Tending the Garden of My Soul by Jen Telger ***Warning: If you are currently experiencing a mental health crisis, this post could be triggering. Please proceed with caution and make a healthy choice that is appropriate to your situation.*** In 2018, my daughter innocently passed on words of wisdom that have reached much farther than she will likely ever know. Our conversation went like this: A: “Mom, do you know what I think is the prettiest thing in your garden?” Me: “What’s that,
Author: Jen Telger
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Once in a Lifetime by Jen Telger “Once in a lifetime” is a term often used to describe individual moments, snippets of life. Perfectly timed photos. Lightning strikes. Lottery draws. Grand experiences normally out of reach. Fortuitous happenstances that could never happen again in a million tries. But what happens when that once-in-a-lifetime moment lasts two-and-a-half years? Last night, many of us gathered to celebrate and remember our friend, Brian. He would’ve hated it. But it was lowkey. No big speeches or tear-jerking
Goodbye, Old Friend by Jen Telger I find myself in a quandary. How do I say goodbye to someone I haven’t spoken to in twenty years? “Gosh, Jen,” you might say. “Twenty years is a long time. Do you really need to say goodbye?” The thing is, while we haven’t spoken, save through hello’s passed through mutual friends and coworkers, what I learned from him, and what he gifted to me through who he was, are things that I rely on still today,
Summer Storm – A MicroStory by Jen Telger Raindrops slammed into the ground as if fired from a shotgun, each drop exploding like a land mine, carving its own crater in the dirt. Anthony was grateful for the flexible green canopy above his head, knowing it would bend, but was unlikely to break. This wasn’t his first summer storm, but it was the most violent. His stomach churned with equal parts nerves and excitement. “I told you we shoulda
Found My Tail Found my tail! It’s pretty sweet. If you don’t have one, you should seriously consider getting one. For a while, I thought I’d lost mine, and I could SWEAR it was a lot bigger the very first time I saw it, but there’s still enough left to wag when I’m happy, which makes my family go nuts. Mom calls it my “nubbin”, which is just a really weird word. Nubbin… Nubbin… Try saying it out loud. Weird, right? Anyway, now
New Puppy, New World You guys, my new mom put me in a kitten collar. Like for baby cats! And then, when we walked into the vet’s today for my outstanding health check-up, and mom brought me in in my little kennel, the tech at the desk looked at me expecting a cat and then said, “That is not a cat!” Of course, I’m not a cat!! Then the staff got all squidgy and cutesy and giggly with me. I charmed the socks
Adorable, Right Up Until… The world is full of mundane things. Things to which no one gives a second glance. But when you make those tiresome things smaller, they become irresistibly adorable. Hot dogs, furniture, candy bars—all pretty boring. Mini franks, tiny chairs, and snack-size candy bars—all adorable. I even read today about mini-pigs becoming a big pet fad in the UK. And so it makes perfect sense that when you scale the world down to toddler-size, it becomes too cute for words.
What’s in a Name? In April ’09, I sent an update to our family containing the following excerpt, which explains it all. It became the first post of a personal blog I continued to write while the kids were little called Rock, Paper…Diaper? Here is how it got it’s name. “I’ve been duped. Outwitted. Outplayed. Out-parented, even. Our daughter has been sleeping through the night for a while now. I don’t mind so much on the rare night she wakes up hungry/thirsty, but