When my son Jack was about four years old, I lost him in the mall. I was pulling a sweater on over my clothes to see if it would fit, and in the three seconds it took for me to poke my head through the fabric, he was gone. One minute, he was there, standing […]
Listen, I get it. He’s twelve. He’s almost as tall as I am and his sneakers are a whole size bigger than the ones I wear. He’s in the seventh grade. His older-by-one-year brother knows. His younger-by-three-years sister is beginning to connect the dots. Quietly, when no one else is in the room, she asks […]
When I was a little girl, I swore I heard your sleigh land on the top of our roof. I must have been about four years old, five at the most. When I said this—that I knew you had come in the night because I heard your sleigh and your reindeer—my father smiled a funny […]
Tweens are such funny people, aren’t they? Not quite teenagers, but no longer children, these pre-adolescents are simultaneously the best and the worst and the brightest and the dimmest. They are funny and fresh and maddening and gross. When your oldest is eleven, you start calculating; five years until he drives, six years until prom, […]
“So, buddy. Everything going okay? Anything you want to talk about while we’re alone?” I asked my ten-year old as we pulled into the parking lot of the grocery store. I had just picked him up from cub scouts, and I needed to run a few errands before we headed home. “No, Mom,” he sighed, reaching […]