Two of my children were toddlers when I started writing about them. They are sixteen now. The archive between those two years is dense.
Three hundred-odd posts. I did not set out to document a childhood. I set out to process a hard afternoon and write it down, and then another, and the writing accumulated into something that looks, from a distance, like a record.
This is a hub for that record. It is large, so it runs in threads. Some of those threads will grow into pages of their own; the rest are gathered here.
Letters to My Daughters
For fourteen years I have written a series of letters and published them, the Letters to My Daughters that began in 2010 and run through a tenth birthday in 2024. They are the closest thing here to a spine.
Watching Them Grow
The largest thread is the one about time. Birthdays, milestones, the recurring shock of a child outpacing the version of her I keep in my head. Four Years Old is one such essay; The Last Bit I Walk Alone, a first morning of middle school, is the newest. There are many; they will gather into their own page.
The Philosophy, Such As It Is
I distrust parenting advice, my own included. The essays in this thread, from Parenting From the Sidelines to Through the Door, are less instruction than field notes from someone revising her method while the children watch.
The Hard Parts
And then the essays that were difficult to write. Sibling friction. Grief that arrived in the middle of ordinary parenting, the kind Ghost Grief and Heartbreak Central try to hold. The years do not only accumulate joy.