A year ago, a tornado hop-scotched through our town. It was past midnight, and I was watching a movie at home with our teenagers. When our phones screamed a long, loud beep, we switched to local news to see a meteorologist — sleeves rolled up to the elbows — urging viewers to get into a safe place. A tornado had been spotted in the heart of town. For the next 10 minutes, we huddled in a closet under the stairs, listening to the staccato sound of hail. We heard the warning sirens wail and felt our ears pop. I remember gripping the closet doorknob, praying the door would stay closed and be a barrier between us and the storm. After […]

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I used to be a fidgeter. I’d tap on things and bounce my leg so fast that Tom would sometimes reach over and put his hand on my knee as if to say, “Enough. That’s driving me nuts.” Fidgeters don’t often realize that our small yet frenetic movements can make the table shake just enough to be annoying. Over the years, I’ve calmed down the leg bouncing so I won’t look like I just guzzled a gallon of energy drinks. But yesterday, I heard something that made me think maybe I was onto something with all that fidgeting, and I didn’t even know it. I was listening to a podcast by a neuroscientist named Andrew Huberman, Ph.D., who is also […]

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I have a long relationship with waiting rooms. I’ve attended medical appointments for three kids, two dogs, one cat, and one husband. For nearly a decade, I also waited in rooms with my dad, which was tricky because he had dementia and couldn’t remember why we were there. Less than a year after Dad died, my mother (who has always been an overachiever) got diagnosed with not one but two separate, unrelated cancers — a shock that sent us down a winding road filled with waiting rooms in two different cancer clinics in two cities that are three hours apart. Spoiler alert: Everyone is doing well now and enjoying good health again. The waiting rooms were well worth the outcome, […]

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A windsock shaped like a hot air balloon with a spiral tail is suspended above our backyard deck. When the wind blows, the balloon spins, and the spiral twirls below it, catching my eye when I walk past the window. Maybe I notice that spiraling tail because the windsock isn’t the only thing around here that spins. I do it, too, except my version isn’t nearly as pretty. Unlike the windsock, my spiral is powered by thoughts — random ones, weird ones, and scary ones. Here’s an example of how it happens. The other day, I was folding a warm load of towels I’d just scooped out of the dryer. Just a normal chore on a normal day full of […]

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In 1995, I got my first job after college from a “help wanted” ad posted in a newspaper’s classified ads. (Remember those?) The headline on the ad said they were looking for an “aspiring journalist” to serve as assistant to the newspaper’s executive editor. At the time, I didn’t know if I was aspiring to be a journalist, but I was aspiring to pay rent and buy food. I was aspiring to put my newly earned English degree to good use. So, I drove to an office building and dropped off my resume, which was printed on actual paper because no one knew what a PDF file was back then. About a week later, I got called in for an […]

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Have you ever gotten good at the wrong thing? I think it might have happened to me. Yesterday, I read this article about the myth of multitasking — how what we once thought of as skillful juggling is nothing more than rapid switching from one task to another and then back again, over and over. But all that switching not only reduces the quality of work on each task, it also eats up extra time as the brain tries to refocus. Multitasking is less of a smart work strategy and more like a hyper puppy getting distracted by an army of passing squirrels. I worry that motherhood made me such a prolific multitasker that I may have forgotten how to […]

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By Gwen Rockwood, newspaper columnist and mama of 3 Let me set the scene. We were at a restaurant with the whole family, including my mom, all three of our college kids, plus two roommates brought home by our 20-year-old son Jack, who was in town for spring break. His roommates were both born and raised in Michigan, and this was their first trip to a city in the South. We were on a culinary mission to show them the best Southern cuisine has to offer. With plates loaded with barbecue brisket, ribs, green beans, burnt ends, and mac and cheese, we navigated through the bustling barbecue joint to the enclosed patio out back. We settled down at a long […]

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I’ve learned a lesson this week, and here it is: Sometimes, it’s okay to lower your standards. For the 26 years we’ve been married, I’ve told Tom that we would not become one of those couples who buy a monstrosity of a sofa no matter what “cool” things it could do. I refused to sacrifice beauty for bells and whistles because it shouldn’t be a choice. In a perfect world, all furniture buyers should get both. But alas, we are far from a perfect world. And when Tom convinced me to go furniture shopping a few days after Christmas, I was in a weakened state. Worn out from all the shopping, wrapping, decorating and cooking, I just wanted to sit […]

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My husband and I were born five years and two days apart in March. Since it’s birthday season again, here are 52 things I’ve noticed about turning 52. Numbers are not my thing. I struggle to remember the exact age I am during any given year. Has this ever happened to you? My shortcut is to ask Tom how old he is and then subtract five. If Tom isn’t around, I subtract 1973 from the current year and attempt to do the math in my head. But I inevitably screw it up during the “carry the one” part. So, I resort to using the calculator app on my phone. Tom tells me this is the year I turn 52 and […]

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When our three college kids are home for a visit and we go out to eat, we follow a protocol. We usually ask for a big booth and slide into it in a particular order – with our two left-handed kids sitting together. Over the years, we’ve learned that when a lefty sits to the right of a righty, elbows collide. So, we’ve learned to arrange ourselves to give everyone room to move, no matter which hand holds the fork. I love lefties, partly because I’m the mother of two of them and because the history of left-handedness is so interesting. Only about 10 percent of the human population is left-handed, which means there are more than 700 million left-handed […]

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