By: Melissa Mensavage When it started I was sitting there rubbing my cold, clammy feet together waiting in the crisp, mauve-pink paper vest and sheet laying across my lap. I was wondering how long this was going to take and how soon I could get back to the office when the doctor walked in. We […]
Interview with Holly Vanderhaar by The Next Family TNF: How has it been blogging for TNF? It’s great. I tend to think in “personal essay mode” anyway, and I often find that, in the process of writing my entries, I work through the issue and I find answers to questions I didn’t even realize I was asking. […]
By: Holly Vanderhaar “Why are we here, again?” This is the question I found myself answering —over and over again— when my daughters and I attended the 30th Anniversary Celebration of Single Mothers by Choice. I had of course told them that the celebration was the main reason for our trip to New York —their […]
By: Julie Gamberg At the zoo, all my toddler wants to do is touch the animals. “No, honey,” I tell her, “This is their house and they want to stay there and they want us to stay here and they do not want us to touch them. But we can wave hello.” “But,” she says, […]
By: Julie Gamberg I work within the community with children and their parents and I see again and again how much learned behavior comes directly from parents. Parents who behave in a generous, caring way, who offer to help, who are involved and engaged, generally have kids who exhibit a lot of the same behavior. […]
By: Julie Gamberg My next-door neighbor has terminal brain cancer. When I hear him coughing, which is, intermittently, twenty-four hours a day, I imagine many a touching independent or foreign film in which two urban apartment neighbors who have never really met come together over something serious and profound and both of their lives are […]
By: Sheana Ochoa I’m glad Noah is a boy. This is a sexist remark and I admit it. If we lived in a gynocratic society, I’d wish he were a girl. As a mother, I just want him to have the smoothest path through this unwieldy road of life. This morning my fiancé and […]
By: Julie Gamberg I know another single mom who, after feeling very disconnected from her tween son, embarked on a project of spending just fifteen minutes a day where she is totally present with him, and then journaling about it. I was privileged to hear some of her journal entries and it’s clear that […]
By: Sheana Ochoa I’m writing under duress because my son is crying as my fiancé puts antibiotic drops in his ears. Once they’re done, he will come to mommy and I will have to stop writing because he is going to want me to rock him or play hide and seek or get him […]
By: Julie Gamberg I love reading, and books, and language. I like academia and I’m a bit of a (non-technical) geek. Which means, research shows, that it is very important that I do not push my child in any of those directions, and instead allow her to slowly, developmentally, find her way to her own […]