Think for a moment about a blank slate character in any medium with no gendered attributes. Do you assume it is male unless you are given clear markers of femininity? As a feminist, and father of two girls, I am hyper-vigilant about how gender and sexism pervade everything, and I try to correct, or at […]
When my car is inching along the freeway and people in nearby cars are stone faced, irritated, or in a texting frenzy, I wonder: What is this all for? School teaching is the kind of work that doesn’t stop when you leave the classroom. You bring it home. Grading, planning, preparing. You get up in […]
She was a beautiful woman, long legs, lovely face, curvy figure—why couldn’t she see it? Why couldn’t she see beauty in me? My grandmother’s funeral was last week, in a small town in Illinois where a gaggle of sad looking geese huddled together for warmth on a frozen lake in front of a church on […]
In the life of an over-doer, parenthood is a kind of torture therapy. You get over yourself by having no time for yourself. At the height of my most successful period as a young writer in my 20s, I was also at my most miserable. I hosted a weekly literary reading series in the red-hued […]
The comfort of the typical day, the normal, even the boring—it’s a luxury we don’t appreciate enough. When I was growing up, my parents always made a big deal about birthdays and holidays, which always involved multiple parties, many traditions, and even more gifts. As a result, I used to put a lot of stock […]
I loved her, but not through my actions. And when all was said and done, I had proved nothing but my ability to nurse a grudge. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about an old friend who died suddenly a few years ago. We had each turned 30 the year she passed away from a […]
It wasn’t until after I became a mother at age 34 that I began to understand where terms like “Mommy’s little helper” and “Mommy juice” came from. With alcoholism and addiction strong in my family line, I grew up with a deep anxiety that someday this condition might wake up inside me, too. Never able […]
When you’re at the grocery store, people don’t comment on the food selection in your cart in the name of “trying to be helpful.” Through mass media, we’ve been bombarded with messages that the “normal” size is actually thin. And this assumption that you need to be thin in order to be OK and normal […]
