Being a mom can suck from time to time—schlepping a noisy carload of kids to outer Suburbia for little league; making 11th hour trips to the hardware store to pick up parts for the science project your kid forgot was due the next day; or,…
My mother is not the kind of mother I need. And I am not the kind of daughter she wants. That makes us “even” in a cruel sort of way. But what has become apparent to me in the past several weeks is that she…
You know the art of cooking has reached rock bottom when young adults can’t conquer making Kraft Dinner. I was reading about one 20-year-old woman who was asked to make KD for the kids she was babysitting. She boiled the water, and then dumped all…
It has been a quiet Saturday. My younger son Micah is in Cuba for some fun in the sun with his high school graduating class. My older son Jake is ensconced hundreds of miles away at university. This leaves my husband John and me all…
It is easy to think being the child of divorce is all bad. According to the research, kids from broken families are more likely to smoke, be on Ritalin, suffer from lower self esteem, drop out of school, suffer a stroke, and die earlier than…
My children Jake and Micah did not have sanitized childhoods. While other parents were firing up videos of Pingu, Barney and Teletubbies, we were letting them watch seriously age-inappropriate stuff. Tim Burton’s very dark animated Nightmare before Christmas was a family favourite, as were Six…
I was never the “good job” kind of Mom. My two sons didn’t get standing ovations for doing ordinary party tricks like learning to use the potty, eating broccoli or making their beds. Nope, I never subscribed to the theory that “good job” parenting would…
When parenting duties were being divvied up, I somehow drew the short straw. My husband John comes from strict Baptist stock, the kind of people who don’t talk about sex because it may lead to dancing, or worse, cards. By process of elimination, I was…