Archive for children

Mother’s Day is not limited to childbirth

{Photo:  My friend, Adriana Heim, deserves equal recognition on Mother’s Day.} Mother’s Day celebrates the maternal, and that is not limited to childbirth.  A lavish spring bouquet to all the women who cared for us with no less than a mother’s love! It’s taken me a lifetime, at age 63, to fathom the preciousness of […]

Healing the unsaid with the dead

[Photo taken in 1973 of Suzette and her father, Steve Martinez, who passed away in 1982.] Lately memories of loved ones, now gone, are tinged with “I wish I told them [fill in the blank].”  Recently, I had the chance. A meditative exercise is designed to heal the unsaid with direct conversation. I tried it […]

Graduation: dinner with my three husbands

(Photo:  Star and I today.  Her 1996 college graduation dinner was memorable.) A graduation poses challenges for the multi-wedded.  I’ve been married three times, odd for a spirituality columnist to admit, but guess what?  I’m an optimist. Experience decrees that when breaking bread with exes, stay positive. Star, my daughter, graduated from college in 1996, […]

The Gifts We Don’t Return

This month a deluge of holiday gifts are returned to stores. It’s hard to give the perfect gift, and almost as hard to remember getting one. Yet Patricia Kachinsky of Milton still talks about what she received years ago.  Back then she told her four young daughters, “I want a memory of something your father […]

BALTIMORE: THE WAGES OF RIOTING

Until police tactics that license aggression and brutal handling are changed, there seems no end to the cycle of death-fear-retaliation-destruction on all sides. Until brave leaders emerge to overcome despair with forgiveness and real tools for effective change, there will be none. Violence only begets violence. As Baltimore battles chaos, consider the victims of rioting. […]