Samantha Branch

I had a voracious appetite for books as a child. My mother paraded me and my 3 siblings to the library every week in the summer, and while my siblings grabbed a book or 2 off of the shelves (that they may or may not open up throughout the week), I loaded up my arms with more books than I could carry. Seven, eight, maybe nine books that I intended to read over the next several days until we made the pilgrimage back to the building that housed these windows into worlds outside of mine. Curled up in my bed back at home, I dove into pages that sparked my imagination and gave me zest for a life outside of the four walls of my very pink bedroom.    I had my first child when I was practically a child myself. Relatively clueless about babies and their lack of attention span, I started buying and collecting children’s books, anxious to read him Dr. Seuss and  Goodnight Moon . Finally in the midst of toddlerhood, he learned the wonder and excitement of cozying up and hearing a stor...

My youngest sleeps with a little black lantern every single night. Part of the bedtime routine is finding the lantern, which inevitably gets lost in a sea of blankets and sheets through the twists and turns of the night. Once it’s been found, I turn the light on and she holds it close, ready to settle in for the night. Her whole face illuminated by the dim light of a cheap battery operated lantern, she smiles contentedly. “Snuggle with me, Mom. Lie here with me.” Fear subsides. Calm.    There’s something so unsettling about darkness. I turned 40 this year, and then seemingly overnight everything started falling apart. My 18-year marriage hit a major snag. My anxiety decided to manifest into frequent panic attacks that would wreak havoc on my entire body. My oldest child started visiting college campuses and casually mentioning that he might be interested in joining the military, thus exacerbating the already out-of-control anxiety. After 18 years of being a stay at home mom, I...

What do you know? What are you still learning?    Things I know    I had my first kid when I was 23 and then just kept having them, so I was a young mom and so frequently dominated by pregnancy brain that people probably just thought I was dumb and ditzy. I know now that when the preschool teachers assign you to bring the chicken nuggets for the party, they are all expecting you to just stop by Chick-fil-A and grab a tray of nuggets. They are NOT expecting you to go to the store, buy a big bag of dinosaur nuggets, cook them at your house and then bring them up to the school lukewarm and slightly soggy.    It is also a given that when you bring Valentines cards for your kid to hand out at school, there should be some kind of candy or fun surprise attached to the card. Though they will tell you that it’s perfectly fine that you just dropped off a bag of sad, little cards, they are just being nice, and every other mom has created a butterfly out of a lollipop ...

We were an unlikely duo from the start. She walks into a room and commands all the attention with her confident stride; I shyly walk into a room and quickly make a beeline for the most inconspicuous seat. She is tall and beautiful and turns every head; I am average and unimpressive and easily disappear in a crowd. She is smart, savvy, and climbing her way up the corporate ladder; I’m a stay at home mom with four kids trying to climb my way out of the piles of laundry that are constantly accumulating. For whatever reason, her Enneagram 7 energy just clicks with all of my Enneagram 9-ness.     Grace strode into my life on a Wednesday evening several years ago. She was trying out a church community group that my family was a part of, and maybe it was that we were both from Oklahoma, or maybe I was just desperate for a friend in that season of life, but I did something highly out of character and invited her to grab coffee with me the next week. I ambushed her with a barrage ...