I pick my son Danny up from the house of a friend. The car is quiet. “I love you,” says Danny. He shakes his head back and forth with awareness of the words that have just left his mouth. “That’s a habit I picked up from you,” he says with some teenage agony. “One of…

I am chatting with my friend “Trixie.” She tells me that she has met a few women lately who are re-emerging in their lives. “They are some bad-ass women,” says Trixie. “I want to be bad-ass again.” “I want to be bad-ass again, too,” I say back. I hang up the phone. Later I drive…

I drive towards town. The air is colder than the past few days and it suits my morning mood. I fiddle with the radio not able to find a song that I like. I hear the hypnotic voice of Stevie Nicks. She is singing “Landslide” and the car fills with more stillness than it already…

I hear a rumbling in my garage. No, it’s more like the pillaging sounds of a two hundred pound man. It’s late and right now it’s just my chocolate lab Hazel and me at home. Suddenly I am quite aware of my soon to be divorced – there is no one, but me to ‘check…

I sip coffee, pull the ponytail holder out of my hair and slide back in the chair. The stylist mixes the dye behind me. I am at Salon Bleu. It’s my favorite hair salon and one of my ‘happy’ places. I am comfortable here and have been a client so long these are also my…

I loved high school. It was a time of emerging independence, life innocence and forever friendships. A period of explosive emotional growth while my friends and I were growing comfortable in our own skin. It was football games and basketball and rugby. It was passing notes that we prayed weren’t intercepted by the guy we…

My Nana and Grandpa left the shores of the Emerald Isle carrying their dreams and a bit of shamrocks, Blarney and rainbows with them. You might say, “the luck of the Irish.” Tommy and Rose McCaffrey fell in love state side. Tommy was a handsome, New York City cop. His heart so big that his…

I flop onto my couch, put my computer on my lap and my cold pressed (carrot, cucumber, orange and ginger) juice on the table beside me. I start to watch television much like the rest of us do today, constantly distracted by my laptop. My eyes turn towards the fire fading in my fireplace. The…

It’s hot in Siesta Key, Florida. The water splashes up against the dock. The kids scurry past us. They jump onto the jet skis. “Hey,” yells my friend Lucy. “You are everything to me!” Lucy’s three kids look up and smile at their mom. They are anxious to hit the open seas. “Hey,” commands Lucy…

I love writing this column because not only is it cathartic for me, but because I can attempt to help some of the people in pain reaching out to me. I can tell them that I understand their heartache. It is true that marriage problems come in all different shapes and sizes. However, there is…

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