Tag: husbands

Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls — and Rebel Moms

So: everyone knows the wonderful books Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, yes? If you are a parent of a young girl (or boy!), you should. They are a collection of tiny biographies of important, daring women — everyone from RBG to Serena Williams, Harriet Tubman to Aung San Suu Kyi. The art is something to behold.

And now, the company has launched an online site called Rebel Girls Boundless — for which I am writing a series about parenting abroad.

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I’ll be profiling six mothers — mostly expats — one on every continent. The first story is about my little family in Vienna, Austria. But we will be featuring moms in Australia, Bahrain, India, Argentina and Dar es Salaam.

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I’ll post each link here. I’d be delighted if you came along for the ride.

xoxoxo

A Love Letter from Me to You

Oh, hi! I totally forgot to mention to you all here that I’ve started a newsletter — or as I’ve been calling it, a letter from me to you. Really, it’s a love letter.

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So far I’ve been sending out weekly dispatches about life, love, food, politics, books, TV, podcasts (so many podcasts!), motherhood, and I’d be delighted if you wanted to sign up. My mom wrote me a long email with all the questions: Why a tiny letter? Why not do it here, on your website? Can I write you back there? Are my replies public? Do I need to go find your gmail? Do you think people will find it and sign up!?

(Hi, Mom!)

So: The reason it’s a Tiny Letter and not here, on my website, is because, as you can read in the first email, I love letters. Love them. It’s how I’ve always communicated with my friends and family, it’s how I met and fell in love with my husband. It’s how I think through problems and work out essays. There’s something intimate, precious and private about them, even when they are not written out by hand. When I found Tiny Letter I thought: what a quaint and lovely pocket of the internet. (Rare thought.)

And to answer the more practical questions: Yes, you can write me back directly on Tiny Letter. No, your replies aren’t public. Yes, I do write everyone back!

So come on over. You can sign up here. I’d love, love, love to have you.

xo

 

Three New Reads

Happy Spring, all! I’m delighted to share three new pieces.

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I wrote about my inability to make decisions on my own for Lenny.

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I wrote about how much I love my own Mama for Mother’s Day for Land’s End Journal.

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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

I Took Plan B. Thank you, Planned Parenthood.

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.

Screen Shot 2017-01-13 at 10.18.30.pngRead on at Motherwell Magazine.

On Baby #2

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.

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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?

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I wrote this whopper for The Cut. Please read on here.