Proudly serving unpolished working motherhood, with bipolar depression & hilarity on the side
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 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? […]
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?
Here’s the thing we’re not supposed to say in my family – one of our own can get irrationally angry over just about anything. We’ll call him “Schmad”. This doesn’t happen every day – in fact, most days it doesn’t happen. But that’s the rub of it – you never can tell when Schmad is […]
I was born into a gig and I have to get away from it. And by “gig”, I mean “life defining label”. I need to stop being the mayor’s daughter already. People I met as an adult – sur-PRISE! People I grew up with – how weird is it that not everybody in my little […]
My family and I got kicked out of church when I was a kid. Actually, we kicked ourselves out. There I am in my lacy white dress, circa Christmas eve 1988, obediently sitting in the massive sanctuary beside my dad. My mom lingers outside the doors, watching my two year old brother zoom around the […]
I’ve spent way too much time getting over him. He was always so quick to toss off a studied laugh, grab the reins of any conversation and start throwing ideas around the room. Never mind if those ideas were only loosely tethered to reality, he was going to sell ‘em to you like an old-time […]