Columns

It was nearly a year and a half ago that Dave told me he was probably dying. I sat on the porch swing on my terrace, phone pressed to my…

It would be easy to forget the bones of last year, to search for new recipes and fresh ingredients. But toward the end of each January, my mother would haul…

Once I actually had children, other people’s judgments just got louder, until they were buzzing constantly in my ears. There was the waiter who found my public breastfeeding so offensive…

Tony’s heart is broken. Literally. Maybe that shouldn’t surprise us, since when we adopted him as an infant he was suffering from congestive heart failure, a complication of his premature…

The lesson for Class 3 of Birthing the Mother Writer is: Find the desire.

As I considered what to write for this, the final column of Four Worlds, I thought at first of stressing how bicultural marriage plus life in a third country, in…

In last month’s column, Cassie Premo Steele led readers into “the deeper stuff of poetry” and asked them to reflect upon the process of claiming themselves as mother poets. The…

When I was pregnant the second time, I eventually got too big to wear my first child in her carrier. I couldn’t carry two children at once; my heart ached…

In this final installment of Dear Marjo, a first-time mom seeks advice on how to come to terms with her decision to have an epidural, and how to keep the…

Ethan knew the day our moving truck was coming. Friday, September 5, exactly two weeks after his own move to Penn State. We spoke that morning around 6 a.m. He…

My three-year-old watched me silently with round eyes, ripe for impression. When she asked me what I was doing, I danced around the word “kill.” I told her I was…