My Jenn-eration

Hope is in a phase right now. Frankly, it’s one that I had completely forgotten we’d already visited two times over before. Until I opened that car one chilly December morning to take her out of her car seat and found her barefoot. She is in the taking off her shoes and socks while we drive phase. I’d completely erased from my mind that this was ever a thing until I looked down at those pale pink little piggies staring back at me. Of course, Dylan always did this wherever we went. And Ruby too. And how it would frustrate me to have to stop and put back on the shoes and socks every single time no matter how short the trip or how cold the day. It used to annoy me but now, staring down at her feet I realize, whatever moment you’re in never lasts nearly as long as it feels. This is both the most beautiful and terrible thing about any single place in time. The other day I went back and read through tons of old blog posts, now spanning nearly three years. It was amazing. Less beca...

Not often, but sometimes when my father in law is feeling particularly wistful, he will speak of what he remembers. He remembers learning to swim with his sister on the banks of the mighty Tigris. He remembers the bountiful fruit trees that benefited from the rich soil of her banks, bearing the most beautiful and fragrant fruits. Pear trees, grapes, pomegranates. If I close my eyes, it all sounds so sweet, and aromatic and exotic. He is describing for me his childhood in Iraq. When they were still young, both my husband’s parents and their families left their homes in Iraq. They left everything they knew, and a land that by all accounts, was beautiful. Why? Why would you walk away from everything you have and everything you love? Because of fear. They were Jews. And at a certain point, being Jewish in Baghdad had become a dangerous way of life. It was clear: they were no longer welcome in their own home. In America, my mother in law went on to study and get her Master’...

Each night, away from the din of 24 feeds and news cycles and the idle chatter that surrounds us, my husband and I are working to rediscover some piece of the sacred and not yet lost art of communicating with each other without interruption. For a while now we have been trying to enforce a pretty simple rule we established for each other: no phones in the bedroom. There is all kinds of science and data that reinforce why this makes sense in terms of falling and landing in a generally more substantial and satisfying mode of REM. But even if we didn’t know about all of those studies there are all of the more obvious reasons why we should: because even if we silence all notifications it is nearly impossible to resist the lure of possible work emails, because it is a rabbit hole time suck, or because it inevitably places me in the same physical space with my husband even though he and I are mentally in vastly different circles with at least 400-1000 of our not so closest friends par...

How does the saying go? The days are long but the years are short. As a parent, my relationship with time has never been so complicated. But increasingly I am shifting my thinking to focus less on the minutes and more on me. How can I make small yet meaningful investments in my own physical and emotional well-being that will give me greater capacity to face each day? I hope you’ll have a listen to this podcast where I was so excited to have the opportunity to discuss this with Real Simple editor Lori Leibovich and time management expert Laura Vanderkam.

Perhaps the question was never, “Am I ahead or behind?” but rather, “How am I?” I hope you’ll come join me over at The Washington Post where I’m musing on how to make the most out of each day. So how do you manage your clock?

A few weeks ago I was sort of lurking behind the scenes in one of those Facebook groups created to share business referrals within my suburban town. A homeowner was having a horrendous problem with her lawn. Could anyone recommend a landscaper? Someone who could finally rid her of those unsightly weeds? In response, she received plenty of referrals of places to call from other home owners, but there was one comment buried within the midst of all the others that stood out. “I wish people would stop making their lawns so pretty. Those damn fertilizers are chasing everything away. We used to have butterflies in this town. We used to have ugly lawns and butterflies. Now we just have nice lawns.” This morning I woke up and I looked out at my perfectly nice lawn and turned on the news. More people are dead. They didn’t have to tell me anything about the shooter. I expected I already knew exactly what he was like. He was young. And angry and isolated. Here we are again. 1 shooter. ...

Do you know this feeling? The feeling of choosing to give so much of yourself over to the people you love so that you carefully evade the difficult process of discovering who you really are? Come join me over at The Manifest-Station this morning, where I’m talking about why we do and don't choose to disentangle ourselves from their love, and what it feels like to unravel.

It is a balmy mid-summer night and my family is huddled together on the bed watching the Mets. In between innings, we flip back and forth to another channel featuring a documentary on Billy Joel and his last concert at Shea. He is singing one of my favorite songs, Summer Highland Falls. It’s either sadness or euphoria, Billy croons. It’s an oddly fitting backdrop for the evening as the Mets head into the 14 th inning. Indeed for experienced Met fans, it’s usually sadness. The bases are loaded. Lucas Duda is up. So far he is 0 for 6. Most of the family hurls insults at the TV in part because they are mad at Lucas Duda and in part because they believe (though would never admit) that if they are really angry and believe the worst in him, some mix of karma and superstition will change the outcome of his at bat. The count is 2-2. I see my husband and son. They are cursing and praying for the young batter at the same time. He strikes out. My son clutches his head and falls t...

So pleased to collaborate with BlogHer on this piece that is very near and dear to my heart. What lessons do we pass down to our daughters and why? Come join the discussion to find out which ones I won’t be sharing with my girls.

Sometimes when I am driving in the car, I will grip the wheel very tightly. I feel the leather slip between my fingers, its relative heat radiating off the bumps and groves of its rippled, manufactured skin. I like to linger there, perhaps too long, and to strangely take stock of the seemingly obvious fact that I am clutching a steering wheel. I am holding something. It is right here. In my hands. I can look at it and touch and turn it. I know what it is. And if I show it to you, you too will agree that this is a steering wheel. Inexplicably as a parent, this is increasingly meaningful to me. As a parent in the age of Internet and social media, this is life, and air. Everything is opinion. Nothing is fact. I need to know what is real. Sometimes I will spend all day with my kids and I will give every ounce of my physical and mental self and all of it will end with “you’re the worst.” Why? Because I asked her to put on her water shoes, or I asked him to buckle his seatbelt, ...

I have been struggling lately with the space both physical and mental to make time for writing. I have a lot of excuses for why that is. But more than not, I think the reason I haven’t been writing is largely the same as the reason I ever did: it’s scary. Writing prompts are short themed sort of micro essays that give you an opportunity to free write on a suggested topic. No pretense, no fear, no editing, no excuses: just write. Today I decided to take 10 minutes out of my day to try this prompt by Dina Relles at Literary Mama . I am grateful to the Charlie Brown special on the television, the baby’s nap, and a one sided and protracted Monopoly game that conspired on this rainy day to make this possible. Today’s prompt centered at what bubbles up when you return to a place that holds memories for you. So I thought to myself, where else do you go in the summer? Come join me at the beach….   ***** As a young girl, I never worried about the tide coming in too f...

Whenever my husband travels for business, I have the same thing for dinner almost every night. I will own that it is so disgusting that I will not eat it in front of him or my children. It is always post bedtime when I sink into that delicious and rare moment in time that is uniquely my own space. I take a bag of pretzels and dump them out on a plate and then I cover them with a slice of American cheese which I then microwave. Everything about it is wrong. It tastes amazing. I suspect that the actual taste of microwaved processed cheese melted on top of pretzels has little to do with gastronomic pleasure and everything to do with the taste of freedom, the taste of what it feels like to not be wanted or needed or touched. It tastes like the freedom to unravel. Mentally, sometimes I picture that this is what is happening at the end of these days that are both centuries and mere moments long. That after a day of logistics and questions and to dos and toys and tasks and dis...

My daughter and I shuffle carefully over the bridge. She is still trying to figure out how to maintain her balance while she walks. Each step is equal parts small yet deliberate. Slowly, we make progress. She is almost there but still she needs me and my one finger, more to mentally reassure her than anything else. Just one week shy of my 7 th Mother’s Day as a Mother, I am standing inside the circle of seven years without my own mother today. And from such a strange vantage point as it always has been from nearly the moment I became a mother, it strikes me how much both grief and motherhood are exactly like this: slow but deliberate steps forward. Each year at this time, the blogosphere is filled with pieces about what we’ve learned from our mothers. I’ve written extensively about the wonderful lessons I learned growing up with my mother. But not every lesson we learn from our mothers happens when they are living. Only now, seven years inside the circle of grief, d...

I am hastily straightening out the covers on my children's beds . Ruby’s bed takes little effort to pull together. When she sleeps, she hardly moves. Dylan’s bed has no blankets and half a sheet. Things were wild in there again last night. It was clearly another restless evening. Dylan has always been my most restless sleeper. Relentlessly curious, he tosses and turns throughout the night, waking pre-dawn. He spends most of the night awake and thinking. My husband and I are always in search of the next great thing that is going to “cure” him of this tossing and turning that often leaves him bleary eyed the next morning. We have invested a near silly amount of time and energy researching special blankets and sound machines and sleep masks and anything else we can think of. But all of this stuff circumvents the central issue: that he fundamentally views sleep as an extended length of time to swirl about in his own head about people and places he loves or misses. It is an...

About a month or so into our relationship, Phil took the meaningful next step of asking me to meet one of his best friends. They had a kind of friendship that spanned the test of time from childhood to adulthood, and came with its own language and shorthand.  Soon, they started talking about clock management. It was a throwback reference to the hours they would spend in front of the NBA as children, watching teams manage the final minutes and seconds of the game. Are you ahead or behind? Do you hold the ball and use the clock to your advantage, slowing the game down, or are you eager to make up points and try to race the clock while time seems to speed up and away? In a nutshell, this is clock management. I had not spent my formative years watching the NBA or on a court. The concept of manipulating time in this way was as foreign to me as their secret bromance language with each other. Now, nearly ten years later, I think often about that conversation and how much more a...

What do you wish you’d known before you brought your baby home? I’m over on the TODAY Parenting Team Community page discussing my reflections on what I wish I’d known as a first-time parent. I wish someone had warned me about the witching hour. Click here to read more and join the conversation!

I hope you’ll take a minute to hop on over to The Washington Post’s On Parenting page. This week I’m sharing my reflections and questions there on what makes a productive parent, and how do we distinguish between busy versus productive.   Come join the conversation by clicking here !

If parenting as a whole could be summed up through a single snapshot in time, that time would be dinner. It is nightly reinforcement of a central parenting principle that at no time should the amount of effort you put into anything correlate with the amount of joy, interest, education, and/or nutritional value that your children get out of the same moment. There is simply no connection between how much I try and work, and how many eat it at all, or how many spontaneously induce vomiting to evade the whole situation (in fairness, this only happened once but was nonetheless impressive in its own way). Here’s the thing. Now that Phil and I are doing this the third time around, we are ever so slightly more comfortable in our parenting roles. That is to say we don’t overreach. We know our limits. As parents, we know what we can pull off. Low expectations don’t mean we think less of ourselves as parents. It means we are realists who understand the math. Extraordinary effort does not neces...

The season of love is upon us. It's almost Valentine's Day and this year, I want to talk about real love and connection: the messy kind - the human kind. The other day I took Hope to her favorite little gym class. It’s funny how things shift from your first to your third kid. It has been a good six years since I did this class with my first born. Toward the end, they dump a big basket of toys in the middle and ask the parents to step to the side so that the babies can learn to socialize independent of their parents. This, at least historically, was always the time when the moms (and sometimes a few dads) would chat casually about their little ones. If they were sleeping, or not, new teeth, first steps, first foods. You see separation time for the babies is actually super important for moms and dads. It gives them precious seconds of adult conversation together. For many parents, they may not see another adult for the rest of the day. I remember that feeling as a first tim...