Proudly serving unpolished working motherhood, with bipolar depression & hilarity on the side
It started with biting. I’d be working from home at my little white desk and my phone would buzz. On the other end was the preschool director, her voice mixing notes of frustration and sympathy. “I’m calling to let you know Banana bit a classmate today.” “Oh. Um. I’m so sorry to hear that,” I’d […]
The mystery woman beamed up at me from the restaurant booth. I smiled back, my brain stumbling to figure out if I knew her, when she said, “I work with autistic children. I can be a resource to you.” I stared at her. “I’m sorry – what?” She then proceeded to rattle off a short […]
The competition moms were going full force behind me. “LET’S GOOOOO, MAISY!!!….oh noooo. She just missed an AA time.” “She’ll get it next time. She looks so strong,” reassured the mom next to her. Next heat it was her turn. “COME ON, JACKIE, COME ON!!!….argh. GOOD RACE HONEY. Darn it. That was a second slower […]
The moment I walked through the junior high doors, the baddies would pounce on me like a pack of jackals. “Buy some weed, kid!” they would sneer, shoving me back and forth like a hairbow-wearing sack of potatoes. If things got really bad, maybe they’d try to hold me down and force something….up my nose? […]
The signs are all a lie, according to my husband. “Shit for sale!” he announces every spring, gesturing darkly to the hand-lettered signs. “Not enough crap of your own? Come buy ours!” When we drive by he adopts the persona of a soldier skirting hostile territory – eyes fixed straight ahead, not a break in […]
I always thought my grandma stopped ice skating when she hit 70. Wrong! “I’ve raised four children and now I want to do what I want to do,” she told me matter of factly. What she wanted to do, in her seventies, eighties and nineties, was skate on the open-air rink near her house. So […]
My dad was never one for fancy cars, gravitating instead to barely functional cars. When I was a little kid he drove a Mazda hatchback that was basically a large tin can with a sputtering motor attached. This was the car that ferried him back and forth to law school, and credit to the Mazda […]
There’s a lot of fluffy half-truth bullshit out there around parenthood that just tap dances on the reality of what it is to raise another human. And the sugar-coated stories about motherhood in particular trigger the hell out of me, probably because I bought into them for so long. Silly me. Had I bothered to […]
“Do you ever think about taking your own life?” asked the psychiatrist with a face like a board. I stared into his clinical eyes. “No.” It was a lie. After hauling myself up four flights of stairs to my dorm room, I’d tilt my head over the railing, imagining what it would be like to […]
A casual acquaintance gives you a gift meant for his “oops-she’s-not-my-girlfriend” on Valentine’s Day. Errrr….what next?