My Jenn-eration

I think that there is something about this seemingly never-ending winter and my raging seasonal affective disorder that has got my mind already travelling to spring and got my heart stuck on Mother’s Day. And it made me wonder, did you ever imagine what your life would be like? Did you ever have a moment, where the reality of living out a scene from the life imagined was just so shockingly different from the life-long fantasy that you literally felt stuck somehow, like there was some murky uncomfortable gray area that defined the space between the path you thought your life would take and the path it actually did? It’s a dark, sticky, murky, sucky, uncomfortable space. That space between what was supposed to be and what is. Which is exactly where I landed on my first Mother’s Day as a mother. All of us have different visions of where they think their lives will twist and turn and lead them, but I always knew that somehow, some way, mine would lead me toward motherhood. And in my fan...

Dear Valentine, For many, many years you were the single girl. The girl who bought yourself chocolates at the Duane Reade and watched Nora Ephron movies inside her UWS apartment on those lonely single Valentine’s Day nights, believing that none of it would ever change and that you would die alone in there at some point with the box of chocolates and the receipt from the Duane Reade which would embarrassingly prove to everyone long after you were dead that you bought them for yourself. And then one day you weren’t alone anymore. One day, someone bought you chocolates. Actually, it was a bottle of water outside Fairway but still, the sentiment was there. And Valentine’s Days were really never the same since. But this year, I challenge you to reach back to lonely Duane Reade chocolate girl, because more than anything she knew how strong and smart and capable she was. And sometimes in the whirlwind that is marriage and children and families, finding yourself in a tornado of schedules a...

Today was a snow day. Actually more like a blizzard day. For the past 31 hours (but who’s counting) we’ve been house-bound while nearly three feet of snow fell on our house, city and state. I had planned for us to be stuck most of Saturday but my presumption was that by Sunday life would mostly return to normal. But our driveway is still blocked by snowdrifts that are both un-climable and larger than Dylan (guessing somewhere between 4 and 5 feet). A Sunday burst of freedom is looking murky, much like my sanity. Here is what a snow day appears to mean to the children: I have no responsibilities and unfettered access to both my parents. Though we will go nowhere, I will change my clothes multiple times and insist on bulking up on baked goods at random points throughout the day. Here is what it appears to mean to my husband: unlike a regular weekend when I nap once, on snow days I will nap twice. Snow days are apparently the Passover of other days to Phil: on this day, he dips twice. ...