Because sometimes being a parent means doing what’s hard.
Posted in family finances, family life, fathers and work, modern families, mothers and work on Nov 8th, 2010
Well, here we are again. By “we” I mean my family; and by “here” I mean with one of us out of a job. Several years ago, my husband left a job that was literally sucking the life out of him (thanks to a bullying boss and a badly-run organization, he lost: 15 lbs. and [...]
Posted in family life, parenting, spirituality on Oct 19th, 2010
Last spring, I wrote a post entitled The Spiritual Education of Mommy, Part II, and reflected on a sobering, emotional religion class I’d just attended. To recap: As a group, the Monday night religion classes (kids and adults) were told about an upcoming annual four-mile walk/run, organized by a father in the parish whose son, [...]
Posted in bullying, family life, Mean Mom's Question Time, parenting, school on Oct 4th, 2010
The story about the young man at Rutgers University who, after he found that a video of him having sex with a male partner had been live-streamed on the Internet, committed suicide, has me heartsick. I’m sick for him, for his family, for all the other teens unsure of how they fit in a world [...]
Posted in family life, kids and sports, other parents on Sep 20th, 2010
Just yesterday, on a fine, sunny Sunday afternoon, my husband and I were doing some weeding in our front yard. For us, “some weeding” means cursing and huffing and puffing our way through a summer’s worth of work. We are not natural gardeners, let’s just say, and combining that with a summer that was so [...]
Posted in family finances, family life, learning, summer, vacation on Aug 10th, 2010
So, last weekend my family and I were up in the Catskill Mountains, in upstate New York, at a family-style resort we’ve been going to, on and off, my whole life (my dad used to go there as a teen, that’s how long we’ve been patrons of this particular spot). By “family” I mean a [...]
Posted in discipline, family life, parenting, parenting research, Uncategorized on Jul 15th, 2010
Okay, here we go again, with another flurry of conversation swirling around the topic of parents, children, and happiness. Specifically: Does becoming a parent increase or decrease happiness? Do kids make you happy? Are parents happier than non-parents? And my personal favorite: Why do we all work so hard at this parenting stuff without it [...]
Posted in family life, humor, parenting, school, summer, Uncategorized on Jul 7th, 2010
My second son, James, is bewildering and bedeviling in shifting measures, like all offspring, but I have been feeling for a while lately that, while he’s as capable as his big brother of winning or crushing my heart, I understand him better. To put it in actorly terms, I have flashes of brilliance and insight, [...]
Posted in family life, parenting, parenting research on Jun 23rd, 2010
Here’s a case where being a Mean Mom works in your favor: When you have a big family. It’s obvious, right? You can’t coddle and hover over 14 kids; no one’s arms are that big. Even with four or five kids helicoptering and over-parenting is a stretch. (And four or five is, by today’s standards [...]
Posted in babycare, family life, humor, mom bloggers on May 10th, 2010
As readers can tell by perusing my last post, I’m not on board with junking up emotions surrounding motherhood with borrowed words or treacly sentiment. I’m all about the reality, kiddos. I’ve also never been, since becoming a mom, about abandoning my own hard-won instincts in order to follow any crowd into a place that [...]
Posted in family life, holiday, mommy guilt on May 7th, 2010
Sigh. Facebook is at it again. well, not Facebook itself, but the community of FBers. As I type, with a day and a half until Mother’s Day descends upon us again, one of those “copy and paste this and put it in your status line if you’re a Mom!” thingies is virusing its way around. [...]
