K A T E   L E W I S

Your young son, only five but already a committed follower of rules, will call out. Mama. He will alert you that your toddler daughter’s sunglasses, pink cat-eyes with rhinestone edges that sparkle in the brilliance of the summer sun, have slipped beneath the water. You won’t realize what he means: that they are still on her face; that she is beneath the water. 

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You will say you’ll be there in a minute.

I sat up slowly, then tried to stand, but the pain was agonizing. I gripped my husband’s arm so tightly I left white stripes on his skin.

Nine years earlier, we’d stood before our loved ones and vowed to keep standing by each other, for better or worse. The “or” held a lot of weight for me then, as though we had a choice between the two. As though we might just need to work harder through the one to earn back the other.

Like many young couples, we’d been filled with hope and confidence, a certainty that we could shape the world and our lives within it any way we wished.

As a work-from-home writer and a stay-at-home parent, I find that the parenting typically tilts the scale during the waking hours of my two small children – especially with an almost 2-year-old daughter who has a propensity for climbing pantry shelves, tasting dish soap and smuggling eyeliner out of my makeup drawer.

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My work, when it’s done, is crammed into naptimes or after bedtime stories. The fact that my work often goes unseen by my children, now and probably later, is something that often worries me.

​One of the most important actions parents can take is to model the kind of relationships you want your children to have and the behavior you’d like to see. If you’re hoping to raise children who treat each other respectfully and choose kindness, ensure your own behavior toward others sets that standard consistently.

The memory thief came for my grandmother when I was sixteen. We were cleaning up from lunch, the sandwich crumbs just swept from the laminate countertop, the crinkled plastic bag of bread wrapped and stored out of sight. She paused in the immaculate kitchen, quiet for a long moment before turning back to me, tears shimmering at the edges of her eyes.

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I can’t believe it, she said. I forgot to feed you.

No amount of kind adamance would persuade her otherwise. She cried, convinced she had failed me. I ate a second lunch, each swallow an attempt to change the truth.   

Two in the morning is when my own fear often strikes, shaking me from slumber with terror-filled regularity. There’s so much that can go wrong when you are raising tiny people. Human beings are so fragile. In the middle of the night, my mind catalogues all the ways my children could be lost, and my heart clutches at the knowledge that life is unpredictable and hard and sad, and any of those awful possibilities could come true.

A series of barrier islands and land along the North Carolina coast that stretches for well over 100 miles, the Outer Banks are the setting for many a romantic novel. Yet this laid-back locale offers much more than windswept seascapes. 

So much of the work of holidays unfolds like this, downstairs while children are sleeping, in kitchens while extended family relaxes around the glow of the TV or tosses a football amongst russet leaves, in the last-minute arrangement of cheese and salami slices into an artistic charcuterie board before visitors arrive.