Browsing: MER Online

“Where are we going?”  Her every morning question.     “Miss Patty’s house today.”     “But I don’t want to go there!  I want to stay home. Hmmp.”     “Put on your socks—please!”      “I can’t do it.  I’m little.”…

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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…

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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,…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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– 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…

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