Tenderness

Tenderness

Posted by on Jun 12, 2014 in All, Family, Mental Health, Personal, Quotidian | One Comment

Tenderness, where is the Tenderness, where is it I don’t know where I am but I know I don’t like it I open my mouth and out pops something spiteful words are so cheap but they can turn out expensive – Dave Wakeling, “Tenderness” (sung by General Public), 1984   I haven’t written much lately […]

The empty cart

The empty cart

Late January 2014 For the last several months I have been mentally flagellating myself, trying to declutter my garage. My husband, kids, and I moved into this house over three years ago, and the unpacking process was a never-ending Hydra of paper, housewares, and detritus from grad school and earlier. I claimed that I’d finished […]

Finding Grateful, 2013 edition

Finding Grateful, 2013 edition

  If you know me in real life or have read my blog at the end of the year in the past, you will know that I am a self-identified holiday hater. I’m not proud of that, but why pretend otherwise? To sum it up, the gradual loathing came about as a result of the […]

Spying in plain sight

Spying in plain sight

On Christmas Eve when I was flying with my family to go on vacation, I gave myself a treat. I re-read a book that I loved as a child: Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. Reading a beloved book from childhood has been hit or miss in recent years. I had wildly happy memories of […]

The nature of the beast

The nature of the beast

This is my first dog, Genji, in 1999, when he was a few months old. When he wasn’t gnawing on nylabones or other chew toys, he spent some valuable hours chewing my Swedish wood clogs and a couple of pairs of underwear from the laundry hamper. His other pastimes included digging into my husband’s armpits […]

Private Matters and Choices

Private Matters and Choices

What did the old fashioned feminists and political moderates used to say? That abortion ought to be safe, legal, and rare? Also, that it was a private matter, one for a woman (and in the case of a married woman, she and her husband) to discuss and decide. I remember the conservative politicians in the […]

I wanna know what love is

I wanna know what love is

“There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations and yet fails so regularly as love.” –Erich Fromm Last month I began reading this book. It’s a challenging book, a short, dense, mid-century tome, written by a European psychoanalyst and social theorist. In short, despite the title The […]

The early 2009 time capsule

I’m doing a bit of house cleaning lately, in both a real and metaphorical sense, and I was looking at old Facebook lists. Remember that? A few years ago, Facebook friends were tagging each other and, I think, trying to find common ground with one another through lists of beloved movies, books, and my personal […]

Keepin’ it real, friend edition

The other day I was driving my 10-year-old daughter home from swim practice, and we passed the home where a family we knew used to live. “Do you remember Q, the little girl who lived there?” I asked. “No. Yeah. Sort of,” she answered. “What happened to her anyway?” “Her family moved away,” I said. […]

Friends of a Certain Age

Friends of a Certain Age

The New York Times ran a piece last summer on the difficulty of making friends in adulthood. It generated such a response that they newspaper ran a second piece with a selection of readers’ comments. Clearly the subject of authentic friendship is something that needs more attention than most of us give it. I’ve talked […]