Peeping on the Potty
By Candy Schulman My daughter is a nudist. Greeting the Chinese take-out delivery man in a yellow turtleneck, she is not quite three and completely bottomless. Mortified, I watch my husband pay for our dinner while I say in a loud whisper, “Come inside. You don’t have any…pants on.” “I’m just standing here next to my daddy,” she says, while I worry what the delivery man must be thinking about our Americ ...
It Takes a Village
By Kim Siegal I sat on the living room floor with my one-year-old, three brightly colored balls atop a plywood box between us. Perched on my elbows, I watched him raise that little wooden mallet as high as his tiny arms would allow and then bring it down with a satisfying thud onto one of the balls, sending the ball down through the box and careening across the floor. He reeled at his newfound success at this baby-sized whack-a-mole game, giggl ...
There is No Such Thing as a Perfect Waffle
By Christine Ritenis It begins, as usual, with a frozen waffle. It isn’t toasted properly; it is too crisp, too soggy, not hot enough, or burned, according to my high school sophomore (let’s call her Nicole). Today, a Friday, the waffle is insufficiently warm. My face reddens and I sense the upward surge of a normally low blood pressure when the complaint registers. I always prepare it the same way: first toasting it on “light,” and then, when I ...
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The Difference a Mother Makes
By Anne-Christine Strugnell I’ve always been interested in brain development, but having two teenagers has driven me to learn more. Like any mom, I want to provide them what they need—and figure out how to make them into the people I want them to be. So at 5:30 a.m. every school day I’ve been getting up to exercise on the elliptical trainer in my living room and watch the latest DVD installment of a 36-part Teaching Company series on neuroscience. At 6:15 I finish the lecture and start my mom day: knock on my son’s door and my daughter’s, make her a cup of sugar-free non-fat hot cocoa, and put it on the bathroom counter so she will unknowingly build critical bone mass while applying thick black eyeliner. I make lunch for the kids—sandwiches and organic apples—and watch the clock to keep our carpooling commitments. And in the midst of all this nurturing, I think about neuroscience. I got off Read more …
There is No Such Thing as a Perfect Waffle
By Christine Ritenis It begins, as usual, with a frozen waffle. It isn’t toasted properly; it is too crisp, too soggy, not hot enough, or burned, according to my high school sophomore (let’s call her Nicole). Today, a Friday, the waffle is insufficiently warm. My face reddens and I sense the upward surge of a normally low blood pressure when the complaint registers. I always prepare it the same way: first toasting it on “light,” and then, when I hear Nicole padding down the upstairs hall to the bathroom, heating it a second time, carefully spinning the gauge to the machine’s “perfect” mark. The toaster lies. There is no such thing as perfect. “I did what I do every day,” I snap at the disgruntled teen, whose blue eyes have barely opened enough at 6:00 a.m. to see the thing. “It’s not hot at all,” she responds, fidgeting with sleep-mussed hair. My voice pitches high. “Eat your waffle.” “Stop! Just Read more …
From The Archive
Black on the Inside
By Dionne Ford My daughter has decided that she is white. With her butterscotch skin and thick copper-colored curls, it’s easy to see that white is only half the story. Her father is white, with his Irish grandmother’s freckled skin and red hair and his Finnish grandfather’s long limbs and blue eyes. I am black, cocoa-colored like my grandmothers from Arkansas and Mississippi. I want Desiree, as a biracial child, to self-identify, to not let others box her into some container too small to hold all of her. I just never considered that she might not identify with me at all. I liked it better when she worked in tones. When she was four and heading off to preschool, she compared us to the colors in her crayon box. She was peach, Dad was pink, and I was brown. The kids in her school were an amalgam of different colors, races, and religions, with parents of varying sexual orientations, and Read more …
Talking Smack
By Johanna Bailey “Let’s leave the kids at home and meet up for a drink sometime!” Every time I join a new playgroup, there’s always at least one person who suggests a girls’ night out. I’m never sure exactly how to respond. Do I say that alcohol gives me a headache? That I’m on medication and can’t drink? That I’m allergic? Or do I say nothing at all and just hope that they won’t notice when I order orange juice at the bar? The truth is, I’m an alcoholic and heroin addict in recovery. Eight years into my sobriety, it doesn’t get any easier to say that out loud. Even more troubling is what—if anything—I say to my son, Nico, and when. He’s only three. When he asks why I don’t drink wine like daddy, I explain to him I don’t like the taste, just like he doesn’t like the taste of corn. And that’s all the explanation he needs. Read more …
Moment of Recognition
By Suzi Schweikert Boarding an evening flight home from a medical conference, I shuffle along in an interminable line that winds its way to the back of the plane. My thoughts of home are interrupted by a man who is seated and facing me. His manner isn’t flirtatious, but we make prolonged eye contact. Or rather, he does. While he stares, I glance at the back of someone’s head, down at my boarding pass, back up at the seat numbers. At last I arrive at my row, a few behind the man in question, and settle in with a magazine. That might have been the end of it. The moment our plane lands, though, I become aware of him again. He’s standing, hunched over, his head at a tilt between the chair back and overhead bins. He eagerly waves at me. “Hey!” he shouts over the rumbling plane engines. “Did you deliver my baby?” Heads spin around on both aisles Read more …
The Fur Berry Dilemma
By Lara Strong In Hungary, where I have lived for ten years, most schools operate with tight budgets. As a result, there aren’t a lot of toys or books in the classrooms for kids to play with or look through during breaks. In the States, the “bring-your-own lunch” concept exists; in Hungary, kids are allowed—in fact, encouraged—to bring in their own toys. This has never caused much of a problem. My eight-year-old son has always relished the morning ritual of choosing which toy to bring in: Should it be a Lego dinosaur? How about Playmobil pirates or some tiny, plastic animal figures? Now that my six-year-old daughter, Sara, is entering first grade, she is already eagerly anticipating this practice—a stuffed unicorn, perhaps? Maybe a pretty pink pony? I’ve rarely had an opportunity to witness what happens when my kids actually arrive at school, but I imagine how it goes each morning. They set down their backpacks, take off their jackets, Read more …