I am scared of erecting a wall of arrogance by telling myself that I will raise my daughter to be stronger than a man with a gun who is hell-bent on taking her, who has thought of nothing else but taking her no matter how hard I hold on to her in the bathtub. The […]
What is it about this particular milestone that we hold so sacred that we’re humorless about it? Is it because school is the first environment our kids enter without us, and so serves as a proving ground of parenting? If your child is crying, is it because you haven’t done enough to prepare them for […]
I’m angry at the world’s eagerness to see Tony as your rock instead of seeing you as the rock—for yourself and for all women. And I wish we were doing a better job of thanking you for it, Asia. Dear Asia Argento, Like millions of people far-flung across the globe, I am a rabid fan […]
We watched Bourdain be moved by the ways others live in this world. We watched him share in their joy. We watched him confront their suffering and his own. To make anybody feel good is an extraordinary ability, but it is also exhausting. “Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting […]
How much we can sacrifice depends on how many other places in our lives we may be needed. In February, my 4-year-old daughter came down with the flu (yes, she had her flu shot). We got lucky—the virus never became life-threatening for her, and she was mostly over it within a few rough days, back […]
I’ve habitually, if unconsciously, compared myself to other white women who, in far greater numbers than women of color, are granted competitor status in America’s Olympics of life. “Stop talking to her. That girl is your enemy.” These are the words of Tonya Harding’s mother, LaVona, to a pre-teen Tonya at her skating lesson in […]
When a new colleague, hired just this year, came to my office for the first time, she said, “So, judging by your walls, it would probably be OK to have a photo of my stepkids on my desk, right?” Right. It never occurred to me to put my job search on hiatus while I was pregnant. […]
What I want is for women’s choices regarding fertility to be supported, full stop. I want our privacy respected. About a week after my daughter was born, I was nursing her on the couch for the literal 11th hour in a row. She had weight gain issues at the beginning of her life, had lost […]
An equitably responsible life between a man and a woman should not be seen as a rare wonder, but an expectation. Women of a certain age often describe my husband as a gentleman. I met Jason at a graduate school party, a party I threw at my apartment in Columbus, Ohio, a party where, after […]
I’m tired of “tireless” as the only adjective that defines a good mom. It’s the last two weeks of the academic year, when my hours as a professor grow desperate with the grading of final papers, replying to last-ditch emails from frantic students, and attending senior week events—the symposiums and ceremonies that fill up the […]
Shame. It may be the single most corrosive force of our time. When my husband and I were in our final year of the MFA program where we met, we were each responsible for producing a book-length thesis. Jason and I had started dating in our first year and moved in together quickly, realizing that […]
The past year has been particularly brutal for parents, a year of dead children. The world is at least/ fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative/estimate, though I keep this from my children./For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird./For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,/ sunk in a lake.—Maggie Smith, […]
