How’s your budget as the back-to-school expenses come rolling in? Because I’ve been using You Need a Budget for a while, I had the money I needed saved in advance for the first time. A life-enhancement enthusiast, I’ve been delighted to discover that consciously spending and saving is core to my self-care. For my son Theo’s first eight years, I … Read More
Sick
My body makes its own memorials. When I am ravaged by a sadness I can not solve, eventually I go to the calendar where I find a fact to back up the ache. Two years after the second baby I will never have left me–taking me with her right out of my marriage, I become deeply infected with the grief … Read More
Unmasked
I meet Pete and Teddy at the party supply store. It’s their weekend together but I have proposed that we repeat last year’s successful collaboration and select Teddy’s sixth-birthday-party schwag together. When I arrive, Teddy is gleefully fake-stabbing Pete with a variety of plastic swords, scythes, arrows and chainsaws with a gusto that reflects his complete deprivation of such play objects in both of … Read More
Four years
At the state-mandated parenting class that my husband and I took as a precursor to divorce, I heard a number that still rings in my ears. The therapist in front of the projector insisted that blending a family (as in, getting established with a new partner in a new home and integrating all of the kids) takes four years. Four years. My … Read More
The woman with the perfect life
…is standing outside her perfect home, framed in her perfect garden, with her perfectly pregnant belly perfectly spaced to arrive two years after her perfectly beautiful small son. She is standing over her compost bin, handmade by her perfect husband—like everything else around the house—looking perfect in her sweats and ponytail. As I walk by with my dog, I tell … Read More
In the Words of a Three-Year-Old
About a month or so after our divorce was finalized, Teddy started preschool. Until that time, for the first three years of his life, he had been cared for by our beloved nanny at home while I worked from home. When Teddy entered public life, so did my divorce. Into an intimate community of in-tact families our little, leaky boat … Read More
Sleeping Beside my Son
Two years after Pete’s place in the bed opens up, Teddy occasionally wanders in to fill it. Pursued by monsters or dragons in his dreams, my child who prefers to sleep alone will accept co-sleeping in self-defense. I am intrigued by the genius of DNA as I watch him move through an exact replica of his father’s sleep pattern rotation. … Read More
