I never pushed myself, never set my sights high on the horizon, never took failure as a learning experience, but only as a warning to remove something from my purview. Is my 9-year-old son now doing the same thing? Certainly, one of the most peculiar parts of being a parent is watching the emerging idiosyncratic […]
How could I both comfort and clarify on a subject that was not only distressing and mysterious, but was such a personal stumbling block for me? This past week, I dug a grave. It was a tiny one—just rat-sized—to bury our family pet. It was, in fact, the second such plot I had to prepare […]
Every minute worrying about what age you are is one more minute that you could use in a million other ways. There are two types of people who will tell you that “life begins at 40” or that “40 is the new 20” or any of that other nonsense that people feel obligated to console […]
The more I learned about a partner, the more insecurities, imperfections, and idiosyncrasies that revealed themselves, the less interested I was in hanging around. Back in my grunge days, when wide-lapelled polyester shirts made a brief resurgence in popularity, I found myself routinely scouring the racks of the Salvation Army to secure what, at the time, was […]
From the outside, I may not look like someone who’d be littered with permanent skulls and bats under her conventional exterior. But my body art is an expression of who I once was and who I still am. Once upon a time, as I found myself maneuvering through an especially thorny patch of my adolescence, during which […]
I enjoy dressing up and being told my hair looks good and catching a glimpse of myself in a mirrored store front and liking what I see. Whether or not that makes me vain is up to you. Recently, I divulged to a friend that I had undergone a cosmetic procedure several years ago, a secret […]
If we celebrate every small achievement, how will they know what hard work means? I was among the group of standing-room-only spectators as the second hour of my 4-year-old son’s pre-school graduation ceremony began when the whole thing jumped the shark. Up until this moment, the proceeding could be charmingly described as precociously adorable—with each […]
