“Your Mom Has A Rockin’ Bod”. That’s what the handsome surfer looking dude told my eleven- and seven- year old daughters about me – their forty-eight year old mother. It was December 2004. Seven months after my husband said he…
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Tilda Swinton made small talk as we strolled through quiet, cobbled streets to the door of her garden apartment. We followed her in, my husband and I, and were met by a tortoise-shell cat. A decorative railing marked off a…
Amongst the things I did not realize about having four children was the fact that there’d be so much stuff to manage. I’m not even talking about the doctors’ appointments or school forms (there are those, too, groaning to-do lists’…
When you see the word “choice,” you might first think about the emphasis of the “pro-choice” proponents on free will, as opposed to the sanctity of life that its opponents emphasize or the privacy aspect that was the basis for…
Two years after my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, my brother and I moved her from her house in River Vale, New Jersey, to a nearby dementia unit called Memory Lane. I wish I could say it was the hardest…
In Bali, where I live in a big bamboo and grass house, “Ibu” means mother… I am a mom, to 8 people ages 4 to 34! I am also a midwife, which gives me the astonishing day and night attendance…
“I wonder if my children will ever really know me?” My friend, mother of four, grandmother of many, asked me this when she was sixty-something. At this time she had become a certified counselor for elders encouraging them to uncover…
Today when I visit my mother at the dementia center, one of the residents convinces several of her companions there is a cat on a nearby roof. She can see it, she says, and I assure her that I can…
Growing up in the shadow of my absentee Vietnam War veteran father, it always seemed like I inherited some, and too much, of his post-service sensibilities—he was diagnosed with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder before his second tour finished. I’ve always suspected…
Mama needed a ride home from work so I went for her. As I was pulling out of the lot behind the grocery store where she was a clerk in the deli, I said, “We gotta stop somewhere; Ray wants…