I'm experimenting with the format of this newsletter, inspired by Maggie Frank-Hsu's delightfully honest newsletter, Momsplaining. I don't really have a plan for this, so here's the concept of an essay. I’ve been wondering since we moved here if it matters, the 25ish minutes a day I spend walking to and from the bus stop waiting to send off and receive my child for the day. Does it matter when I wave to the bus with an army of other parents? Does it matter that I am there after school to walk...
26 days ago • 3 min read
This Month I moved myself in, moved L in, started him in 3rd grade, started myself in 19th grade (OUCH lol), got my Ohio driver's license, tags, and registration, signed up for library cards, found my critical mass of 5-6 local mom friends from a delightful spectrum of past life stages, cooked a bunch of tasty food, started working on one of my book projects again, hiked and paddleboarded and found fossils, and went to Meijer, Costco, and Trader Joe's more times than strictly necessary. I am...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
This Week By this time next week, I will be in my new home in Cincinnati, Ohio. After more than a year of waiting, working, and advocating, it is finally time for a new chapter of my life to begin. My brain and body are very tired (because I spent the day moving boxes and also, uh, refinishing a not-small piece of furniture that I acquired yesterday, and also, uh, acquiring another not-small piece of furniture, I PROMISE I WILL STOP NOW) so here's a poem I wrote a few weeks ago that is at...
3 months ago • 2 min read
This Week Today is not my ninth wedding anniversary, and I've been thinking about cancer. Cancer is so hard to treat because it is fundamentally an excess of healthy cell processes: growth, replication, angiogenesis (blood vessel formation), and migration from one tissue to another. One genetic gas pedal may get stuck in the ON position while another genetic brake line gets cut while still another genetic gateway gets disabled, all accelerating the cancer cell's growth out of control. The...
4 months ago • 3 min read
This Week Month Somehow another month has passed since my last email. Perhaps that is just going to be my cadence for the foreseeable future. I met with my faculty advisers last week and when they asked how things were going, I blurted out a truth that I've kind of been burying: I thought the hard part was over, and it's not. This move is the third or fourth consecutive major life transition I'll have in ONE CALENDAR YEAR, and it will also be the biggest change of my child's life thus far....
4 months ago • 1 min read
This Week Month Whoops, it has been a full four weeks since my last missive. I landed the plane of second semester...felt like Captain Sully skidding to a stop on the frozen Hudson River, but hey, everyone is alive and that's what matters! Here's what I've been doing: I started draft 2 of Just One Date but fairly quickly ran out of energy for that somehow. Possibly I have too many goals at once right now. I might try to reinstate my morning pages practice just to keep those gears turning. I...
5 months ago • 2 min read
This Week Today is genetic counseling Match Day 2024, and it occurred to me in recent days that the day I matched last year was probably the death knell of my marriage. Because that morning, it was my friend who walked me around the neighborhood like a racehorse the hour before results came out, not my then-spouse. That morning, it was strangers on the Internet who cheered for me first. My then-spouse said a lukewarm congratulations after I opened the email, and then quickly went to work with...
6 months ago • 2 min read
I'm a little late with this fortnight's newsletter because I had/am still having a slight to severe existential crisis over my email address LOL. My divorce decree states that my former name (AND GLORY) shall be restored to me, which feels great. I've applied for a new social security card and driver's license, both of which were mercifully and astonishingly easy to do. And now I want a Fultz-free email address, and that turns out to be a potentially gigantic pain in the butt. I already have...
7 months ago • 2 min read
This Week Last week I got some feedback on the first 3,000 words from my beta reader group, and I was forced to come to the delightful conclusion that my book...is not actually a romance. My readers commented how much they liked the relationship between mother and child but were unclear what the romantic storyline was going to be, and I realized...THAT IS RESOUNDINGLY FINE WITH ME. Look, at this point I'm pretty sure I am constitutionally incapable of writing 70,000 words focused on finding a...
8 months ago • 2 min read