I turned 49. Our custody arrangement means the kids are always with us on our birthdays. The kids and I had planned to take BART into the city and have an adventure. After my eldest daughter’s State Cup game.

We did the game. My son had a fever. We cancelled the rest of the plans and stayed home. I think we maybe ordered take out. The original plan before the Bart plan had been to have a party in our new house. 49’er themed. Scavenger hunt. We’d brainstormed and then I’d pre-determined weeks before that we would throw the party sometime later in the year when we were more ready. Because I’m 49 all year and can celebrate anytime I want to.

Monday, March 2: I have no notes and therefore no recollection whatsoever about this day.

Tuesday, March 3:

Therapy.

Final live Masterclass with The Book Academy®. We had met at least weekly since Tuesday, January 27th. Each time was completely thrilling, lighting me on fire, affecting the way I showed up in every other aspect of my life. Ideas, connections, words, gratitude, awe, hilarity poured into and out of me as I welcome the creative back into my life. Journals. Voice memos. Oh hello there. I forgot how much a part of me you are.

Wednesday, March 4:

First meeting of a new (to me) women’s book club at the church I have been attending for the past four years. Lenten study. A first. The kids and I had been having conversations about Ramadan, Lunar New Year, Lent, God, god, magic, faith, the stars. We like to keep it light.

Thursday, March 5:

Stopped taking aspirin in preparation for a procedure the following week. Interview with my previous employer. Had a phone chat with a friend living 11 miles away, our first since before my transplant. She was one of the ones receiving text messages from my sister throughout the day of the 14-hour procedure. I reached out because I know she has been paying attention to the world and to acting locally and I needed that connection in my life. We spoke about intentional community, raising pre-teens, where we put our energy, where our gathering and space holding energy is flowing.

First Zoom co-working session with my The Book Academy® alumni cohort.

Friday, March 6

One hour long MRI of my head. I asked a friend to drive me and pick me up. This is hard for me to do and I am committed to doing it. On the way there we spoke of the Muslim world and the bombing of Iran by the US in the middle of Ramadan that occurred on her 50th birthday, the day before my 49th birthday. Of the tears and the anger and the shame and the violence. I binge ate caramel popcorn and also tried to remember to drink water to make my scarred veins as fat and juicy as they can get.

I breathed through having my head strapped down with padded boards on either side. I wished I had taken an Ativan. I tried to stay relaxed as a stranger hunted for a vein and luckily got it on the first try. I kept my eyes closes the whole time

I sat in the atrium and waited for my friend, watching as a family of four navigated the pathway with one daughter in a wheelchair, a feeding tube in one nostril. When I left she was slowly eating soup with a spoon, her family circled around.

My friend picked me up and on our drive back I listened as she told the story of a harsh, painful interaction during school pick up. My heart ached and my stomach clenched. I breathed.

I got home and the kids came home not long after. I had another phone appointment with a different doctor about different things.

Saturday March 7th:

Visit to our old house to pick up more boxes. Watched as my kids melted like slow molasses on the hot driveway, looking through piles of old artwork and Christmas decorations as they started moving in slow motion. Oh. This is our first time back here all together since we moved out at the end of September. Before we moved into a month-long rental found and paid for by my sister and her husband so I could be closer to the hospital where I needed daily radiation on my eye. Before I moved to San Francisco and they moved in with their dad and step-mom for three months. Right. We go slowly today.

Lunch in the shade of our favorite taqueria with one extra tween, my eldest daughter’s first friend whom we met on blankets in the park we just drove by when my older twins and this kiddo were three months old and I had no friends living locally.

One fight of frustration and desperation with one kid who did not want Mexican food. One quick hug with a grieving mama friend whose husband died suddenly the week before my transplant. She wore a shirt that said Fernando: The Man, The Myth, The Legend and stopped to talk to a couple she knew, who knew them.

I bought bunuelos from an older Mexican man, as we spoke Spanish and tried to figure out how I could pay via Venmo.

I left with yet another tween, messy van stuffed to the brim with six 11 and 12 year olds.

One kid to soccer practice. One kid to a softball game. Redrawing of boundaries and expectations about how we honor each other when we share space so that everyone feels respected and safe. Deep breaths.

Sunday March 8th:

Church, alone with the wooden pew beneath me, tears streaming down my cheeks. The silence. The singing. The resonance of allowing for stillness. For reflection. The gratitude of knowing my kids are nearby in their own community, talking about and questioning faith.

New Member class. Learning about the history of a new type of practice, after four years of signing up for and cancelling each of the previously offered new member classes the years before. When I came to the church in a daze, in exhaustion, itchy, embarrassed and accepting of the outfits I wore that were the only ones soft enough to wear. Feeling what it feels like to intentionally join a local community in a town I never would have chosen for myself. A community that has held me and my kids these past few years—feeding us, praying for us, welcoming us, teaching us, singing over and around us. An imperfect group of people who I am slowly getting to know now that my mind works again. People who are trying. Like I am trying.

Smiling as my kids come in and out, grabbing sandwichs and drinks and cookies before going back outside to play basketball or sit and read during the two hours about which they had groaned saying how bored they would be and how they would have nothing to do. In a beautiful place where they are welcome and seen.

Well. That’s a week. Already so much longer than I planned it to be. And so many more thoughts about those days bubbling up to the top of mind once the fingers hit the keys.

Monday: no kids with me

Tuesday: no kids with me

Wednesday: I wake up with no kids with me, I pick them up from school or practice, I go to bed with my kids snuggled into their beds under the same roof. My chemistry changes. This change is quiet and perhaps invisible if only because there is no one but me to witness it. Much of our time together is not quiet. The shift is quiet or fierce but it is a change always. Molecules coming back together. Though I must acknowledge that the same molecules come together in a different way when they leave. My self is the same but different. In both directions. I am learning to stand firmly and softly in myself, no matter what day it is, no matter whom I am with or not with.

Thursday: Wake up with my kids. I try to get up before them so that I can sit quietly with my coffee. Breakfast. Gathering of things. Gathering of selves. School. After school. Sports. Dinner. Bed.

Friday: Wake up with my kids. Morning stuff. Take them to school.

And then sometimes I pick them up again as we shift from week to weekend. We are together and apart on Friday night, all day and night Saturday, all day and night Sunday, morning routine on Monday. School. Begin again.

But other times they don’t come back to me again until the following Wednesday.

My friends and family often apologize for having a hard time remembering the schedule and I chuckle. I would never expect anyone to internalize this schedule. I’m used to it and still getting used to it, nine years later.

This work I am doing, this year, is coming into alignment so that I am my same self no matter what day it is. No matter whether I am parenting in absentia, from afar, in heart not in practice, or whether I am regulating myself and four young people as we bounce off one another, entangle, enmesh, pull apart, lean into and away from one another.

Once again I opened this page with the intention of writing something else entirely. But it’s also all part of the same story anyway.

So. March. What was challenging when it came to sitting my butt in a chair and getting words on the page? Let’s review. As much for myself as for whoever might be curious.

Back in December 2025, I was a couple weeks post transplant. I was living in my sister’s family’s house in San Francisco with her, her husband and my two nephews. My four tweens were living in the East Bay with their dad and step-mom.

For the first six weeks post transplant I was required to have 24/7 adult supervision and I was not allowed to drive. Looking at my calendar for that time I see:

Lab work two mornings a week, requiring a blood draw at specifically 9:30 am. This either required a cross-town drive during rush hour traffic or a freeway trip south. My sister took me to each of these. I sat in the back seat wearing a huge quilted coat and holding a stuffed animal to protect my belly full of staples and stitches from the seatbelt.

A weekly trip to the transplant clinic to be seen by a transplant surgeon. My friend Phyllis came to pick me up each week which involved an early-morning freeway drive for her and some complicated parking at a huge medical center with major construction going on in multiple directions.

Bi-weekly nurse visits at home from a service contracted by my health insurer because I was seen as a medium-risk for returning to the hospital.

“No offense,” said the staff member who came first.

None taken, sir. I’m just glad you don’t see me as high risk! Score for me. Insert emoji of choice here.

Newsflash: I did indeed return to the hospital. Argh. And had a tantrum about it because we felt like we were doing every single thing in our power to get an issue addressed but I still ended up hospitalized for an infection in my abdominal wall that somehow got missed even though we kept pointing to it. Sigh. Boo. Hiss. Systemic communication challenges. I digress.

Weekly home visits from a physical therapist who helped me do exercises such as. . .standing still with my feet in certain positions and balancing while standing still. I was a Division 1 athlete in college btw. Each exercise for a count of ten as my legs shook due to a complete lack of muscle anywhere in my body after two years of increasingly poor absorption of nutrients and ultimate malnutrition.

Weekly home visits from an occupational therapist who worked with me on. . .I honestly can’t remember what we worked on in December. By January we were working on eye exercises for my separate and officially (harrumph) unrelated to liver failure condition—the benign schwannoma on my right optic nerve. The harrumph is in response to the aggravating certainty with which Western medicine practitioners proclaim that things happening in my one body can not possibly be at all related. Pero por que? Y pero como se sabe?

Have any of them ever taken care of a 48-year-old woman with multiple autoimmune disorders who has had two liver transplants and given birth to two sets of twins one year apart? No? Then please at least acknowledge the possibility that there are things we do not know about how my body operates. Of note, one young doctor asked permission to write up a case study about mouth sores I developed in 2024 that took five separate practitioners in five different departments and one hospital stay for someone to finally diagnose and effectively treat. Wait. No, six. I DIGRESS.

Oh. And I also had a kind young nursing student come visit once a week to help me take a shower. We talked about being SF natives as I stood naked in my sister’s shower, washing my hair. Having a human body is humbling and tender. He will be a wonderful nurse.

All of this was happening. I also did not have an official address, as I had rented my home to a friend. My kids came to visit and stay with me in my sister’s house for two separate five-day stretches. I still could not drive. My brother, sister-in-law and my two young nieces stayed with us to take care of me and help take care of my kids.

So I looked at the email about signing up for The Book Academy® and knew it was not the right time.

Then came January. I’d missed the window to sign up for this writing program at a huge discount. The incomparable Luvvie Ajayi-Jones’ offered a free Masterclass about The Book Academy® and I attended. And every single thing she said about her program and the reason a person should sign up spoke directly to me. Well damn.

I still did not sign up.

I thought about it every day though. Having already experienced the sacred time after a liver transplant once before, 25 years ago, I knew that I was in an era that would not last forever. This felt like the time.

Having missed every single bonus I might have been given as a gift for signing up earlier, I signed up on the last possible day.

Many voices were loud in my head. No time. No money. Too much rebuilding to do. Too many other priorities. True priorities. My health. My housing. My kids’ healing. My family’s well-being. My finances.

Still signed up. Not just for The Book Academy® but for the Accelerator version.

This essay was meant to be a write up of this past March. Because last week the admins of The Book Academy® celebrated the end of the month with us and also asked us a question.

What was our biggest challenge in March?

I paused before replying.

I read the replies of others.

I kept thinking about it, especially when I felt what felt like excuses popping up.

I pondered the difference between excuses and explanations as some memories of different events and appointments and experiences floated to mind.

Then I decided to come here and write about March. For accountability to myself. And as a writing exercise. And to be able to post a link for anyone in the cohort who wanted to read it, rather than trying to summarize in the thread what felt like a long answer to that question.

So I came here and wrote. . . about December. Heh.

Stay tuned for my next post which will (hopefully) be about March.

I started keeping a journal when I was in elementary school. Third grade, I think. I have it somewhere. It has a cornflower-blue canvas cover with yellow ducks in diagonal rows. The first entry is an enthusiastic celebration of some decision that Congress had made, with at least one “Yay!” and a few exclamation points. I did not know what was exciting about that decision but I did know that my parents were thrilled about it. I was a cute little parentified codependent eldest daughter. (Insert emoji of choice here.)

Somewhere in a box, either in my new house or my old house, is a stack of handwritten journals that I kept throughout adolescence and early adulthood.

Elsewhere, in a series of plastic bags, there are more—kept during the early years of motherhood, mostly in a yoga studio where journaling from a specific prompt was part of the practice.

I started a handwritten journal for each of my babies when they were born, modeled after the journals my own mother kept for me and my two siblings each of the starting in infancy. Hers stretched into our adulthood.

I can locate the journals I started for my older twins, each with a maximum of four entries. I am not sure where the journals for the younger twins are—hopefully in that box of journals I hope to find soon. Each of theirs has one entry, maybe two.

And I have two fat journals that sporadically cover the past five years. My habit was to pick one up, scrawl a page or two about whatever was happening that day or week, and then promptly misplace it or feel too scattered to write anything more. These entries are often undated, either because I was in survival mode or because I assumed that the actual date was so obvious as to be irrelevant. (Note: the date is most often a useful addition.)

In all of these journals throughout the years I mostly wrote when I was feeling particularly good or particularly bad. Many entries are about the angst I was feeling about whatever romantic relationship I was in or wanted to be in. There was a lot of trying to figure myself out. Of trying to quiet the noise in my head. Writing usually made me feel better or at least gave me a break from the almost-never-silent internal monologue that I thought was my personality.

handsfullx2

This is the blog I started on Blogger in March 2014. I had just become a first-time homeowner with my now ex-husband. We had nine-month old twins and I was five-months pregnant with a second set of twins. No, this was not planned. I had just returned to work or was about to return to work, after an extended maternity leave that was kickstarted early when by son decided that our birth plan would include an emergency C-section in June rather than in August, when they were due. I had just hired a nanny, who I thought of as a mother’s helper, as I planned to work from home and be with the kids as much as I possibly could.

I did not think of myself as a chronically ill person, though I had been dealing with chronic autoimmune diseases since I was eleven. I did not think of myself as medically fragile, though my best friend the doctor told described me that way, to myself. I did not consider myself disabled in any way. I nor made nor asked for any accommodations in any area of my life. My family and friends watched from near and far with great concern at the ways in which I did or did not take care of myself.

In the early 2000s, I found blogs as a reader. The white women I followed wrote primarily about motherhood. I did not notice I was only following white women. I do not remember how I found the blogs I liked so much, though I do remember the writers. Seeking out blogs about motherhood was not my intent. The first one that drew me in wrote a lot about outfits, living in NYC and eating in nice restaurants. It was the Sex in the City era. That writer got married and had kids and began writing more about being a mom. I had fallen into mommy blogs and decided to stay, because I was desperate to be a mother myself. And because, surprise surprise, mommy blogs are not just about being a mom.

My blog was almost always a thoughtful stream-of-consciousness, full of run-on sentences. My habit was to turn ideas around in my head for days and work through them before sitting down to type when I had some time or was about to explode. I almost never edited what I had written. Whatever editing was done I did as I typed, which is not a recommended writing technique.

My posts went straight to Facebook where I received gratifying feedback. It was common to receive an appreciative “me too” from other moms who liked my authentic voice. People also liked the way I showed the complicated, joyful, lonely confusion of trying to maintain an identity in new motherhood.

I also scared the shit out of people, unintentionally. My friend Giorgio told me he was afraid to read it and I never asked him to explain why. When I was still married, my aunt flew out to take care of my kids, clean and organize our house, and send me away for a weekend because she was afraid I was going to die.

Though I have gone back to read most if not all of the posts, it has been several years since doing so. I cringe, remembering some of them now. I hesitate to share the link without going back to edit some of them out. My heart quakes, remembering how sick and exhausted and lonely I was so much of the time.

But that is not all that there was. It was truly my wildest dream come true to be the mama. Life was full of joy and fun and chaos and little ones and friendships, new and old. It was also so very hard, and I was so very hard on myself. That is painful to go back and read.

And it scares me too. It shocks me that I essentially wrote an online diary and threw it like a grenade out onto the internet for anyone to read. Long, long ago I shut down most of my emotions as they related to my body, my physical health. The pain, discomfort and indignity of it all. So many people said to me, over and over again, that they did not know how I did it. I wanted to shout at them “What is the alternative that you see? Is there an option that I am missing?” Of course there were and of course I was.

My blog is complicated. Messy. Embarrasing. Powerful. Sad. Beautiful. I am so grateful it exists because without it I’m not sure how much I would even remember about those years in my life—the years in which my beautiful children came to join us.

At some point—I will have to do more writing and remembering and putting the pieces together to know the actual dates—I realized that I wrote my blog to keep myself from losing my mind, from losing myself. I was not well— physically, mentally or spiritually. I did not know how to feel or even recognize my emotions, so I threw them onto a page and hit “Publish” and felt relief because whatever it was no longer lived in my body or my mind.

I stopped posting regularly in July 2017. There are many reasons for that, to be written and shared later. When I go back to my archives, I see many unpublished drafts and those make me curious. What was I writing that I knew well enough not to share or was afraid to share? I’m glad I get to explore those when the time is right.

The last published post was on March 11, 2022.

Silence

I took a break from most writing because I started to understand that writing was letting me bypass feeling. I was not embodied at all, but I was starting to hear the little internal whispers that told me that I was finding the path to my whole self. My mind was in the driver’s seat, and had been there for almost three decades. It was time to be quiet. Or try to be quiet. Or at the very least stop immediately jumping to the written words to get out of the extreme discomfort and panic that feeling my feelings brought on. More on all of this later.

The Substack

When did I become aware of Substack? Just looked it up to learn that it was founded in 2017. I definitely did not know anything about it then. At some point the creators I was following—mostly Black and Brown women writing or speaking about liberation, yoga, anti-racism, mutual aid and the ways in which white women needed to showing up differently—started linking to their Substack. Introduction to the format made but not followed. Until now.

Within my writing silence, I had been thinking more and more about how to return to the page. My words in the written form are one of my divine gifts. Blessed to have many teachers, my self included, I was learning and being taught how to actually know and stand in my full self, imperfect and lovable. I was also beginning to understand that part of my work could be, maybe needed to be, writing to repair harm and help build new systems

Where and how to share my writing and what I was going to write about kept shifting. I knew that I needed and wanted something new. I wanted what I put out to be less of an unedited, raw, personal journal wilding its way out without a second glance. Slowing down was important, not just for the craft itself but also because part of white supremacy culture is a sense of urgency that is not the truth.

I wanted to improve as a writer and I also wanted to maintain my authentic voice, which does tend to be raw and stream-of-consciousy. My mind is quick. My curiousity vast. My interests myriad. The big-picture view (that I think I was born with), I had been growing and honing in a decades-long career, in intentional community, in movement, in recovery, in hospital beds, in school pick-up lines, in graduate school and within the pages of many, many books.

I thought about having someone create a website for me, because I was pursuing a career as a therapist and I was getting certified as a yoga instructor so I imagined a space where all of my offerings would be in one place. Becoming a therapist has been on hold due to illness. Yoga teacher certification process has been stopped due to a deeper understanding that it is not an offering I feel like the world needs from me.

I still wanted to write about motherhood but I no longer wanted that to be my main subject. I also wanted to write about liberation and anti-racism and systems of oppression and resistance and decolonization. This scared me because I was afraid of making mistakes, taking up too much space, causing harm, and inviting criticism that I was not ready to receive or respond to. Is this for me? Do I have anything true, necessary and kind to say and should it be me who is saying any of it?

I was also not sure about what or how to write about these things, and about my life, if I wanted to be a therapist.

I was also getting sicker and had much less energy. Writing and paying attention to what I was publishing felt beyond me. But I did start sharing a few longer-form posts on Facebook and Instagram about my health in 2025, partly because I was learning to reach out and ask for help. People responded with enthusiasm and support. When I mentioned that I was thinking of sharing more writing and wondering aloud (in writing) the best way to do that, my community and I were in consensus that Substack seemed liked the place to do it.

One of my friends from college responded to a Facebook post saying “Start at the beginning. . .not the liver failure but the diagnosis and the transplant.”

I wondered to myself where the beginning was.

My Book

I have wanted to write a book for a long time. A long, long time. I have also been told many times that I should write a book. This encourage came most often from one of two places. Either someone was already a fan of my writing or they were in the process of picking their jaw off the floor when I mentioned that I had given birth to two sets of twins, a year apart. Or when I said that I was waiting for a liver transplant, after having received a liver transplant nearly 25 years before.

In January 2020 I was working with a mentor. She was not a writing mentor but she had designed a program to help guide people towards making a dream a reality. Every day at 5am I would wake up to an alarm and sit down to write. Mostly I was transcribing old blog entries and making notes about what would go where. My vision was to intersperse new essays, telling stories from earlier years or more current years to add depth and background to what I had been writing about in early marriage and parenthood. My working title was “The First 5 Years.”

Cue the start of online graduate school, the start of my first romantic relationship since being divorced and the onset of Covid with two first-graders and two kindergarteners attempting remote bilingual learning while I worked full-time from home in a house where I was the only adult. It is possible that my spirit left my body once or twice during that time. The writing stopped. The dream was very much deferred.

At some point I started thinking about picking the book idea up again. I thought I could still use the same title, this time imagining that it would be about the first five years of life after the divorce. One of the reasons I had stopped regularly blogging was that I was actively in a marriage that was disintegrating. I was not sure whether I was trying to save it or escape it. I was trying to save myself and I was trying to put the kids first in everything I did. I did not know how, did not want, and wasn’t sure what I was allowed to share about what was going on in real time.

In 2022, when I published the one and only post of the year on my blog, I thought I might be ready to start really writing again.

I was not.

When I start to write that I started getting sick in March 2024 I not only have to count on my fingers to make sure that’s the date I’m thinking about, I also have to check myself to ask “Is that really when you started getting sick?”

Nope.

I was sick long before that—since before I got married—but I didn’t claim that or allow it to be so. It got worse and I ignored it harder because I did not know how to be a sick, head-of-household, divorced parent of four small children.

Early 2024 my body started jumping the shark in new, weird, seemingly-unrelated ways. I went on leave from work at the end of April that year and have not yet returned.

Kept taking care of my kiddos though. Kept driving all over the Bay Area. Went back to therapy to learn how to ask for help. Dug an ever-deepening hole of debt. Let my house fall more and more into disrepair. Spent most of my time on the couch, talking my kids through preparing food for themselves because I was too fatigued to get up. Ended up in the hospital in acute distress three separate times. Finally asked my sister to take over my life because I was failing at it and had started to see that I would not survive under my own stewardship.

Then, liver transplant in November 2025. My younger cousin gave me the gift of 60% of her perfect liver. My brain came back on line once we had a functioning liver hooked up in there, clearing out the cobwebs. I knew I had been very sick but I truly did not come close to having a real clue until I started feeling better. Holy miracle of wonder.

A firehose of clarity and wisdom immediately started spraying me full-force in the face as fourteen years of surviving, learning, healing, growing, cleaning up, repairing and aligning met my new liver. IT WAS A LOT. It is still a lot. And it is time.

My book lives somewhere in all of this. This Substack will be a mix of wildness and play and honing my writing voice. All questions welcome.

I am so glad you are here. Please stay and play. Please buy my book when it is ready.