Before I became a mother, I was, as my Sonoma County aunt is fond of saying, “a lover of the grape.” I liked my wine. So much so, in fact, that when I got pregnant, I continued to hold stemware at parties, feigning sips, because I knew that if I were to abstain among anyone who had seen the old, half-a-bottle-a-night me in action, the jig would immediately be up. Read More
I was breastfed until I was 4 years old. Or 5, maybe. My mother has always been fuzzy on the exact math. I choose to go with 4, because as it is, people tend to look so shocked that I’m afraid their lower jaws might actually fracture were I to add a full year to my tenure suckling on what I reportedly liked to call “nippy.”
As you might imagine, this information became humiliating to me right around the time I sprouted my own breasts (sixth grade or seventh grade, depending on which breast you want to date from—they were Irish twins). Read More
I was shocked—shocked—to hear about the backlash that erupted a few weeks ago after a mom on the Park Slope Parents message board complained about ice cream vendors infiltrating our local playgrounds, in a craven attempt to force their obesity-promoting, lactose-intolerant intolerant products on innocent children.
In the interest of full disclosure, I was eating a pint of ice cream—well, gelato—when I received my weekly PSP digest, which was otherwise a lovely and harmless collection of stories about people getting help spying on their nannies using iPhone apps, or choosing the right Jewish day school, that read like an ever-so-slightly ethnic Nicholas Sparks novel. But when I got to the blast about the the ice cream incident, I pushed back my stracciatella in shame. Read More
“Why is that baby being such a dick?”
This was in 2009. My husband, Jeff, and I were on our way to Berlin, and a toddler a few rows ahead of us was voicing dissatisfaction with his sudden corporeal confinement by making the sorts of noises Janis Joplin might have produced had she lived to accidentally stick her hand into a garbage disposal.
I rolled my eyes and returned to my US Weekly and Delta-issue merlot. “I know. What an asshole.”
John Lennon once sang of instant karma. But in my case, it took three years. Read More
