Category: Roots & Remnants


  • Playground Beginnings We met on our elementary school playground. I was sitting alone on a bench during recess—probably pretending not to care. Her best friend wasn’t at school that day, so she walked over and asked, “Wanna swing with me?” That was it. No dramatic music. No movie moment. Just two girls on the swings.…

  • Once upon a paperwork-laden time, I traded a dream of palm trees and pixie dust for a cubicle and a conveyor belt. I was this close to heading off to the Disney College Program—bags nearly packed, dreams bubbling like Main Street soda pop—when my ex-husband nudged me toward a job in a government office. “It’s…

  • When Strength Starts to Crumble I used to think my mom was just being overdramatic. In 2013, everything in her life changed. And I knew the details—the betrayal, the implosion, the long unraveling that followed. What I didn’t understand was why she fell apart so completely. This was the woman who raised me to be…

  • A Love Letter to the Queen of Tejano ✨ The First Voice I Ever Borrowed Selena Quintanilla was murdered in 1995, and even though I never got to witness her rise in real time, my parents were fans, and in that very “kids absorb music like oxygen” way, I grew up with her English album…

  • I’ve been on both sides of body shaming. When I was bigger, people said I should lose weight.Now that I have, they say I’ve gone too far. Funny how no one ever stops to ask how I feel—they just measure their comfort against my body and call it concern. The Familiar Voice of “Concern” It’s…

  • The Man and the Child None of us actually remember seeing them.My mom told us about it years later—at least a decade after it happened. Apparently, when we were really little—around three to five years old—all three of us kids saw the same thing: a man and a child. Different years.Different rooms.Same description. We each…

  • What the Body Remembers I don’t have many memories of my Grandpa—I was eight or nine when he passed—but the ones I do have are vivid. Cemented.And the clearest of all? His energy hugs. Whenever we walked into the house, my Grams was there first—ready with her lipstick kisses and her “Hi, sweetie!”—and then we’d…

  • 💍 A True Story of Len and Betty They met in Flint, Michigan, in 1963—not a fairy tale, not a movie, just a bar filled with cigarette haze and two people trying to start over. She was recently divorced and out with a friend. He’d just clocked out from the Flint Police Department, a 101st…

  • The One Where I Finally Stopped Settling for “Good Enough” Dave still says therapy doesn’t work for him.But here’s the thing — therapy works. He just hasn’t found the right therapist. And honestly? It took me years—and seven therapists—to find mine. The first one talked more than I did.The second gave me whiplash — one…

  • When Sleeplessness Isn’t Mania — It’s the Weight of Everything Anybody who knows me knows I don’t do all-nighters.Jamie used to make fun of me for it — no matter what we were doing, I’d hit my wall by 2AM like clockwork. My brain would just…power down. So when I stayed awake for nearly a…