Clare Marlow

When I was growing up, my dad frequently took us on Saturday adventures in the desert. We lived on the outskirts of Phoenix, and he always had some kind of four-wheel drive vehicle, so his goal was to get us as “off-road” as possible without my mom passing out. She would pack lunch and my brother, sister and I would pile in the back of the truck or SUV, and we’d go hunting for creeks and ghost towns and old mines. My dad was famous for taking roads that only he could see. He’d say, “Let’s go this way!” and my mom and us kids would peer through the windshield at the dirt and rocks and tumbleweeds and say, “We don’t really

Just before I left the nail salon after getting long-awaited pedicures with my visiting daughter, I flipped through a pile of magazines at the dryer and caught this Cosmopolitan headline: ”You Deserve Great Sex.” It wasn’t the sex part that gave me pause; that’s typical Cosmo (a magazine I always check to assure is hidden from inquisitive young eyes in the grocery store checkout line). It was the first two words—You Deserve—that sent my mind spinning, because it was about the fourth time in the past week that I’ve seen those words on something aimed at women. They’re everywhere: magazine covers, Pinterest boards, Instagram posts, billboards, product packaging, and interrupting Carrie Underwood on my radio. According to pretty much every advertiser in

Oh good grief, you say, you’re not addicted to your smartphone! You just like it, and, you know, it’s how you communicate with your friends and family. And you get such great ideas from Pinterest and Instagram! And your friend’s mom is having surgery across the country, so it’s absolutely necessary to check Facebook to find out how it went! And your kids need to be picked up and you need to be ready! I get it! Because if my iPhone doesn’t ding or I don’t see an alert show up on my Snapchat icon every 30 seconds or so, I have to check! Did I miss it? I. CAN’T. MISS. IT! Well, actually, I can. And you can, too. Because the truth is,

Exactly 12 hours before the Orlando nightclub massacre, I sat at a window in Chipotle and saw a police officer get into his car to go back on duty after a late lunch. He was young and handsome, and I instantly thought of the 20-something men in our family, men we love, men we would fear for if they were wearing his pressed black uniform. He confidently and calmly drove away and I thought, You, young cop, leaving Chipotle with your belly full, your mind perhaps on your afternoon patrol ahead, or maybe on something else; a girlfriend, tonight’s Stanley Cup playoffs, your next day off. You, young cop, I’m praying for you. I hope your mama prays for you, but even

I remember the first time I walked through a store after my first husband died. It was like walking on Mars; I was an alien in a foreign land. I looked like everyone else in Walmart that day, but I was a completely altered human being. I was struggling to simply put one foot in front of the other, to actually find and place a few grocery items into my basket, that in the grand scheme of things are meaningless to life. And no one knew. No one could tell by looking at me that I just lost my husband; that I felt like I might collapse in a puddle at any moment and melt away like the Wicked Witch of the West.