Month in Review: March 2026

March 2026 in Review

March felt like a month made up of moments. Not one big defining thing, but a collection of nights out, small wins, kid milestones, and a few unexpected highs that ended up meaning more than I thought they would. It wound up being a fuller month than expected. Here's how it all shook out.

📊 Month by the Numbers

Weight: ⬇️ 6 lbs

Books: 2 

Blog Posts: 13

OMMs: 5

Savings: ⬆️ $570

Debt: ⬇️ $149.17

Runs: 0

Migraines: 8

Highlights

• Two movie nights, two very different vibes: I saw Scream 7 with my two best friends. It was campy, chaotic, and honestly just really good to be back together again. It had been too long. Later in the month, I took the boys to see Hoppers on a discount Tuesday. They loved it. I thought it was cute. We loaded up on popcorn and made a pre-movie stop at the dollar store for candy and pop, which honestly might have been their favorite part.
• Glow Night & school life: Caleb had his school glow dance and both boys had a great time. I also had a productive and helpful meeting with Holden's school that went pretty well!
• Holden’s social calendar: Holden had his first real playdate! We met up with two of his friends to go bowling (slightly chaotic, fully successful). Later in the month, he went to a roller skating birthday party where the skating was questionable but the laser tag and arcade games were elite.
• Bingo, but make it a win: We go to our community center's Bingo night every month. Sometimes it results in tears. But this month? This month delivered. Caleb won in the first round, the boys inhaled questionable pizza, and Holden ended the night by winning the big Squishmallow raffle. A full victory sweep.
• Food adventures (mixed results): We tried the K Pop Demon Hunters meal at McDonald’s (fun, chaotic, lots of nuggets), hit Dave’s Hot Chicken for the first time (too hot, immediate regret), and went to the Chinese buffet with my parents, where Holden confidently explored things no one asked him to try, including crawfish (he loves) and octopus (not a fan).
• Broadway night: My aunt and I saw Kimberly Akimbo and were completely blown away. Funny, weird, and unexpectedly heartfelt.
• Quiet financial follow-through: Now that my credit cards are paid off, I shifted my focus to what’s next. I set up a repayment plan for my retirement loan and re-enrolled in my NYS deferred comp (457) contributions. Nothing flashy, but the kind of steady, behind-the-scenes moves that actually change things long term.
• A moment I wasn’t expecting: I wrote an essay about Cindy — the baboon in Namibia I had followed and loved for years — and shared it, hoping it might somehow reach Ruben and his family (Ruben was her human "brother" who shared her life with people all over the world). I didn’t really think it would, but I tried anyway. I left comments. Tagged them in stories. Messaged his page. And after two days of attempts and with bated breath, I opened my inbox to a message back from him. He had read it. He loved it. He thanked me. Then he shared the link (with his MILLIONS of followers) on Instagram and Facebook with a really meaningful caption. His mom shared it as well. It was one of those surreal, emotional, “did that really just happen?” moments. I lived off that high for the rest of the week. As a writer, this was a really big moment for me with a lot of exposure. But as a human, it was even bigger. I wanted the family to know what she meant to me and how grateful I was to them for sharing her. To know I reached them still delights me to no end. 

📚 What I Read

Only two books this month, but both solid reads.

• The Last Party by A.R. Torre ★★★★☆
• The Family Next Door by John Glatt ★★★★☆

Favorite: The Last Party
Yearly Progress: 9 / 100

🎬 What I Watched

Movies

• Scream 7 ★★★★☆ — campy, self-aware, and exactly what you want from this franchise at this point. Saw it with my two best friends, which made it even better. A masked killer returns (again), but the fun is in how over-the-top it leans into itself. I now need to watch the rest of the series (I've only seen the first three or so).
• Hoppers ★★★☆☆ — cute, easy, and completely kid-approved. We made a full night of it with popcorn and dollar store candy. A light, family-friendly story that doesn’t try too hard and doesn’t need to.

TV

• Grey’s Anatomy — rewatch era continues (rewatch ◦ s:2 e:1–3)

Documentaries & Docuseries

• Death in Apartment 603: What Happened to Ellen Greenberg? (Hulu, 2025) ★★★☆☆ — frustrating and thought-provoking. Explores the suspicious death of a woman and the lingering question of suicide vs. homicide. I'd heard of this case before, but the details were shocking. Really well done... and managed to enrage me. (3 episodes)
• Friends Like These: The Murder of Skylar Neese (Hulu, 2026) ★★★☆☆ — a brutal case involving teenage girls that’s hard to sit with. A look at the dynamics that led to a shocking and tragic crime. This series was well done and interesting to watch. (3 episodes)
• Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God (HBO Max, 2023) ★★★★★ — completely unhinged in the best way. A deep dive into a cult built around a self-proclaimed spiritual leader that somehow gets more unbelievable the longer you watch. I honestly loved it and could not turn away. (3 episodes)
• Escaping Twin Flames (Netflix, 2023) ★★★★☆ — still fully in my cult documentary phase. Follows a group that claims to help people find their “twin flame,” but quickly spirals into manipulation and control. Crazy and compelling! (3 episodes)
• Tell Me Who I Am (Netflix, 2019) ★★☆☆☆ — fascinating topic, slower execution. A man loses his memory after an accident and relies on his twin to reconstruct their shared past — except not everything is told. (film)

Coming Up in April

We have another musical coming up (A Beautiful Noise), plans to see the new Mario movie, and, once again, hopes that the weather finally cooperates enough to get back into running. I’m aiming for a bit more consistency this month: something like a few runs, a handful of books, and continuing to chip away at both my savings and weight. Nothing dramatic... just steady progress.

See you next month.

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On My Own Two Feet (New Chapters)

New Chapters ◦ Chapter Three: The Return ◦ Entry 3

This essay is part of my New Chapters series — a collection of personal essays organized into themed chapters that trace different seasons of rebuilding and becoming.

← Previous: Not the Same, Not Yet 

On Stability, Self-Trust, and Choosing What Comes Next. 🌿

There was a version of my life not that long ago that felt like it was being held together with duct tape and adrenaline.

Everything felt urgent. Bills. Decisions. Conversations. I wasn’t thinking five steps ahead. I was thinking about how to get through the week without something else breaking.

During the divorce, my finances were the clearest reflection of that chaos. Credit card balances climbing. Interest compounding. Payments that felt like bailing water out of a boat with a teaspoon.

I told myself it was temporary. That once things settled, I’d sort it out.

In February, the credit cards were finally paid off.

After years of carrying them. After watching them grow during instability. After months of slowly chipping away at them.

They hit zero.

But what I didn’t realize then was that it wasn’t just about the balances. It was about how powerless I felt inside of them.

When money feels unstable, everything feels unstable. You don’t feel free to make decisions. You feel cornered by them. You calculate constantly. You brace constantly. You adapt constantly.

You survive.

Somewhere along the way, that started to change.

Not overnight. Not with a dramatic reset. Just small, steady decisions made over and over again. Tracking instead of avoiding. Paying a little extra when I could. Choosing long-term relief over short-term comfort.

The numbers eventually moved.

But more importantly, so did I.

For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel like I’m one unexpected expense away from panic. I don’t check my account with dread. I don’t feel like my life could tip over because of one misstep.

I built breathing room.

Breathing room doesn’t just change your bank balance. It changes your posture. It changes the way you walk into rooms. It changes how you decide what you will tolerate and what you won’t.

And that breathing room has changed more than my bank balance.

It’s changed how I think about my future.

When you’re in survival mode, you don’t dream. You cling. You make decisions based on fear. You hold onto what’s in front of you because you don’t trust that you could land on your feet if it disappeared.

But when you know you can stand on your own, something shifts.

You stop scanning every decision for danger. You start scanning for alignment.

You start asking different questions.

Not “How do I hold this together?”

But “What do I actually want?”

That’s new for me.

I’m thinking about career growth in a way that feels expansive instead of desperate. I’m not looking for something to save me. I’m looking for something that fits. I’m thinking about where I want to live, not just where I can afford to exist. I’m thinking about opportunities without immediately calculating whether I’d survive the risk.

I don’t feel rescued.

I feel capable.

That’s the difference.

No one swooped in. No dramatic bailout. No external fix.

Just months of quiet, unglamorous work: steady payments. Clearer boundaries. More intentional choices.

It’s strange how invisible this kind of rebuilding is while you're in it. There’s no applause for paying off credit cards slowly. No celebration for choosing stability over impulse. No milestone marker for becoming less reactive.

But internally, it feels enormous.

Because for the first time since my life split open, I feel like I’m not rebuilding around fear.

I’m rebuilding around strength.

The stability isn’t flashy. It doesn’t look like a new house or a fancy car or some dramatic reinvention yet. It looks like spreadsheets and routines and showing up consistently.

It looks like standing up on my own two feet and realizing I’m not wobbling anymore.

I didn’t just fix my finances. I paid off the credit cards that once felt impossible. And somewhere between the first payment and the last, I stopped waiting to be steadied.

I steadied myself.

Visit the New Chapters landing page to explore each chapter and read the story in order.

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What If We Printed One? (One Minute Memoir)

A Memoir on Family Brainstorming, Things We Could Have Bought, and Other Unnecessary Objects

Setting: March 2026

Most evenings at dinner lately, the conversation turns to the 3D printer. Not because we need anything, but because we can. Someone throws out an idea and we all build on it from there.

“Caleb, you should print a French horn for your band teacher,” I say.

“Or a whole music staff,” my dad adds.

“Wait. What instrument does she actually play?”

Phones come out. Screens get turned across the table. Someone finds something, passes it over, and the question always follows: “Could you print that?”

At some point, Caleb started keeping a list in the Notes app on his phone. Just a running collection of things to make next.

The funny part is that most of the things on that list already exist. They’re things we could easily buy, usually for a few dollars, and definitely in less time than it takes us to make them.

We’ve already spent hours printing things that fall into that category. A toothbrush holder that took most of the day. Fidget toys. Replacement doll shoes for my mom's collection. Balloon dogs. Small baskets for our book counter numbers. A replacement back cover for a Wii remote we thought was gone for good.

None of it was necessary. None of it was urgent. And all of it took significantly longer than just buying it.

That’s what makes it a little hard to explain.

Why spend hours printing something that already exists? Why wait for it to build, layer by layer, when you could just click “add to cart” and be done with it?

There isn’t really a good answer.

It’s novelty. A little pointless. Completely unnecessary.

And still, every time a print finishes, the boys run upstairs to see it. Sometimes they argue over who gets to scrape it off the build plate.

When we first got the printer, we stood there watching the very first layer go down. Just a thin line of melted plastic slowly tracing its shape. We watched it like it was magic.

Now the house is slowly filling with things that didn’t need to exist. And somehow, that’s not the part that matters.

The part that matters is the moment someone pauses mid-conversation and says, “Wait… what if we printed one?”

And just like that, we’re all leaning in again, turning our screens toward each other, trying to see if we can.

This post is part of my One-Minute Memoir series — short reflections on small moments that still manage to say something big.

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A Season of Thrillers

On reading habits, fragmented attention, and the books that pull you through

I’ve always been the kind of reader who moves around.

Whenever someone asks what I read, I tend to answer with “a little bit of everything.” Memoirs. Mysteries. Romance. Chick lit. Women’s fiction. Young adult. True crime. I’ve never been loyal to one genre for very long. My reading life has always been a little scattered, a little curious, a little of everything.

Recently, though, I noticed something strange. Not while reading. While tracking.

I built a new reading tracker at the beginning of the year. I log each book I read and categorize it in a variety of ways. One of the columns asks for genre, which means every time I finish a book I have to stop for a second and categorize it.

Mystery. Romance. Literary fiction. Thriller.

After entering a few books, I started to notice a pattern.

Thriller.
Thriller.
Thriller.
Thriller.

It wasn’t intentional. I hadn’t decided to read a bunch of thrillers. I hadn’t set out to do a “thriller month” or a themed reading stretch. But once I started logging them, it was impossible to ignore.

Nearly everything I’d read this year fell into the same category.

And that made me curious.

Because I still like the other genres. I still enjoy memoirs and women’s fiction and romance and YA. None of those have disappeared from my reading life. They just aren’t pulling me the way thrillers are right now.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that thrillers do something very specific that other genres don’t.

They move.

They are built for momentum. Short chapters. Cliffhangers. New information constantly appearing. Every chapter quietly nudging you forward: just one more.

If your attention is fragmented, thrillers are forgiving in a way other books aren’t. You don’t need long stretches of quiet focus. You can read a few pages here, a chapter there. The story grabs you again almost immediately.

Some books ask for patience. Thrillers don’t. They grab your sleeve and pull. And lately, that kind of momentum has been exactly what my brain seems to want.

Part of it might be escape.

Not the cozy kind. I’ve always liked darker stories anyway. True crime, mysteries, things that are a little strange or unsettling. Thrillers sit right in the middle of all of that. They’re familiar territory.

But they also do something else: they make reading easy.

Not intellectually easy, necessarily. But structurally easy. The story keeps pushing forward whether your brain feels sharp that day or not.

And sometimes that’s exactly the kind of book you need.

There are seasons of reading where you want something slow and thoughtful. Something that sits with you for a while. Memoirs do that well. So does literary fiction.

But there are other seasons when what you really want is a book that simply carries you.

You open it. You start reading. And suddenly you’re a hundred pages in.

Thrillers are very good at that.

I suspect this phase will eventually pass. My reading habits tend to wander, and sooner or later something else will catch my attention. Maybe memoirs again. Maybe romance. Maybe something quieter.

But for now, when I open my tracker and start entering genres, the answer is usually the same.

Thriller.

Right now, they’re the only stories that don’t ask anything from me.

They just take over and carry me for a while.

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The Bigger I Am, The Smaller I Shrink

On Size and the Permission to Be Seen

I have lost more than 100 pounds twice.

The first time, I did it through sheer will. Counting. Tracking. Exercising for hours. Controlling everything I could.

The second time, I had surgery.

Neither was easy. Both required discipline. Both demanded something from me.

And after that second loss, something shifted.

I didn’t just weigh less. I moved differently.

I got LASIK eye surgery. I went to an esthetician to learn how to do my makeup. I bought clothes I wouldn’t have tried before. I took pictures of myself almost every day because I couldn’t believe what I looked like.

Holden or Caleb would take outfit-of-the-day photos for me in the yard. I’d scroll through them later like I was studying someone else. I looked lighter, sharper, more defined.

More visible.

My confidence wasn’t perfect. Even at 118 pounds, I fixated on the loose skin. My stomach didn’t match the fantasy. No number would have fixed that.

But I was there. In the frame. In the photos. In my own camera roll.

Then life shifted.

Divorce. Moving. A job change. Stress layered on top of stress. Structure dissolved. Some of the weight came back... not all of it, but enough to notice. Enough to feel.

And with it, I noticed something else.

I stopped reaching for the camera.

There are almost no recent photos of me on my phone. I take one and immediately see my face as too round, my body as too soft, my angles all wrong. I delete it before it has a chance to exist.

And that's where it starts.

It’s subtle at first. Easy to miss. But it shows up in small ways. I speak less. I hesitate. I pull back. I assume I am less desirable, less impressive, less worthy of attention.

It doesn't stay contained to just photos.

The bigger I am, the smaller I shrink.

 

Not physically, but in the way I show up. In the things I hold back from, the ways I make myself smaller without saying it out loud.

And so I tell myself I’m just waiting. I’ll feel better when I lose it again. I’ll take pictures again when I look better. I’ll put myself out there when I’m smaller. As if visibility is something I have to earn.

And that's how I end up starting over. 

 

Recently, I started another weight loss journey.

I missed the sharper jawline. The flatter stomach. The version of myself that felt easier to photograph, easier to take up space in.

But it was also about control.

After everything shifted — my life, my home, my routines — I felt untethered. Like too much of my life had moved at once. My body felt like another thing slipping.

Watching my food again, watching the number move, paying attention in a way I hadn’t been... it gave me something steady when everything else felt uncertain.

And I can feel it already, down more than 25 pounds so far. The subtle lift. The steadiness. The structure returning. The way my confidence ticks up slightly when I catch my reflection and don’t immediately flinch.

And the way I start to feel a little more acceptable in my own skin.

That’s the part that unsettles me.

Because it tells me how closely I’ve tied my sense of worth to my size.

I can trace this thinking all the way back to high school. I remember crash dieting with a friend before a movie date with two boys. The goal wasn’t health. It wasn’t strength. 

 

It was to be wanted.

Somewhere along the way, I internalized a version of the same equation: that smaller meant safer, more lovable, more worthy of being chosen. And even when I got close to that version of myself, it never quite held.

Even at my smallest, I still found something wrong. The skin. The angles. The way nothing ever quite looked how I wanted it to. The finish line kept moving. I’d get there, and then immediately start looking for the next thing to fix.

What I’m starting to understand is that I’ve been bargaining with my body for permission. Permission to be photographed. Permission to be in photos with my kids instead of behind the camera. Permission to feel confident, to take up space, to exist without constantly editing myself down.

I know, logically, that my weight does not determine my intelligence, my work ethic, my resilience, my ability to rebuild. But knowing that and feeling it are not the same thing.

Because I still feel it.

I feel it in the way I second-guess myself. In the way I quiet my own voice. In the way I shrink myself down without even realizing I’m doing it.

The bigger I am, the smaller I become.

Not physically, but in presence. In how much of myself I allow to be seen, how much space I take up, how willing I am to be in the frame instead of just around it. 

 

I disappear from my own life in small, quiet ways: fewer photos, fewer risks, less boldness. I keep waiting to reappear.

And maybe that's the part I need to stop doing.

Not waiting. Not postponing. Not deciding I'll show up later, when I look different.

Maybe this time, the real work isn't just about losing weight.

Maybe it's about learning to show up anyway.

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Unexpected Caller (One Minute Memoir)

A Memoir on Extroverted Children, FaceTime Ambushes, and Parental Discomfort

Setting: March 2026

This year, I’m experiencing something new as a parent.

Holden has real friends. Not just classmates he mentions occasionally. Actual friends he texts, calls, FaceTimes, and plays Roblox with. They seem to communicate constantly.

This is unfamiliar territory for me. I am shy and socially awkward. Caleb is more like me. Quiet, a little reserved. The whole “kids casually calling each other and chatting for an hour” thing was never really part of our household before.

Holden, however, has embraced it fully.

Lately he’ll leave his computer open on FaceTime while they talk, which means the camera is usually pointed somewhere into the living room. If I’m sitting on the couch behind him, or walking past the room, I’m suddenly part of the background of their conversation.

I try not to think about it.

One evening they were FaceTiming on Holden’s phone instead.

Phone calls alone are already outside my comfort zone. FaceTime is even worse. A video call removes the comforting illusion that no one can see you.

A few times Holden has asked if I want to say hello to his friend.

I have politely declined.

“Oh. No. That’s okay.”

While they were talking one night, they started discussing the possibility of a playdate.

From across the room, Holden called out that he wanted to go to his friend’s house sometime soon. Without looking up from my book, I waved vaguely in his direction.

“Sure. That’s fine. Just have his mom text me and we’ll figure something out.”

I assumed the matter was settled. Instead, Holden stood up.

Before I fully understood what was happening, he had crossed the room and was holding the phone directly in front of my face. My face was now on the screen.

And on the other side of that screen was his friend’s dad.

I was not emotionally prepared for this.

“Hi,” he said cheerfully. “Yeah, he’s been talking about maybe having a playdate with Holden soon, if he’d like to come over sometime.”

I couldn’t even make eye contact.

Staring vaguely off to the side, I muttered something like, “Yeah, sounds good… maybe over the weekend.”

And then it was over.

No plans finalized. No details established.

I avoided eye contact with the phone for the rest of the night.

This post is part of my One-Minute Memoir series — short reflections on small moments that still manage to say something big.

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