Motherhood, for most of us, comes with its own language. We learn to divide our experience into trimesters; we become familiar with all things maternal, including "instinct," "bond" and "leave." Many of our new words slide into a kind of...
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Full disclosure: I did not want to read Cancer Is a Bitch (Or, I'd Rather Be Having a Midlife Crisis). I suffer from what Henry James evocatively called "an imagination of disaster" and a marked tendency to catastrophize, not to...
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It took the tragedy of Nicholas Hughes's March 16, 2009 suicide to bring his mother Sylvia Plath back to the popular spotlight. The media buzzed with what it was all about--famous parents and the shadows they cast, mental illness and...
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Children in most tribal cultures learn that their "grandmothers" include not only the mothers of their parents, but a wide circle of women who are to be honored for their experience, respected, consulted, trusted, cared for, and listened to when...
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I watched the towers fall on 9/11 with my daughter, who was eight months old. I fell too; depression set in, and for the first time since my daughter was born, I felt trapped at home with my baby in...
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A change occurs when I tell people outside the military community that I am an Army spouse. It's a small one, certainly. In fact, the shift may be imperceptible to the uninitiated. But it is there all the same. Once...
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