parents

The boundless love a parent has for their child is matched only by their capacity to embarrass them.

CHRISTMAS DINNER, ONE CHICKEN AND NEIL
When I was about four, Christmas felt magical and exciting. It would be our first Christmas in England. We had travelled down from Scotland in the family that April, with my pet mouse perched on the back window ledge. I had only started infant school in September, so there were Christmas carols being sung everyday, and we spent our time making homemade cards and decorations.
By Karol Williamina Sumner5 months ago in Families
Silentria:Chapter 6. Content Warning.
The forest narrowed around them like a closing fist. Branches clawed across the moonlit path as Aria ran, Chloe and Sadie’s hands locked in hers, their footsteps stumbling over roots and stone.
By Amber5 months ago in Families
Silentria:Chapter 5. Content Warning.
The ash did not fall. It drifted. Like black snow carried on a wind none of them could feel. Aria rose slowly, the lantern still trembling in her hands as the dark particles swirled deeper between the trees.
By Amber5 months ago in Families
Silentria:Chapter 4. Content Warning.
The branches snapped again. Closer. Aria’s body moved before her mind could catch up. She pulled Sadie behind her and reached for Chloe’s hand, gripping it so tightly Chloe winced but didn’t complain.
By Amber5 months ago in Families
Silentria:Chapter 3. Content Warning.
The hinges did not creak. That was the first thing Aria noticed. For something so old, the door opened in complete silence, as if it had been waiting for their hands and knew better than to frighten them away.
By Amber5 months ago in Families
Silentria:Chapter 2. Content Warning.
The woods began where the backyard ended. Not all at once. First came the patch of wild grass behind the rusted chain-link fence, where dandelions pushed through cracked earth and old soda cans lay half-buried in the dirt. Then the narrow trail between the pines, worn down by years of small feet and secret escapes. Beyond that, the world changed.
By Amber5 months ago in Families
Silentria:Chapter 1. Content Warning.
By the time Aria was eleven, she knew the house by sound. Not the way other children knew their homes… by the squeak of a favorite swing on the porch, or the hum of a dryer, or the comfort of a parent moving around in the kitchen before breakfast.
By Amber5 months ago in Families
The Silent Witness
For three decades, I worked behind the heavy oak doors of the American legal system. I wasn’t the one in the robes. I wasn’t the one arguing before the bench.
By Ginny Brown5 months ago in Families
The One
I know what you’re thinking. Here we go, another sappy love story. You’re totally wrong. This isn’t about a couple’s love story. Well, not in the usual way. This is about siblings.
By Alexandra Grant5 months ago in Families
The perfect chocolate substitute. Naturally sweet for your little explorer
Take a seat, and first of all, use this space to give yourself the credit you deserve. We often talk about careers, degrees, and external achievements, but we rarely stop to acknowledge the work of raising children for what it truly is: the most demanding, complex, and vital job there is.
By Veronica Ruiz5 months ago in Families
Anna Dorosh, Supporting War-Affected Children in Ukraine: Grassroots Impact and Public Service
Anna Dorosh is a Ukrainian public-sector professional working in the Cabinet Secretariat of Ukraine, with expertise in European integration and strategic communications. She is a former assistant to the Deputy Minister of Justice of Ukraine. She is the initiator of an independent charitable project supporting children in difficult life circumstances, especially families affected by war and disability, SvyatKYOU. Dorosh has drawn on earlier experience in project management, stakeholder engagement, communications, and fundraising, including work connected to the Chernivtsi City Council, to build partnerships and expand practical support for vulnerable children in Ukraine.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen5 months ago in Families
Marriage
How Losing Everything Revealed What We Actually Had THE MORNING WE LOST IT ALL 📉 The phone call came at 7:43 AM on a Wednesday morning while my husband Robert and I were eating breakfast with our two children who were arguing about whose turn it was to use the iPad, and the normalcy of this scene, the cereal bowls and the sibling bickering and the coffee growing cold while I refereed, made what followed feel like it was happening to someone else in a movie I was watching rather than in my actual kitchen in my actual life, because Robert's business partner called to inform him that their construction company was insolvent, that the bank was calling their loans immediately, that their largest client had filed a lawsuit for breach of contract, and that the personal guarantees Robert had signed on the business loans meant that our family was liable for approximately 1.7 million dollars in debt that the company could not pay, and in the approximately four minutes of that phone call our financial life which had been comfortable and secure and built on fifteen years of hard work and careful planning collapsed into a crater so deep that climbing out seemed not just difficult but genuinely impossible 📞😰
By The Curious Writer5 months ago in Families