My Jenn-eration

One of my favorite things to do whenever I visit my father’s home is to pore through old family albums. I love looking at all the old pictures. There are multiple albums dedicated to the arrival of my oldest sister. Endless black and white shot after shot of a very new set of parents looking adoringly at their baby. There are many more of my next oldest sister, this time in color, of a set of slightly worn but still very excited and sort of new parents greeting their second child, their first baby toddling off in the distance. And then there is me. There are a few of pictures of me as a baby. Mostly these are group shots with my sisters and me plugged in right before someone snapped the photo. There are almost no shots with that adoring fresh faced couple grinning at their new baby. I presume they were either too busy or too tired to pose. More than ever, this makes sense to me. When most of the photos of me do begin, it is around the time that my sisters became teenagers and I ...

Recently, one of my oldest and dearest friends celebrated her daughter’s 8 th birthday. It seemed nearly impossible both to her and to me that 8 years had gone by since that adorable little chubby blonde bundle joined us. She found herself remarking on how this grown-up girl before her is the same baby from all those years ago. It seems so incomprehensible. In many ways, I know how she feels. Yes, about her daughter but also about myself. For a reason I can’t quite articulate, in my head there is a certain age that I perpetually feel that I am. And regardless of how much time passes and how much father I get from that actual age, I still feel like that girl. I look in the mirror and I see some wrinkles and creases and lumps and bumps – the battle scars of motherhood and aging that I can, on occasion, wear with pride.   But in my head I am still that same girl from long ago: I am 24. It is 2001. I have lived in New York City for just a few weeks. I moved there exactly 3 da...

This morning as the summer brightness peeked in beneath the shades earlier than it should, Phil and I lay very still in our bed listening to the quiet hum of our house and our family. Soon, as always, the bed started getting crowded. Dylan’s head popped up first. Before not too long, some curls bopped along looking for a spot in the bed, Ruby wedging herself into the mix as well. And just like that we’d gone from two to four. In some ways, that feels like so much of what the last 7 years have been like. There were first dates and excitement and laughter and indulgence. And then an engagement! And then a wedding! And suddenly… there were more of us. But that girl from 7 years ago – she just couldn’t have known what was to come. How hard it would be, how hard it is. In truth, I believe I legitimately thought that my marriage would largely play out like a sitcom. We’d occasionally bicker, but resolve the issue within a 30 minute timeframe, each admitting we were wrong, laughing and sea...