Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “family”
@bethvogt My son Josh and daughter-in-love Meagan stopped by our house on Monday. “How are you?” A simple enough question, right? Not these days. My son Josh is white. My daughter-in-love Meagan is black. Meagan backed away from me. From responding. “I don’t want to cry. I can’t cry … I won’t stop crying …” And then I held …
@bethvogt Sometimes I think my now-adult children believe I didn’t want them to grow up. Yes, there are days I miss their toddler voices. The funny ways they mangled words and their odd preferences for a particular food or a stuffed animal or a certain pair of pajamas. I’ll even admit to saying, “Why you want to leave …
@bethvogt The Best We’ve Been, the third book in my Thatcher Sisters series, is a story about what happens when you lose control of your life. The book releases today, during the worldwide coronavirus pandemic. A time when it seems as if each one of us — no matter where we live, no matter our occupation or vocation, or where we …
My youngest daughter, Christa, is home for spring break from college. Only it’s not the spring break she planned on. It’s not the spring break hundreds of thousands of college students planned on. After I wrote that last sentence my husband, Rob, Christa, and I paused to do some quick mental math and decided the sentence should read “millions …
My son-in-love, David, lost his mom when he was 10 years old. Losing your mom when you’re a young child? I see the faint flicker of his heartache in David’s eyes whenever he mentions his mom. All of us are familiar with the companionship of grief. Throughout our lives, we all must learn and relearn the halting steps of grief …
Today’s blog post is pretty straightforward. With Valentine’s Day on Friday, I thought it would be fun to share a few quotes about love. “Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.” Mother Teresa Now before you move on from this post because you’re not into all the forced, commercialized …
I tossed several topics around for this blog post. Things like the Super Bowl halftime show or the president’s State of the Union address or how about the craziness of the Iowa caucus? Nah. I’m not about wading into controversy and ruffling feathers today. Instead, I came across these words by poet Maya Angelou: “Every day I awaken grateful. …
We all grow up knowing our place in our families. And that “place” determines our identity. Firstborn. Middle child. The baby. Sometimes we’re the only child. Among my two brothers and two sisters, I was the ugly one. Now before you say something like, “Surely you exaggerate,” let me assure you I’m not. I knew my place in my …
We’re eight days into the new year and may I just say I’d like a do-over? Of course, I know that’s not how life works. There’s no rewind button in life. No pause button, either. We do life in forward motion – sometimes fast-forward. Circumstances? Well, they are often beyond our control. The first week of this brand-new year has …
How would you define Christmas? People have a lot to say about Christmas. Just google “quotes about Christmas” and you’ll discover all sorts of things that people think about Christmas. I happen to like what Dale Evans had to say: “Christmas, my child, is love in action.” One brief sentence. Seven simple words. But if you look closer, there’s a …
