Our daughter, Mary Addison, is now 26 years old. She is mentally and physically challenged.  She has skills of a 12-year-old but enjoys the innocence of a small child. That being said, you can imagine her love of all things “Christmas.” (She and Buddy the Elf have a lot in common.) We start listening to […]

The holidays can be difficult and depressing. Shorter days, gloomy weather, family chaos with everyone at home, and changes in schedules can intensify our challenges of caring for a family member with exceptional needs. The complaint I hear the most is, “Christmas and all its traditions no longer bring me joy. It’s just extra work […]

A sweet friend that I met during caregiver small groups gave me permission to share it this you. Her mother has Alzheimer’s and is quickly declining, and my friend had been struggling with feelings of impatience and inadequacy. She confessed she’d had a “sit down” with God asking if He was sure He picked the […]

My daughter’s seizures dramatically escalate with every big storm. Hurricane Florence’s scope is so big, there is nowhere within a 5-hour radius we can drive to get her out of the pressure. We resigned to just stay in Charleston and be near our familiar docs and hospital. Watching her seize with increased frequency and intensity […]

My website was recently hacked and infected with a terrible virus. My webmaster and hosting service eventually got everything cleaned up and back online, but when I typed in the address, I kept getting the same error message. It was so frustrating – they could see the new and improved, cleaned up site, but I couldn’t. […]

I was reading the book of Ruth in the Bible the other day. It really touched something deep in me I want to share. My mother died very young, before I had children. It seemed so premature and unfair, but like this story of Ruth, I have come to realize it wasn’t the terribly bad […]

When we realized that no surgery, no med, no therapy was going to fix Mary Addison – that this was our new normal – I felt like we’d been given a sentence of life in prison. To accommodate her daily seizures and her mental and physical challenges, everything about our lifestyle would have to change […]

You become a better caregiver when you realize what a gift you have been given to find out who you really are and what you are capable of — your power to love, the deep satisfaction that comes from humble service, the exquisiteness of fragility, and our marvelous connection with the Divine. It’s not about […]

Each January, millions of us make resolutions. We examine ourselves and our lives and decide what needs to be improved. The idea is that a resolution is an optimistic way to approach each new year, but in reality, it’s the perfect set-up for failure. Studies have shown that fewer than 20 percent of New Year’s […]

It sounds crazy, but early in life I learned that Time was my enemy – cramming school, homework, and activities into every second of the day. In college, I began to wage war on what I feared Time would eventually do to my body – diets, potions, gyms and a race to find a mate […]