Do You Tell Your Partner Before You Cut Your Hair?
I answer this and other vital questions regarding my rules of marriage in this new piece for The Cut!
xo
writer, editor, teacher
I answer this and other vital questions regarding my rules of marriage in this new piece for The Cut!
xo
Happy Spring, all! I’m delighted to share three new pieces.
I wrote about my inability to make decisions on my own for Lenny.
I wrote about how much I love my own Mama for Mother’s Day for Land’s End Journal.
And! I wrote about getting up at the crack of dawn to have some time for myself (for crying out loud!). (It will shock no one to learn that since I published this, my kid’s been waking up much earlier. #Momfail.) This one was for Healthline.
xoxoxox
Sometime in the not so distant past, I needed to take the morning-after pill. I was a 38-year-old mother of a three-year-old; I was in a stable marriage. We both had advanced degrees and careers, and had planned out my first pregnancy with charts and ovulation kits. Most of my friends were onto their second children. I was, in other words, not necessarily the kind of woman you might picture when you think of Plan B.
Read on at Motherwell Magazine.
The jealousy peaked when the second round of pregnancy announcements started to roll in. By then my daughter was 2 and I was 37, but neither my husband nor I had broached the subject of a second child. Instead, my tactics were cheap, comments lobbed at inopportune moments: I mentioned my (old) age and boy names I liked, and reminded him that we had to “get it done” before we left Europe, our temporary (family-friendly) home. When I got salmonella poisoning from eating bad chicken, I secretly hoped my symptoms meant I was pregnant. My husband prayed they didn’t.
Our avoidance of the discussion, followed by our inability to agree on trying for another, was heartbreaking. It seemed to symbolize some fundamental rift in our marriage: Almost everyone we knew had — or was trying for — more than one child. Why couldn’t we handle it, too?
+
I wrote this whopper for The Cut. Please read on here.