The speech is coming along, but I do have to say that Sean hit the nail on the head when he said 18 years of marriage brings with it 18 years of baggage.  The baggage is everywhere in our home.  It’s in our bathroom first thing in the morning when I go to use my shampoo and somebody has left the cap off again (which leaves me to wash my hair with the equivalent of soapy water).  It’s in our garage when I trip over someone’s size 10 running shoes while trying to carry MK to her car seat.  It’s even in the driveway when I maneuver around our empty trash cans that are waiting to be dragged back to the house three days after the garbage was picked up.  I guess it’s easy to see the “baggage” that others leave around my life because it pops up everywhere annoying and frustrating me several times a day. (more…)

Advance feedback on our forthcoming book always includes the following statement: “I really liked the use of the two voices throughout the book.”  I do believe this approach works for our story, but I will also admit that if we tried to write it with one unified voice; we would still be stuck on the prologue.  Carolyn and I are not good at tackling a large project together.  We work  much better when we divide tasks and then head to our neutral corners to complete them. (more…)

Sean’s right. We were told during a premarital meeting with the priest who married us that “every family is dysfunctional.”   I remember thinking at the time, “I wonder what our dysfunction will look like?”  Nearly eighteen years later, I have a vivid picture.  Don’t get me wrong, Sean and I function quite well together.  We have three great kids (two teenagers and a two year old), a home that is mostly clean (you’ll hear about the “mostly” part in a later post), and a marriage that is still intact and pretty strong (but is wildly active with bickering and conflict).  We pay our bills, enjoy our friends, and partake in the regular activities that all parents/couples do, but a Norman Rockwell painting we are not.  Well, if we were, it would be a new kind of “Norman Rockwell” painting. (more…)

It was February 16, 2009. I was frozen.

I’d just put the phone down after speaking with our fertility doctor. Moments earlier I learned another couple’s embryos had been mistakenly transferred to my wife ten days earlier and that the pregnancy tests from earlier that day were positive.  Confusion and shock set in immediately.

As I write this post today, Carolyn and I are nearly two years removed from the moment that changed us and our marriage forever.  Today, we refer to past events as either pre-2/16 or post-2/16.  You may have a traumatic reference point in your own life. No matter how we have tried to claw back to the way things once were and pretend as though we can do it, our new reality smacks us in the face.  We simply hit something in life that does not allow us to go back to things as they were.  The earth beneath our feet shifted and the land we had our feet planted on, drifted away forever. (more…)