I don’t quite know what to say about Joannie Rochette. I’ve been stunned by her bravery, humbled by her strength, amazed by her determination in the face such terrible sadness. When my father died, it was days before I could even walk in a straight line, weeks before I could hold myself reliably upright. After losing her mother, Joannie Rochette strapped on her skates and competed for an Olympic medal. Incredible. Courageous. (more…)

I don’t claim to understand what it is, exactly, that makes girls girls and boys boys and women women and men men and whatever identities lay within and between these categories of gender, but I do think that I can say, with some authority, this: it’s not hair. Really, it’s not.

I say this because I know. I know because, I have had short hair. As a child, even: (more…)

Yesterday, Emilia brought home her very first report card. Emilia is four. Just yesterday she was in diapers and nursing and the only thing that anyone ever reported about her was quantity and quality of her bowel movements. How did we get to report cards?

For the longest time, I couldn’t open it. I’m not sure why. The reasons that I gave myself – that reading others’ evaluations of my child would be awkward and challenging; that the report card was a symbol of school and so a symbol of her moving ever further into a life of her own, a life apart from mine; that I just couldn’t bear to see anything other than the highest praise for my child – were not, in themselves, convincing. They just landed in my psyche and fell limp, like drained water balloons, or banana peels, or something else more figuratively appropriate that I can’t think of right now. I was anxious for all of these reasons, and for none of them, and for a thousand other reasons that I probably wouldn’t understand until sometime around her high school graduation, and as I sifted through these known and unknown and entirely inscrutable reasons for my anxiety, I thought, this is the problem. This. This worry. Not the reasons for the worry. The worry itself. (more…)

(Photoshop narrative contrived by Jenny; random badness embodied by – from left to right – Karen, me, Laura, Jenny, Jyl, Rachael, and Alison, who took me down immediately after this photo was taken. Sarcastic spirit fingers, apparently, do not frighten her.)

So I wrote this post over at BlogHer. It’s kind of heavy, but also, I think, kind of extraordinary (that is, the subject of the post is extraordinary, not my writing) and I’d love to know what you think. Not least because it comes up in a week during which some people are saying hateful things on the same subject, and talking about actions and ideas that counter hate is, really, the best defense against such hate, so. I think that it’s worth reading, and well worth discussing, and even if you disagree with the whole enterprise, well, at least we could all join hands and agree that compassion is good, no matter what? I’d like that.

I just spent a wonderful weekend in Houston, cavorting and plotting and reflecting and deep-thinking and giggling with some of the brightest and most brilliant and beautiful and bad-assed women on the interwebs. I left uplifted and inspired and more than a little in love with my community.

Then Air Canada messed up my flight connections, and I deflated a little. Then they lost my beautiful red shoes – along with the rest of my luggage – and I deflated some more.

Then I got home and Jasper started struggling to breath and had to be rushed to the hospital – again, again - and my husband raced off with him while I curled up with the girl and my heart was punctured in so many places that I didn’t so much deflate as collapse in a tattered mess and Houston and Mom 2.0 and all the glitter and rainbows and bacon-wrapped-shrimp taco awesome of that space receded utterly and – this is, of course, entirely predictable and fully banal – I felt scared and alone and I cried. (more…)

This boy?

This wee, mop-headed baby boy is gone. With one careless, husband-directed trip to the hair salon, he is no more. He is now boy-boy. Again, only more so this time, so much more – I don’t know – Junior Banker, if Junior Bankers had front comb-overs, which I suppose some of them do: (more…)

Emilia loves Hannah Montana. She’s not entirely sure who Hannah Montana is – she’s never seen the show or heard the music – but she knows that some of the older girls at school like her and that the boys don’t like her and that she has something to do with music and dancing and that’s good enough for her. She’s been composing odes to Hannah Montana, because she worries that Hannah might feel bad that boys don’t like her, which of course means that there would be far fewer people for Hannah to play with, hence the feeling bad, etc. It’s complicated. (more…)

My husband and I have been together for over seventeen years. That’s pretty much the entirety of my adult life, and almost half of my whole life so far. Hopefully, it’s only the beginning. Hopefully, we’ll both live long lives and will celebrate the births of grandchildren and maybe even great-grandchildren and those years of our lives that were spent without each other will seem distant and momentary and we will tell people, we have been together forever.

It seems such a rare thing these days, couple staying together forever.  My husband sometimes remarks, when we hear that yet another relationship – a relationship of someone close to us, or someone not close to us, or someone that we only know through People magazine – has foundered on the rocks of infidelity or irreconcilable differences, that it seems that everything, everything these days is stacked against lasting love. What that everything is, he’s not sure, but it worries him, sometimes. What if it comes after us, he asks? What if it sneaks up on us when we’re not looking and consumes us before we even know what’s happened? (more…)

Alexander McQueen died this week. He committed suicide, and he did so, in part, it seems, because of his bereavement over the death of his mother earlier this month.

This is going to sound awful, terrible, extreme, insane… but… I think that I know – maybe, a little bit – how he felt. (more…)