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 […]
“Here you have the unexpected, glorious secret about dying. When you know it is going to happen, you can choose to make the final chapter of the story the very best one of all.” “Former lady who leaned in…” says the Twitter description beneath a photo of a beaming, golden-haired woman around my age in […]
I understand myself as genderqueer—as having a gender that lies outside of the binary of men and women. It is a feeling that seems to require explanation, but it is mine. I have felt this way my entire life, but I have never told my father. My father was a good man, so he wanted […]
Having no career, and no baby, am I arguably even a woman at all? Or am I a woman who has nothing at all? It seems not a day goes by when I’m not reading another headline arguing whether women can have it all, or, more accurately, why they can’t. In last week’s New York Times […]
I feel like I should be merry and bright and show my children a holly jolly Christmas like my mom did for me. Instead, each year I feel even more frustrated, depressed, and angry about the holidays. Aren’t the holidays supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year? Then why are we all […]
