Z has to practice his cello. But he just wants to talk about how he can’t practice. I’m like, “Just fucking practice, just pick up the cello and practice. You can’t do anything until you practice.” I’ve been writing about my life with my kids for twenty years, but how can I keep doing it when he […]
The Bureau of Labor says that by 2026 we will be short 1.2 million engineers. Right now, the majority of developers are men. So presumably it’s a crisis that women are not in STEM. Microsoft is thinking that filling the funnel with girls is the way forward. Microsoft decides the Wonder Woman movie has a female […]
My son Z started getting crazy from the pandemic around the fall of 2021. He’d made very few friends in Boston before Covid, and the friends he did make from music lessons stopped coming to Boston from the suburbs. And he couldn’t really meet new kids, because Covid.
I call Melissa to tell her my newest discovery. I gear up to lecture her about Tango and the Jews. “Do you know about them?” I ask. “I won’t be fun if you already know.” She says, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Z is recording Bach. Fifteen minutes earlier he lost his music which is normal for him. When he was six years old his teacher could change a bowing pattern right before a performance and he’d remember just fine. Now, at 16, he can’t remember a bowing pattern even if he checks it right before he […]
Every morning my Google Calendar alert says “you have no events scheduled today.” This used to be my favorite part of my email, but my prayers for permanent lockdown went unanswered, and my brother did shared screen to help me book a flight and he saw I have no calendar and he lost his shit.
I’m carrying water from the spigot at Northeastern’s playing field across the street and through the park to the garden I planted, probably illegally. I used to think of myself as a community activist. Then I received an email from the state that they would run a lawnmower over my roses and I felt more […]
People who are not my kids think it’s really interesting to listen to my side of a coaching phone call. In fact, lots of people say they’d pay to hear both sides, but it’s clear to me that if someone knows another person is listening to them the call gets useless fast and sounds more […]
A majority of people in the US are considering quitting their jobs right now according to the New York Times. This is obvious to me because in the months after the towers fell, my world was my recovery support groups — and in my groups, the conversations were all about who is going back to […]
I treat my freezer like a savings account. As a single parent with an unstable income, I know that when there’s an emergency I’ll use rent money, camp money, or even food money to solve the problem. But no matter what the emergency is, I can’t pay for it with frozen broccoli, so with food […]