My mother had two sisters she never told me about. When she mentioned her large family, she told me she was one of ten children. I boasted to my friends—ten kids! That was bigger than any family I knew. My…
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This is the story my sister-in-law’s brother Andrew told over dinner: One night he, some friends and a fellow female student at Brown University went to a local bar hangout. The waitress brought them a tray of tortilla chips and…
I’m having the biggest ego trip in my life. Lucas, at one-and-a-half years old, sees me everywhere. He notices a woman in a magazine ad and squeals, “Mommy!” Same squeal with the woman on the back of the Cheerios box,…
– I was at the shoe store the other day and a father said the most refreshing thing to his five-year-old son. “You look like a pimp in those red shoes.” The child didn’t say, “What’s a pimp, Daddy?” But…
It’s quiet. Really quiet. My son is at my ex-husband’s place for the week. The constant outer noise and inner static of an intimate relationship that is now over is gone. Most efforts at reaching out to build business interests…
Twenty years ago, there was only one reason I coveted turning forty. ONE. As a hungry student, on the scent of the Shechina (immanent presence of the divine), the esoteric, and the mysterious, I discovered that the rabbis forbid anyone…
As I began to inch closer to forty, I was stunned to realize that for all my efforts of the last twenty years–working day and night literally through day-dreams and night dreams trying to tear down what was non-essential to…
I moved from New York City to a northern suburb in the ninth month of my first pregnancy. The initial deluge of visitors eager to see the new house and the new baby subsided to a trickle; I was alone…
– As every mother considering What To Name the Baby knows, names matter. They resonate, they project, they herald, they evoke. They are subject to personal and societal associations: I could no easier have named my child Eugene, because of…