impossible Archives - THE AWKWARD MOM

Tag: impossible

On Raising Teenagers, and Other Frightening Impossibilities

Reading Time: 5 minutes

So I have a teenager, and another just about. Most of me is tickled pink about all the real conversations we get to hold, all the fun we have as a maturing family, all the crazy jokes they tell me that leave all of us laughing.

And there’s this leeettle part of it that scares the bejeebies out of me.

Seemingly separate note: I have recently acquired an agent for a non-fiction book I’m writing, which makes my heart do little cartwheels of happiness. It was a moment I wasn’t sure would ever happen. read more

When Helping Hurts [You], Part III: When Aisha Died

October 7, 2016 / Janel Breitenstein / 0 Comments

Reading Time: 4 minutes

The phone connection sounded a bit like Oliver, one of my closest Ugandan friends, was crushing newspapers on the other end; I held the phone an inch from my ear. But I didn’t miss what made my hand fly to my chest: “Aisha…she passed. It was just too late. Things were already too bad.”

Aisha. Perhaps you remember her from this photo, snapped from my phone two and a half months ago, outside a mud hut in the slums of Namuwongo. She’s the young mother of four kids. A twenty-something.