New Day, New Season, New Year Happy New Year.  These heartfelt wishes can sound like quite the oxymoron, can’t they?  In a time of increasing violence, usual personal and family challenges, widespread disease and poverty, and epidemic paranoia, where does “happiness” fit in? We are, at our core, trusting, hopeful, strong creatures.  These are the …

Less Polite, Much Faster Times We don’t speak much, in the twenty-first century, about acknowledgment.  These are less polite, much faster times, and a lot has gone out the window that, in earlier times, covered what we would call healthy interpersonal communications.  Therapeutic lingo describes “boundaries”, assertiveness”, “self-esteem”, but doesn’t directly address acknowledgment.  It has …

  What’s Rubbed Off I have gone to more weddings, including, of course, my oldest daughter’s over this past year, than I have gone to in my entire life.  I think something is significantly rubbing off on me related to something new.  In case you need a refresher, the rhyme goes, “something old, something new, …

Today my first husband would have been sixty years old. Every year on this day since 1990, the year after he died, I somehow, no matter what else is going on, think of how he would have been on this day. What milestones in our lives he didn’t live to see!  So many amazing things, …