Adventures In Motherhood

  I wrote a travel memoir and have landed a Pacific Northwest publisher! Happy tears. I did it.    Quite possibly the hardest thing I’ve ever done—besides parenting four children and getting that job at the CIA. I’m living proof that lifelong dreams do come true when you refuse to give up and never stop believing in yourself! Thank you to everyone who has shared in this journey, cheered me on, read my words, and believed in this book. Now, let’s make it a bestseller.  Grief, Grace, and Garlic Naan is coming to a bookstore near you this spring

The anniversary of my late father’s death hit me differently this year. I credit Ali and a sound bath in India two years ago for rewriting the grief narrative in my head that played on repeat year after year. ****** I spotted the shop’s wooden sign: Alibaba Arts , tucked just around the corner from our hotel, and found myself barefoot, stepping into a large metal bowl as if this were the most natural thing a 51-year-old mother of four could do halfway around the world with a total stranger. I had to trust the moment, and the odd, magnetic force that pulled me into Ali’s shop. I stood still, eyes closed, as Ali banged the brass-looking bowl with a cloth-covered mallet—ten, twenty times, without pause. I could sense him moving around me as the vibrations rose from my feet, up through my legs, my chest, my teeth. In his other hand, he held a smaller bowl, which he tapped as he circled it around my head. Tapping alternated between the bowl beneath me and the one above, the sound shifting f...