Writing the good read
A few years back I picked up a really interesting book, Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey among Hasidic Girls by Stephanie Wellen Levine. Essentially the published version of an academic thesis, Levine spent a year living among the young Hasidic girls of the Lubavitcher community in New York. I grew up in a…
I plan on finding the energy to floss my teeth and moisturize. Aside from that today is a loss. My son, who learned to share young, has shared his bad-ass spring cold with me and I have literally spent 30 of the last 36 hours in bed and don’t plan on being vertical again for…
I’ve been going through old pictures of my grandparents and great-grandparents with my son as he puts together a family history presentation for his US history class. On the Hubbell side of the family, we know everything you can know from the 1640s on, when Richard Hubball first walked onto the shores of Colonial America….
I’ve been accused many times of being a Mama Bear when it comes to my son. When it’s said, it is tossed at me as an insult. But I don’t take it that way. I stand a little taller. My son was diagnosed as mildly autistic right around the time he was three. At the…
In what will probably be one of the shortest blog posts I ever do, let me first introduce today’s topic for the NAIEW Words Matter Blog Challenge: Words can be mangled, misused, or misunderstood. What is your funniest example of mangling, misuse, or misunderstanding? My funniest example of mangling words comes from the mouth of…
Today is the first day of the National Association of Independent Writers and Editors annual Words Matter blog challenge. Each day, bloggers write on a specific topic. Today’s topic: Is there a word that has changed, or could change your life? What is it, and what difference would it make? My answer: Cure. Maybe I’m…
If you count the last post I did in April — on April 30 — then really, this is my 32nd straight day blogging as part of the Third Annual Wordcount Blogathon. It’s been hard. Often I’ll have to reach deep to come up with something to blog about, usually in the evening after my…
Maybe there were more than four things, but these stood out: 1. The design isn’t intelligent if the parts wear out before the productive life of the unit is over. Teeth were not meant for a life of 80 or 90 years, and dentists make a living off this fact. 2. It’s not fun getting…
I saw the movie Babies today. It’s a lovely film that looks at the first year or so of life of four babies, one born in Mongolia, one in Namibia, one in Japan, and one in San Francisco. That movie taught me a few things. Some may seem obvious, particularly to someone who has been…
Some days, I don’t know how to be a good parent. I have a nearly 13-year-old boy, on the verge of puberty, who already has surges of testosterone that make him difficult and mouthy and mean in a way that my sweet boy of yore never was before. And this boy is autistic. He has…