Archive

I haven’t seen my teenage daughter in three and a half months. This was my choice.  I sent her to live with her biological father because we were stuck in what seemed to be a broken and abusive dynamic, and I wanted it to change and I wanted to heal. For me, at this time, […]

Three years ago (perhaps not so coincidentally after the 2016 elections in the United States) my family decided on an international move.  The time was right as we felt our home country was becoming more hostile, more racist, and decidedly less like a place where we wanted our children to grow into adults. So, I […]

Marriages are not working. They are, for the most part, broken. Half of all marriages end in divorce.  Marriages need an expiration date.  I can only speak to marriages in the United States, because that is what I am familiar with. But, I can certainly speak to that. Now, I am not bragging or anything, […]

I am developing curriculum for a class on intimacy and relationships and I tried out one of the pieces with my students at school this week. If I was going to talk about developing deep and rich friendships, I thought we first needed to unpack some of our baggage.  So I start my first lesson […]

I have a cousin named Chickie.  Don’t judge.  When you have Irish and Italian families, everyone is named Mary or Maria and at some point, to disambiguate, you need to get funky with the names.  Anyhoo, I spent a lot of years really mad at Chickie.  Like almost 20. I spent almost 20 years angry […]

In 2014, I wrote a piece called Walk With Grace and Other Shit to Say to Your Kids.  It was a list of phrases my husband and I use in situations that can sometimes leave you frazzled.  My husband and I say these phrases because we have thought about them.  They reflect a message we […]

I have seen a number of articles recently claiming that when boys tease and become physically aggressive with girls, it is because the boy likely has a crush on the girl.  These articles say that we are setting girls up to equate love with abuse. We are romanticizing these interactions and victim-blaming the girl in […]

This Father’s Day, thanks to a Budweiser commercial honoring stepfathers that made me blotchy-red-face-snotty-nose cry when I saw it (and is still making me cry as I write this), I am thinking about stepfathers. The commercial features grown children acknowledging what amazing step fathers they have and asking their stepdads to be officially adopt them. […]

In a few weeks, my husband and I will get married…again. This will be our third time because we decided lifelong commitments are only for suckers and the devil. We promised to reevaluate, renegotiate, and remarry every 5 years for as long as we both shall love. For us, this time meant unpacking a lot […]

I just spent the weekend at a retreat for my kid’s school at a magical little nature lodge on a volcano by a river and it was my favorite kind of time. Everyone just hanging out, cabin rotations, no privacy, shared meals, and everywhere I went there was someone I knew, and was about to […]