Dear Dana is a bi-weekly advice column for humans who engage in romantic relationships. Please send your dilemmas, issues, conundrums, assumptions, conflicts, anxieties, worriments, obstacles, complications, predicaments, queries, questions, and any other synonyms for “problems” to deardana@rolereboot.org. Dear Dana: My wife and I were big Hillary Clinton supporters. We went to rallies, canvassed the neighborhood to […]
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, […]
Just as my family desperately needed an adult to shepherd it through our tough times, this country needs civil servants who are willing to set aside avarice, partisanship, and ambition to take control in Washington. When I was a child, I cared for — and mostly raised — my younger siblings. My father was often […]
How do you quell your fear when everyone around you is equally afraid? What a fucking weird year it was to have anxiety. I’ve spent years trying to get used to how my mind works, how it interprets slight inconveniences as mortal threat and responds by ramping up my adrenaline, how I have to spend […]
I’m waiting for the public conversation about women and work to shift away from leadership and toward leading a good life. Every time I get a letter from my MBA program, I feel guilty. Unlike my other classmates, I don’t have a high-powered career—a vocation with thousands of people and millions of dollars in my […]
Randall had a way of making cruel gestures look kind, dressing up abusive tendencies in a nice sweater. When I think of my relationship with my ex Randall*, I think of an episode of South Park. Cartman’s friends abandon him due to his atrocious behavior. The next day, he shows up at Kyle’s house wearing […]
For all the hours of therapy I had received over the years, it took being accepted for Social Security benefits to break through my denial. I hate when people ask what I do for a living. Sometimes I tell them I am a stay-at-home mom, which is true insofar as I am home for my […]
Is it that hard to love me for me? When I was a kid, I used to wonder what I’d be like when I grew up. Somehow I had the idea that nothing about me would ever stay the same. I thought I might grow up to look completely different and act completely different, as though […]
When I repeat over and over that anxiety doesn’t make me a bad parent, it’s not because I think you might not believe it, but because I’m not sure I do. Just shy of eight months ago, my partner gave birth to our daughter. She is gorgeous and smart and happy, and I love her […]
Live your own damn life. As a woman, I’m fully aware of how much we contradict ourselves. We say we want more time to ourselves, but then we RSVP to every halfway decent event on Facebook. We say we want to get healthier, but then we eat a whole bag of Doritos. We say we want […]
I fear that someday I will fail her as a parent and she will fail herself as a person and think that it is OK to hurt someone else to a grave extent, and with intent. It was summer. They were girls I had considered friends. A boy liked me, wanted to date me in the […]
It took me a while to understand that those times when I need to go back on medication are not indicative of failure. I’m watching a British murder mystery and I’m crying. I love British murder mysteries—they’re pretty much the only TV shows I watch—but the entire time I’ve been watching this show on this day, I’ve […]
