In 1972 my mother’s piano professor failed her senior recital because she was pregnant with me. She was a married woman, and that recital was one of the best performances of her life; however, the man had a point to make. A pianist as brilliant as my mother had no business changing the diapers of […]
The Good Old Discipline of the Audio Book
The lesson was forced upon me. As a working mother, I couldn’t read like I wanted to read. Awake by four-thirty or five, my day began with a mad rush to collect lunches and afterschool supplies. From eight to five, I was teaching and grading papers. From five to seven, I was carting kids around […]
The Summer of my Extroverted Child
I’m 45-years-old, sitting in a locked bedroom, with one towel wrapped around my body and another wrapped around my hair. I’m wearing this because I’m hiding from my extroverted child. Over the past twenty years, I have learned only one thing about raising children, and that’s this: kids don’t care if you are sitting on […]
The Art of Days – Part Two
It is not easy to teach children the reverence of sanctuaries or funerals. They recognize the absurdity of nylon tights, buckle shoes that pinch, and powdered people (be they sitting upright in pews or lying in their caskets). They wriggle at shushings, and readings, and ties – silly, choking things – for in those first […]
The Art of Days – Part One
My husband can tell that my annual bout of parenting fatigue has arrived when I lock myself in our bedroom with the laptop and a half-pint of Starbucks Java Chip ice cream. I’ll sit on the bed crying into a soft old t-shirt from college, rattle around YouTube, and occasionally whimper, “I can’t do this […]
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