I spent three hours early this morning researching 19th century masturbation for my next article, until I was just so goddamn sad that I had to stop. I have been doing a series for The Week where I look at the outrageous hygiene and social advice given to people 100 years ago. It’s fun, funny.…
Yesterday, as I hid in flannel sheets to find a nap I didn’t really need, I realized why I think of myself as such a mediocre mom. It’s because I thought there would be a lake. All I’ve ever had is a river. My life has been a river. No, let’s have the proper visual.…
I have a friend who is hobbled by her well-meaning mother. Her mother, we’ll call her Maude, is a woman used to being listened to and respected. She raised her children impoverished and single-handedly, and they become doctors and professors. I once complimented her ex-husband on how much I liked his daughter and he told…
They took a family photo yesterday, the first with all of us. The grandparents, and their three children with their families. I feel bad about the photo. My husband’s people are a good bunch. All of them, save Gus and I, live together in a serene little desert compound. Their three comfortable, sprawling California…
A kid’s birthday party today, one where I didn’t really know anyone. So I took extra pains, as I have learned is necessary if I don’t want to lay the groundwork as a total outcast and then have to dig myself out. An outfit both slimming, feminine and casual. (I think. I don’t know. It…
I put my son into one of those hospital cribs that have always made me shutter, a metal cage; the perfect place to suffer in. But I didn’t shutter. I laid him next to a horrendous giggling bear-robot of some sort, without the least hint of melancholy. I laid down in the pull out chair next…
I hate flat gravestones. I know they are practical. I know they make it easy to drive a roaring, chopping engine reeking of gasoline and indifference right over them. But they are not monuments to the dead, eerie and sacred like they’re supposed to be. They’re just cheesy name tags, stuck to the ground after…
I had the good fortune to be born to a family of conservative rednecks. To my further posterity, I then spent my adolescence living inside a hive of religious nutcases. Then, another blessing, was to spend my adulthood surrounded by over-educated, flaming liberals. I am not being a smart-ass. I am lucky. The only thing those…
“I swear lesbians give the best advice ever,” I said, absently, possibly offensively, to my lesbian therapist. Her office is warm and smells very strongly of lavender. The combination sometimes makes me dopey. “Seriously, I never leave a conversation with one of you guys that I don’t feel I’ve come away with something valuable.” That’s not…
I am a Girl Scout co-leader this year. I didn’t want to be. I’m brutally lazy. I like to lay down at meetings. My body rejects order and organization like a transplanted monkey liver. But there was what Gus calls, “a power vacuum,” and I was the only one to fill it. Then he…
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