Dear anorexia: You will not win.
I met you early in life. I was just a girl. Just a girl looking for life. Just a girl looking for perfect. Just the right kind of girl for you. You whispered your lies in my ear one night when a crack split right down the middle of our family. Make him love you, you...
Dear Concerned Reader: As Far as I Know My Vag Doesn’t Drag the Floor
I have a large family. Six children. In a world where people are choosing to have fewer children (or none at all), this can seem weird and crazy and, for some, unacceptable. These people always come out to play when I mention anywhere in my article that six kids live...
Dear Mama: You don’t have to get in the pool. But maybe you can try.
“Are you going to go swimming tonight, Mama?” he says in that little-boy voice. It’s the 5-year-old, who likes to play with her hair. Who loves to snuggle. Who thinks she’s the most beautiful woman in the world. All that doesn’t matter. She’ll still say no. “Not...
Dear 17-year-old in the string bikini: Our bodies don’t define who we are.
It’s summertime. Bikini season. It can be a make-or-break season. All the other girls in your class are armed with their bikinis in a myriad of colors, and they have their perfect bodies with their perfect breasts and their perfect legs and their perfect skins. But...
Dear third son: Bad decisions don’t make you bad.
Five years ago you slid into our lives on a hot and humid summer day. You stared at us with those big eyes I knew would stay brown from the very beginning, and I fell immediately and deeply in love. We spent those first few nights just the two of us, because your...
On Surviving the Lean Seasons: an Essay
We’ve just gotten back from the doctor, because, for days, my throat has held barbed wire or shards of broken glass, and my fever is out of control and I’ve lost two work days to sleep. We’re turning onto the street that leads to our house, shaking our heads at the strep throat diagnosis, when […]
I used to feel angry about being a working mother. Until I realized what it meant.
“Do you work?” We’re sitting at the pool. The boys are swimming with their daddy, but I’m sitting out with my four-month-old and this still-broken-but-almost-healed foot. A woman has just counted them all up and laughed about “all boys.” The youngest smiles, because...
How do we preserve a memory if we don’t have it on camera?
It’s the last week of school, and I am a weeping mess. It’s not a sad weeping, really. It’s a bittersweet weeping, a proud weeping, because every step they take on this road that is education and growing up and moving on is another step they take out of my home. Those...
Remember this: “They” can’t tell us who we are.
There will always be people in our lives who will speak lies into who we are. The thing about those critical voices is that when we test them and find them as untrue as they actually are, they then have the potential to launch us into greater determination and effort.
What freedom of speech really means
With our freedom comes great responsibility, because we are dealing with people’s hearts. Our freedom doesn’t (or shouldn’t) mean someone else’s hurt.