Is it true?

I learned last week that my Gen Z cousin doesn’t smoke weed or drink alcohol. I’ve seen the headlines: Gen Z isn’t buying alcohol, Gen Z is sober. Still, I was surprised to encounter it in the wild. It made me feel judged, not because my cousin is judgmental, but because youth feels powerful to […]

Semi-Charmed Life

A few days ago, my business partner told me that I presume everyone is incompetent and I feel bad about it, which is one of the most insightful things anyone has ever said about me. I do presume that most people are incompetent, and I feel bad about it because that presumption is antithetical to […]

Anything Helps

The first night of the year, I dreamed about climate change. In the dream, a man told me that the temperature would rise so quickly over the next two years that humans would die out. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to be funnier, so I tried to make myself laugh about it when […]

Half Over

In the summer of 2024, I began craving hard exercise. I hadn’t done any exercise more intense than walking since well before the birth of my second child two years previously. I hadn’t been to a group exercise class since the pandemic. But, one June day, I went to a class at my local Barre3 […]

SWAG

A couple years ago I wrote the first three sentences of my autobiography: The year was 2006. I was listening to Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveSounds album nonstop. I had never been more lonely in my entire life. It’s a good start, a fantastic start even, but where to go from there? It isn’t true, either. Yes, […]

Zoloft

My husband’s therapist told him that if we don’t go on regular dates, we will have nothing when our children are grown. I resented her for it. I like dates, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t resent the suggestion that we’d end up with nothing, either. But I did resent the idea that there is […]

Wish

My mother-in-law once told me that when her children were young she had three prayers. The first was that none of her children would get lice. The second was that she would not have any more babies once she turned 40. The last was that all of her problems would be money problems. She told […]

Hex

I’ve been reading a good book lately. Sometimes reading a good book makes me sad, and I’ve been thinking about why. What I’ve come up with is that a good book conveys the human experience in all its complexities. A good book makes me, as a person, feel seen. Feeling seen by a book is […]

big Fan

The other day my daughter gave me a hug and I recalled a particular section of Cherry Street. You know the spot where the train track crosses Cherry, just before Highway 65? If you’re driving east the street rises up on a little hill, where the train tracks are, and then it rises further and […]

Violent Fancy

Last Saturday we visited the Laura Ingalls Wilder House and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri. Tony and I had recently read Little House in the Big Woods to our 5-year-old daughter. Mansfield is less than an hour’s drive from Springfield, and this was a pretty weekend for it. The tips of the trees were just starting […]