To Who I Am Becoming...

The human life is made up of experiences. Some we choose to have and some are chosen for us. We all have one choice no matter the experience we live, what to do when it is over. When it becomes part of our past instead of our present. When it fades into memory instead of reality. When it becomes a story told at parties instead of something to be dealt with in the moment. We choose what we become. We choose what we will remember, what we will tell. We choose. She stood in that moment of choice. The event had passed and the next one, the one where she would have to actively deal with it, had not started yet. This was it, when she would have to choose what would happen next. She barely understood it herself and could not imagine how she would be able to explain it to someone else. It was over, and she wasn’t sure she knew why. She knew the raw facts of how she had ended up here. She knew the chain of events that had led to this. She knew the reasoning that was given to explain w...

There is a joke that having to speak on Mother's Day in the LDS church is the worst talk to give. No one wants to do it and almost no one wants to listen to it. Perhaps this post will be the same but each year I cannot help but have a few thoughts on the many mothers in my life. When most think about the mothers that are important to them they think about the mother that took care of them as children, gave birth to them, and sent them off into the world. Usually this is one woman. For me this is many many women. I have a birth mom (which I will talk about on a different blog) and I have an adopted mother. The list, however, does not end with these two women. I have mothers who I see at church, mothers in my academic life, mothers in different countries, mothers who are also sisters to me, and mothers who have helped me have a good relationship with my primary mother. It is on Mother's Day that I think about all of these women. Each played a vital role in my upbringing and a...