My Jenn-eration

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...