I knew something was wrong the day my son lay in bed in an emergency room waiting for his MRI to come back. A nurse entered his room and said, “Has your son been outside the country recently?”
I did a double-take. “It’s pretty late to be asking that, isn’t it?”
“Ma’am, yes or no?”
“No.” Read more
When you tell your friends, in disbelief, about this post, you will say, “She’s liveblogging her nervous breakdown.”
I am doing that. Because I don’t know what else to do. Read more
I am writing this on my new dining room table, in my new apartment in Swarthmore, PA. We live above Dunkin’ Donuts, and I told the kids absolutely no buying a donut ever. But I bought a few coffees there as a goodwill gesture for using their Internet which thank goodness filters up to our apartment.
The kids think it’s totally incompetent that we’ve been here four days and still do not have our own Internet connection. They do not recognize we also don’t have pots and pans and sheets and shampoo. Read more
manzanitakids.com
If feminism is about having the right to make choices, then it’s also about the obligation to make a choice. You cannot choose to have a spouse who’s a breadwinner and who shares everything 50/50. You cannot choose to have everything in life but only do it half the time. Having something—anything—is about commitment. And you cannot choose to have everything up to your standards but also allow other peoples’ standards to prevail. Read more
I think I spent the last decade deciding if it’s okay to give up my career for my kids.
I am not splitting hairs any more. I am not writing as if I don’t have kids. I am not writing as if I’m in a permanent identity crisis. I’m not writing screaming tirades to defend myself. Read more
If you ever worry what it will look like when your kids take over your life, this is it: lunch at my investor’s favorite restaurant to discuss my son’s cello lessons. Me getting there two hours early because one son has an orthodontist appointment and one son has a cello lesson and my husband is taking cows to market, so even in a family with two cars and a nanny and a driver, there is no way for me to get to my meeting on time unless I’m two hours early. Read more
After three days of silence on the cause of death for Dave Goldberg, the New York Times has changed their story in the span of seven hours, some mysterious source said collapsed while exercising. Then a leak to the Associated Press said head trauma. If we were in an Agatha Christie mystery, I’d say heart attack. Read more
I intuitively knew to hide my kids when I started having them, because I had already had a rip-roaring career where I steered clear of women who doted on their kids. (It’s always women, even today.) The kids were annoying to me. I couldn’t understand why the women would lose focus on their jobs to get stupid about their kids.
I made sure to stay in male-dominated departments so as to not get sucked into the kid thing by proximity.
I made sure to take no maternity leave. (A terrible decision, but one that many women make.)
Even with all my precautions, my editor suggested that instead of writing a workplace column I should write a women’s column.
That suggestion pissed me off — but I just vowed to hide my kids more.
I am at O’Hare flying to Pittsburgh to give a speech. I try to never give speeches. Actually I try to never leave my house. Because I think I will regret any time I spend away from my kids.
Well, definitely I will. Here’s how I know:
Because I chose to live in abject poverty in NYC because I didn’t want to leave my kids to work in an office. So I started building a freelance writing business on $25 articles. We ran out of food a lot, and I thought I’d look back and be horrified that my kids did not have beds. (We all slept on the floor because we had no room for beds.) Read more
