Changing a culture can take generations, and while teaching our girls that revolutions are born from brave words and fierce actions, omitting the importance of reaction is a dangerous mistake. Trigger Warning: rape “I am certain—my body is pure physical strength.”—Tina Turner Last spring my childhood friend, Marlene, was attacked while walking two blocks from […]
How does a woman cope with not being number one? “If you could have anyone in the world for a boyfriend who would it be?” One of the most crucial questions of every girl I knew. In notes passed between desks and magic eight ball wishes. It could be anyone. It had to be someone. […]
Money helps you make the judgment call for essentials versus desires. But when your funds are zero, everything is as equally unattainable as it is up for grabs. “First the food, then the morality.” — Bertolt Brecht When my 13-year-old son came home from school on Thursday and saw me watching news clips about the […]
Think pot is just for tree-hugging hippies and deadbeat stoners? Think again. Even before the tests came back, I knew it was lupus. I’d been meeting the textbook and Internet criteria for months. In sunlight, my exposed skin broke out into pink and painful sores. Nausea and stomach cramps made even the thought of food […]
I cannot grasp anyone’s failure to understand that the worth a man can offer a woman’s life is much more valuable than anything he can give you in bed. Last year was a strange year for me in the friendship department. One of my best girlfriends, Sharon, decided I could no longer provide what she […]
Not a fan of organized religion, Traci Foust preferred to live by a different standard: Be kind, don’t judge. So when her young son announced that he wanted to join the local Baptist church, she had no choice but to let him. As I watched my AC/DC album burn in our fireplace, by order of […]
True commitment doesn’t require a ring and a set of legal documents, says Traci Foust. For 16 years my mother was romantically involved with a married man. Frank was good to our family. He loved our mother. We all knew about his “situation.” Sometimes Frank gave us birthday cards with 50-dollar bills inside them. Sometimes […]
Nothing bad ever happened in the sleepy beach town Traci Foust calls home until a mentally-ill man opened fire at a local elementary school. Think of a time in your life when you felt so safe you were actually bored. That’s where I live. Carlsbad, California. A beach resort town of tourists, yoga classes, and […]
We already know how to support our friends when their partner is sick, but what about when their partner develops a heroin addiction? There aren’t many variations on that dreaded middle-of-the-night phone call: Someone’s been in an accident, arrested, slipped away in their hospital bed before you had the chance to say goodbye. I think […]
Traci Foust hated herself for not being able to accept a man who loved both women and men, but in the process learned that it’s OK to want more than what one person can give. Christian and I started our love affair in a chat room about religious studies. He was living in a small […]
What would you say to your estranged older sister as she lay dying in her hospital bed? How do you find closure after years of fighting and abuse? The night my sister turned 49 my father called to tell me she was throwing up blood. “They think the cancer’s spread to her stomach,” he said. […]
Author Traci Foust describes her bumpy ride getting off and on pharmaceutical drugs, and dealing with mental illness as a child and as a single mother. My mother was 41 when she stopped taking her Lithium. For years she’d struggled with the side effects: weight gain, chronic dehydration, skin rashes. She chose instead to treat […]
