I love that my family could move from poor immigrants to PhD in just three generations. I also recognize there is privilege in my story, privilege that cannot be denied and should not be ignored.

So the Fourth of July is special to me, but this 250th celebration has been complicated because the country is so divided. On top of that, my town (and the entire county where I live) got hit by another major storm on Friday night. With power outages and downed trees everywhere, celebrating 250 seemed less important in the grand scheme of things.

So it was a quiet day. It was also incredibly hot. I spent some time in the pool with my family, listening to the playlist my husband and kids have cultivated over the years. As I floated in the 92 degree water, which gave just a little relief from the ridiculous air temp, I caught myself singing to Shame on You by the Indigo Girls. The Indigo Girls have been part of the soundtrack of my adulthood. It was one of the few bands both my husband and I loved in college, and my a cappella group sang two of their songs often enough that I still know every word. That’s why it surprised me when I realized I wasn’t just singing along anymore. I was actually listening.

The verse that caught my attention and brought the long lost song into my consciousness:

They say, “We’ve been looking for illegal immigrants

Can we check your car?”

I say, “You know it’s funny

I think we were on the same boat back in 1694″

As I came out of my heat haze, I started to listen, really listen. Though I had heard the song dozens of times before – enough to have it ingrained in my unconscious memory – I listened to it with new ears. I couldn’t help but realize how timely it still felt. The song is three decades old, yet it could have been written yesterday. My brain started humming.

After the pool I took a heat break on the couch and surfed Netflix, which supplied me with the trending movie The Long Walk Home. I had never seen it, but I was curious about both the context and the actors whose names I knew well. A very young Whoopi Goldberg (married to a man played by a very young Ving Rhames) tells the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott through the eyes of two women (Whoopi and Sissy Spacek) who represent two sides of the movement. At one point I said to my husband, “We’re farther away from the release of this movie than the movie was from the events it depicts.”

That realization made me pause. The movie was released in 1990. The events it portrayed began in 1955. It seems that in approximately the same time span the same questions have returned. Watching the movie forces you to face the uncomfortable truths of how Black people were treated in the Jim Crow era. My parents were alive then. It wasn’t that long ago. And sometimes, as a student of history, I wonder whether we learned any lessons. The movie piled onto the song as I continued through my weekend.

The next morning, during my walk, I listened to a podcast that referenced Thomas Paine, one of the driving forces of the Revolutionary cause. In his pamphlet Common Sense, Paine wrote, “In America, law is king.” The concept that no person was above the law, that no person should rule over another individual was a principle on which the country was built.

Lately, I feel like we are wrestling, once again, with what it means for law — not individuals, not parties, not power — to be king.

The podcast piled on.

A song. A movie. A podcast. At work I’m creating a keynote and a workshop to be delivered in the next month that argues that media creation is what defines literacies of today — and the future. Three unrelated pieces of media had surfaced together in my world, helping me to reflect on a very significant moment in the history of the United States. As someone who spends most of her hours learning and teaching, I like to think that learning works most beautifully in these in-between moments, where unexpected connections are made.

The media presented a pattern to me: one of both aspiration and contradiction. The American experiment proposed something radical at its time — that humans can collectively rule themselves and that no one person is above others. At the same time, the founders struggled with their past, their individual economics, and their inherited prejudices. Freedom was not granted to slaves. Women did not have rights. Entire groups of humans were excluded from participation in the best experiment in human governance the world had yet seen.

But the Constitution also stated that it was an attempt to form a “more perfect union.” It was a first step on a journey that recognized that no one — and no thing — is perfect. It is a process of becoming, and that process is uncomfortable, messy, and celebratory all at the same time.

As this bicentennial baby approaches her fiftieth birthday, I find myself grateful that I still have new things to learn about a country I love. Patriotism, I’ve decided, isn’t believing America has always gotten it right. It’s believing the promise of a “more perfect union” is still worth pursuing. Perhaps that’s the work of every generation: to inherit the promise, confront the contradictions, and leave the union just a little more perfect than we found it. In that case, filling my time with listening, observing, questioning, reflecting, learning — and contributing — seems like time well spent.
Mama Bear

July 1, 2026

Last week started on the weekend at my parents’ house. If you have been keeping track, it’s the umpteenth time that I’ve been in PA in 2026. According to Merriam-Webster, the first known use of the word umpteenth was in 1892, but I inherited it from the Polish/Ukrainian women in my family. They usually used it in a negative connotation, but Merriam-Webster says it means “latest or last in an indefinitely numerous series,” and, as I’ve come to appreciate as I’ve travelled back and forth to PA this year, it’s a good thing, not a negative one, that my trips to PA are indefinitely numerous nowadays.

I was there to help with care after my dad’s elective knee surgery. I knew that it would make both of my parents’ lives difficult, and I’m glad I was there to help just a bit in those first 48 hours. Not only could I communicate with the nurses and doctors at the hospital with the distance of being “the daughter,” but I could also do more physical and mental labor for both of them for a few days. It was good, me being the caretaker and psychologist, giving back just a little of what they have done for me over the years.

But something about taking care of your parents is exhausting in the same way that taking care of your kids is, so when I got home, I crashed a bit. Aside from doing what needed to be done at work, I had nothing in me. No filter. No self-confidence. No chutzpah. (Another word I associate with my Nana, and after some research, I’ve figured out that the Polish word is hucpa, which is how it ultimately came to me.)

Without these portions of myself in play, I couldn’t do much but try to navigate the landmines that constantly exist with two “adult” teenagers in the house and watch mindless TV. Since I had just curated a list of shows with my M-Factor friends, I had a lot to pick from. I binged a one-season show quickly and then followed up with a 90-minute movie before I dove into a 5-season show.

So my week was filled with brainlessness until I faced my parental role once again – this time with my daughter’s wisdom teeth surgery. I took care of her, being a cheerleader to get her past her nerves, being a task master to make her take her medicine despite the fact she has never been able to swallow a pill, and being a friend at 3AM when she had to figure out how to do it again. I couldn’t do any work for two days. I was simply exhausted by the caretaking of it all. It made me question how I possibly earned tenure in my first job when I was the mom of two young children.

Caretaking is simply exhausting, and it makes brain work harder than it should be.

Ironically, sometime during the week of me straddling two generations of care, my son walked into the house with a video of a yearling bear walking across our driveway. We have bears in our suburban neighborhood, and we have learned to deal with them over the years. He let me know that I should warn the neighbors to look out for the mama.

Fifteen minutes later, as I headed off to work, the mama approached my car as I drove slowly down the driveway. I could have been scared. She was big, after all, probably one of the biggest we have seen in our yard, but I recognized her burden at that moment. It’s hard work, letting (making) a yearling go.

As she passed my car and wandered toward the woods following her offspring from an appropriate distance, I found myself hoping the yearling was on its way to independence. My parents helped me grow into a person who cares for others. Now I find myself caring for them in small ways while still shepherding my own children as they find their paths. That’s what filling time looks like in this stage of life. It’s not about me, but somehow, it is the core of who I am.
Menopause: Breaking the Silence

June 24, 2026

A friend invited me to attend a screening of The M Factor 2: Before the Pause – Perimenopause, a documentary about perimenopause. Of course, I said yes. Not only was it going to be a night out with a couple of women I enjoy spending time with, I figured I’d learn something about myself. I am celebrating 50 all year, after all.

Growing up, I knew almost nothing about menopause. Beyond the fact that it was something that happened to older women, I couldn’t have explained what it was, what symptoms might accompany it, or how dramatically it could affect someone’s quality of life. Looking back, I am not sure the adult women in my life knew much more than I did. They experienced it, certainly, but nobody really talked about it with the younger generations. Society, in general, has not been in the habit of talking about women’s health.

That’s what struck me most during the film. While perimenopause was the topic, as I sat in a theater amongst friends, I couldn’t help but think about how much had changed between my mom’s generation and my own.

Women have been socialized to quietly endure – to push through and accept discomfort/pain/disorientation without complaint. We joke that if men had to give birth, the human race would go extinct, but in that humor is an uncomfortable truth: Women are expected to tolerate suffering until it becomes impossible to ignore. At what point do we tell women to wait until symptoms are moderate or severe before they seek help? Women are encouraged to minimize symptoms, power through exhaustion, and postpone their own care while they take care of everyone else. We normalize women’s suffering in ways that would seem absurd in other contexts.

My mom’s generation didn’t talk about menopause publicly because they had been conditioned not to. Many of them suffered in silence because nobody explained what was happening to them. Yet they were also the generation that fought for the right to control their own bodies. They fought battles that created opportunities my generation inherited. They entered workplaces that were not designed for them. They challenged assumptions about what women could do and where women belonged. I have tremendous respect for what they accomplished.

And yet, a lot of Gen X women have found themselves learning about menopause while they are living it, just like their moms did. We can research almost anything instantly, yet many of us reached our forties and fifties with only the vaguest understanding of what was coming. Anxiety. Insomnia. Brain fog. Joint pain. Rage. Depression. Heart palpitations. The list goes on.

As I watched the film, I couldn’t help but think about my own health, and also about my mom and my daughter. I don’t want my daughter to suffer in the same ways I have. I don’t want her to get to age 50 and be surprised by the information I learned in the documentary. I would like her to recognize symptoms instead of being blindsided by them and to know what questions to ask and what options are available.

One of the gifts of being Gen X is that we seem more willing to compare notes. We talk to one another. We read articles. We join online groups. We share experiences that might once have been kept private. We go to screenings of documentaries designed to help us see that everything we are experiencing is normal. And then we start a text thread so we can be in it together.

These conversations matter. My mom’s generation fought to be seen. My generation seems increasingly willing to tell the truth about our experiences. We are not sharing as a way to complain or to say that we are not resilient. We are talking because silence is not a particularly effective health strategy.

I am grateful I said yes to an evening with friends, a good meal, and a documentary I might not otherwise have seen. I walked in expecting to learn something about menopause. I left thinking about generations of women, the socialization of silence, and the hope that, because we are finally talking about it, our daughters might not have to figure everything out on their own.

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