I'm going to talk a bit about marriage. If you haven't started rolling your eyes yet, just give me two minutes. Hang in there.
My husband and I are entering our 10th year of marriage. It does not get easier. It's a little like the sand in the bottom of your shoes at the end of a beach day: persistent and sometimes annoying - and mostly, a lovely reminder of that great day at the beach.
And then there's the changing. No one is ever done changing. As Michelangelo said at age 87, “Ancora imparo. [I am still learning.]”
We were 25 and 32.
After four children and several years of parenting, you could say my emotional responses to certain things have changed over time. I know the particular sound a child makes when a foot is caught between two crib rails. Kids, I know the difference between hunger and boredom, and I...
A few weeks ago, I got “the itch.” I looked around my domicile, and every square inch was covered. The tops of cabinets held dusty artifacts that had long ago become cozy homes for spiders. Cabinets were as packed as my pants. There was no room at the inn.
In recent days, a rash of resolution posts and status updates and phone calls and emails have made the rounds. I think it's great - all of us willing ourselves to do more and try harder in the name of newness. I don't make New Year's resolutions, but I do applaud efforts from my sideline Barcalounger. I'll lean forward just enough to hand you a Dixie cup as you, a more motivated person, run by. It's not that I don't...
Shop locally, they say. It's the right thing to do, they say. As I sit down to write this piece, I'm battling internally - deciding which part of me wants to dominate this discussion: necessity or shame. It would be very easy to retreat into a local-shopping shame spiral. I know this because, monthly, I do feel the red-cheeked and shifty-eyed monster when I head just over state lines to give New Hampshire and Massachusetts almost 100 percent of my...
Everything is broken. My favorite plate, my favorite pair of heels, my favorite suede boots, my favorite holiday... In the midst of modern-day Thanksgiving come platitudes like this one: “I'm so thankful that Bobby got a 100 on his being a super-perfect kid test that no one else was taking. Thank you, baby in a manger.” And I roll my eyes to such great lengths that my eye whites catch a random gathering of twigs in my unraked lawn on...
This current stage of parenting seems less fragile. We've made a silent step over a menacing crevasse. It wasn't that we weren't paying attention. We were. It was blinding, fanatical attention. Every detail in our face, like cartoon violence. It was too absurd to ignore. There were years of perpetual pregnancy and sleep deprivation. There were stories that we felt comfortable telling only in the confines of our dark room. Our confessions would come pouring out in guilty, hushed complaints...
I was born in the late 1970s during the breast-feeding revival. My mother, always slightly on the crunchy left of society's well-established “norm,” was a model pregnant woman. No caffeine. Natural births. Lots of pie. It was a non-issue for her: she would breast-feed. And, she did. All four of us. She breast-fed through the breast-feeding revival and into the corporate formula push of the 1990s, happily feeding her children, in hip times and in bad, 'til nipple did we...