LE went to a sleepover. Gus told me, “Don’t think about it.”He didn’t mean, control your emotions, mama bird, dry your tears. Lord no. It was his response to my tenuous observation that everything was…so much more calm and easy and nice with her away. Cripes. No constant questions, no hearing “mama?mama?mama?mama?” repeated until I get…
My daughter is obsessed with why everyone’s house is better than ours. When I tell her “Yes, but ours in paid for! And we have wall to wall laminate!” she isn’t impressed.I tell her the truth.“Well, most of your friend’s parents make more money that we do. So we have a smaller house! But it’s…
You’d think being responsible for someone else’s life would make you really uptight, but it has the opposite affect. You spend your days tending to someone else’s feces. In the before-time, you could enjoy the luxury of disgust, and silly fears. It was an indulgence, you know, to run screaming and flapping around when you saw a spider.…
When you look at yourself in the mirror, your brain smooths out the reflection for you. It automatically smears Vaseline over the lens of your mind and what you see is familiar, workable, fine. Every woman carries a gauzy camera lens and soft lighting in the toolbox of her mind. But then those surprises. Tagged…
(originally published in April, 2013) Spring Break can eat a bag of DICKS. Seriously. I…I had the worst damn week. I’m absolutely bereft over what this summer is going to be like. My daughter. Oh my daughter. She is a good girl. Willing to please, loving, positive. She is unbearable. I think it’s my…
That’s it. I quit. Hands in the air, quit. It’s official. Everything…EVERYTHING is going to harm your child. Including swaddling them. You know, swaddling. The thing that nearly every civilization in every era of history has done for all of time? Yeah, now we need to worry about THAT, too, according to The…
LE’s teacher Mrs. Z was gently molded and hand-patted from the clay of humanity into the perfect form of “Kindergarten Teacher.” She is slight and cheerful, in her early 20’s, with crystal blue eyes as wide and guiless as the babies she teaches. She laid what she called “a rubric” in front of me today at the Parent Teacher conference. It…
