Proudly serving unpolished working motherhood, with bipolar depression & hilarity on the side
The thing that I’ve been drooling over for months drooled back. Ew. What I mean is, this beautiful cupcake of an opportunity that I’ve been eyeing for months was offered to me. And I turned it down. This isn’t how the story is supposed to go. I’m supposed to say, I took it! Here I […]
What’s it like to compete at the pinnacle of sport, the national championships, in an adult body? That was the original idea that flashed through my mind for this post as 400+ of my best friends and I swarmed the University of Delaware for the 2022 US Adult Figure Skating Championships. But unlike the guy […]
He bounded to the altar like a ball of positive energy in the land of Jesus. “Welcome!” he exclaimed, and then proceeded to pour out a beautiful PowerPoint laced with ambition and enthusiasm for our children’s program as the lights shone on his wrinkle-free face. Having begrudgingly left my seat at the back of the […]
You could find cars in the average junkyard that were nicer than the beaters parked in my family’s driveway growing up. There was the time my grandfather, for reasons unknown, removed the front passenger seat from my mother’s almost-antique Mustang. I loved it, because it revealed a rusted-out hole in the floor and we could […]
Babies have the best propaganda machine in the world. Look at this: Who could resist this stuff? Who could resist THIS? Meet Willow! She is the darling baby of my wonderful friends. Also, she’s a star recruit on the baby propaganda squad. Every time I see this kid, she’s either sleeping angelically or making feather-soft […]
Our men were not allowed to be alone. They needed to be bodily escorted by at least three of us in order to interact with anyone outside the tribe. We did not touch people outside the tribe and we did not make eye contact with them. Simple rules. We all understood the rules. The problem […]
“Aren’t you afraid he’ll slit your throat in the middle of the night?” These were the fears of the neighbors to Mayme Czajka when she fell in love with Lawrence Voletti in 1936, an era when “Italian” was synonymous with “mafia”, or at least it was in their first-generation Polish neighborhood. Mayme knew this for […]
“It sounds like you’re saying you want to talk to one of those people,” my mom said slowly, across my teenage bedroom. I sat unevenly on the twin bed, eyeing the pictures of me and my friends taped around the dresser mirror and my CDs stacked up in uneven towers everywhere. I had corralled her […]
My daughter and I made an advent wreath, decked out with branches and pine cones. Our wreath looks pretty and peaceful and apparently delicious, because our cat is now eating it and throwing up pine needles all over the house. Which means our hand-crafted best is now increasingly found in half-masticated clumps of kitty kibble. […]
When my brother was little and not jazzed about eating dinner, he’d say, “I didn’t order this.” My mother, being an overaccommodater, would sweep in and replace the offending item. You have probably noticed that life by and large does not work like this. If the role of my mother were being played by life, […]