An app is supposed to make our lives simpler, not more complex. Maybe it’s time to go old-school. — Every night, slack-bot notifications on my Apple watch cause my wrist to buzz almost incessantly for five minutes. Of course, I can’t help but glance down every time. Finding the right tools for the job I work for a small boutique tea company doing their social media. The founder recently switched our tiny organization onto Slack, retiring…

Taking some hints from addiction recovery to help with healing from grief. — For my latest book project, I have been reading a book called Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love by Helen Fisher. I have been working on the theory that grief recovery is not very far off from addiction recovery. I know this sounds far-fetched, but hear…

Chances are good that you know or will know a family whose lives have been turned upside-down by loss. Here are some tips for how to become one of those who “get” grief. This post was originally published in ParentMap on May 14, 2015. Every time there is news…

Lessons in Effective Parenting — I walked in the door and my son was slumped in his seat watching a Khan Academy video. The tutor who I had hired to teach him looked exasperated and took me aside to tell me so. Later there was a temper tantrum (not mine) where phrases like “I hate…

When a psychic finds me in a coffee shop, she has a message from my dead husband. — The panini’s had been ordered, and I had just gotten up to grab my “Blue Velvet,” a tea latte. A woman sitting at a table next to ours, asked, “Did your boyfriend or husband die recently?” Here we go again, I thought. Not recently,” I said. “And it was my…

Book ideas come from all kinds of places My novel, Remember the Moon began from a seed of an idea I had about a dead man’s conversation with his alive wife through a psychic. My life, basically. Or my dead husband’s, whichever way you want to think about it. I…

Adventures in dating in your 50s during a pandemic — After I broke up with my fiancé three years ago after an almost seven-year relationship, I licked my wounds for a year or two, with no desire to date. I converted what had been his man-cave into my art studio and began to paint. At first, producing art was my…

Will ‘relationship rehab’ help me find true love? — Among the million other things I have on my plate at the moment, I am attempting to follow a seven-week course called “Calling in ‘The One’.” I mention this sheepishly since the cynical part of me thinks the course sounds kind of hokey. Plus, the website is all pink and…

Haha! So true, although my experience of writing my memoir was that it WAS my therapist. I had a strange post-partum depression after it was published!