Filling Time: TwinLife Empty-Nesting
The next stage of TwinLife
Category: family
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It’s event season at work, which means the university schedule is on overdrive and work days spill into nights. I’m used to it; it’s been my life as an educator. But I had set an intention about a month ago to take back some of my time that I have so freely given to my…
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I laughed out loud – literally – at the loaf of bread sitting on the hood of my car. It was so my mom. Almost as soon as I showed up (late) at the 6:15 PM meeting for the reunion concert at my high school, she asked me if I wanted to ride with her…
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I spent most of my childhood living in a house under some version of construction. My parents purchased a 150-year-old farmhouse when I was a toddler, and they spent the next couple of decades bringing it back to life. They did it with their own minds and hands in segments as time and money permitted…
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Time is a strange thing. My husband and I started the week watching Dark, which is about more than just time travel. It’s about how time can be on a loop and how what is meant to happen happens, regardless of how you might try to change the past. Later in the week I travelled…
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I spent 13 years of my life driving into New York City. Because I grew up in Central PA, pretty far from any city, the thought that over a decade of my life was intimately connected to NYC, still awes me. Though my husband likes to joke that I’m now a Jersey girl, I’m not.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
Filling Time: TwinLife Empty-Nesting 