Ah, that feeling of contributing to the 6th mass extinction while saving the monarchs.

I feel ill.

They’ve stayed up to too late every night for 400 years. They’ve watched every show on PBS Kids, Disney Kids, Netflix Kids, and you’re tempted to introduce them to TikTok and never see them again.

But, as one does, I realized that 5 a.m. alarm didn’t feel so good. I missed it once. I missed it again. It wasn’t great. I wasn’t Good Mom – I was pretty cranky with my raring-to-go family. But school was close to done; did it really matter if everyone wasn’t exactly fed and dressed? Then, school was done and where did they need to be, anyway?

I barely even recognized my ten-year-old face when I looked in the mirror!

Email preview: The cognitive dissonance of global business in times of geopolitical upheaval.

But I want her for me. I want all of them for me. I find myself greedier and greedier for my kids’ childhoods as it becomes clearer and clearer just how little of them remain. I want to eat them up.

But this isn’t a story about things lost. Youth. Running. Identity. Or, at least, it’s not only a story about that. It’s about the inevitable morphing one does in big and small ways. It’s about what that morphing takes, no matter how old we get

And germs.

Maybe—and this unfortunately means accepting that past me was a snobby bitch—maybe being a Dance Mom has changed me. For good.

I made a discovery on one of those relentless January days: two of my houseplants had flowered.

If I haven’t bloomed yet, what have I been doing this whole time? 

I spent an hour that afternoon carefully mending our 8-year-old neighbor’s lovies, four identical rabbits that were loved so hard their heads fell off.

I’m not over here trying to drink a lemontini and read context-free Emily Dickinson lines to pretend at feeling fulfilled. I want advice from fellow moms who came out of the holidays feeling tired, tired, tired with more dark snowy months ahead.

Naughty? Nice? The Christmas Witch is on it!