From the category archives:

friendship

Full Circle

April 19, 2010

I’ve been writing YogaMamaMe since Jake was younger than Lily is now.
This makes me think a lot of things: How quickly time passes when you have kids. How scary it is to watch time pass so quickly, especially when you have kids. And how I seem to be repeating myself.
Take last night, for instance. I [...]

Read the full article →

Jake and I Go to the Dentist (and Have Fun)

November 18, 2009

On Sunday I climbed the curved ladder to the top of the play structure for the very first time.
Jake beat me to this milestone by several months and four decades. But that didn’t cheapen the fun of climbing, rung by rung, up and then, a little at a time, over until I crouched horizontally over [...]

Read the full article →

Everything Grows Faster in the Summer

September 1, 2009

I have acquired yet another in the growing number of items on my list of Things I Know Better Than to Do But Do Anyhow.
I have just finished sorting through Jake and Lily’s outgrown clothes, putting them away in anticipation of the spring kids’ rummage sale at the Jewish Community Center to which I will [...]

Read the full article →

Is There Such a Thing as a Full Circle and What Does It Look Like?

May 1, 2009

I hung up the phone yesterday thinking I had come full circle.
We hadn’t spoken in nearly twenty years, and I wonder how long it’s been since I’ve heard the laugh that brought me right back in a joyful slide to the summer I turned seventeen. That laugh, I now remember, made me feel like I’d [...]

Read the full article →

My First Purim Carnival! (and Jake’s too)

March 10, 2009

It is, perhaps, the most remarkable change that motherhood has wrought: I looked forward to the Purim Carnival for weeks before it was upon us.
This is remarkable because — although this was my first Purim Carnival — it was certainly not my first opportunity to attend one.
Purim — for those who have not had and/or [...]

Read the full article →

Am I Completely LOST or Would Any Mother Choose the Husband She Thought Was Dead over the Three-Year-Old Child She Knows Is Not?

February 12, 2009

Is it just me? Am I the only one who’s still in a state of disbelief over what the writers had Sun do?
Maybe it’s the pregnancy.
Normally, I don’t get too wrapped up in the motivations of television characters (unless they appeared on The Wire — oh, Randy, I still mourn for you). I mean, I [...]

Read the full article →

Trusting the Nostalgia (Even When You Should Be Embarrassed by the Songs You Are Listening to on the Radio)

January 14, 2009

I am awash in nostalgia these days.
Certainly it has something to do with the impending transformation of my status into “mother of two.” One child, Mike and I agree, is an accessory. Two children is an adult family. Who can approach such a spectre without a slightly longing glance back at the [...]

Read the full article →

When Families Happen

September 10, 2008

The remarkable thing about my taking Jake to visit my sister-in-law Maureen last weekend was that it seemed so very unremarkable to me.
Mike, you see, had brilliantly realized that even if three of us couldn’t travel to Napa for three days to attend a wedding I had, quite frankly, been dying to attend, he could [...]

Read the full article →

Twice Bitten: More of the Wisdom of Toddlers

September 4, 2008

Not long ago, I arrived to pick Jake up from school to find not one but two incident reports awaiting me.
“He got bitten,” one of Jake’s teachers said apologetically. “Twice.”
From the deliberately pared-down details they provided — perpetrators’ names and identifying characteristics are omitted from incident reports to protect those too young to deserve the [...]

Read the full article →

A New Olympic Event — Caring for a Toddler While You Have the Stomach Flu

August 22, 2008

How about that Michael Phelps, huh? Single-minded determination, laser-like focus, conquering his body’s limitations. The ultimate competitor.
I’d like to see him take care of a toddler while suffering from a good bout of stomach flu. (Dara Torres has probably done it, but then she’s a goddess, being over 40 and an Olympic [...]

Read the full article →

Careful What You Google For

August 14, 2008

About a week ago I googled an old boyfriend. The one I thought I’d marry but didn’t.
It wasn’t a stalker sort of thing. It wasn’t, amazingly, a raging case of misplaced nostalgia brought about by panic over finding myself a work-at-home mom living on a neighborly street in Asheville, North Carolina. I [...]

Read the full article →

The Friendship That Doesn’t Change When You Do

August 12, 2008

I took my dearest friend — Kali I’ll call her and she knows why — to the airport this morning. And I started crying — again. Not just because “Carolina in My Mind” was playing on the radio. (That song makes me cry every time, dammit, and not because I live in [...]

Read the full article →

Forget My Mind — I Lost My Cell Phone

July 24, 2008

Actually, “lost” is mother-of-a-toddler code for, “I left my cell phone in the pocket of the shorts I wore to the pool with Jake and ran it through the washing machine.” Raz-r phones, I probably don’t have to tell you, do not like being run through the washing machine.
When Mike first announced that he [...]

Read the full article →

Is There Such a Thing as a Graceful End to Vacation?

June 9, 2008

I can’t say I remember ever having had a graceful end to any vacation in my life.
I tend to be the type who gets stuck somewhere between the utter relaxation that is, to me, the whole point of a vacation (soldier on, you exploring, traveling, learn-something-on-vacation types, but do it without me) and the pressing [...]

Read the full article →

Jake and My Heart Free Me From a Scary Rat’s Maze

May 5, 2008

I had one of those moments yesterday, the kind where suddenly everything feels completely wrong.
It begins with a weird sense of displacement — in my case, sitting on the floor of my yoga room/office in the middle of my asana practice. “What am I doing here?” or something like it started the internal conversation. [...]

Read the full article →

Sometimes It’s in Your Nature to Take Your Toddler to Play at the Mall

April 22, 2008

A good friend told me yesterday how difficult she finds it to spend a whole day entertaining her twenty-month-old alone. That, she realized, is what those weekly Target outings are about.
“Target?” I thought to myself. “Target? Honey, you haven’t sunk to the depths of toddler entertainment desperation until you become a regular at [...]

Read the full article →

Breaking from Break, Part II: Back to Being a Mom

April 1, 2008

So, it turns out it’s not as hard as I had anticipated to jump right back into mothering, working, and living at breakneck speed.
Except, that is, for those five minutes this morning when I was trying to change Jake’s poopy diaper. He has now decided that a choice between lying down and standing up [...]

Read the full article →

Breaking from Break, Part I: Why We Are Allowed to Take a Break from Being Mothers

March 31, 2008

It began before I left to take my friend Sam to the airport at the end of his weekend visit. Panic. Anxiety. An unsteady feeling, as if the floor beneath me had disappeared, leaving me spinning my legs in an ethereal nothingness.
I thought about what was causing this feeling half an hour [...]

Read the full article →