Clips
Stop! Calm Down! Think! for Greater Good
The children are jostling each other on the carpet in Nichole Hosty’s first grade class at Wilson Hills Elementary School in Worthington, Ohio.
“OK, everyone! I need you to sit quietly! Let’s all sit crisscross applesauce!” says their guidance counselor, Jennifer Hegerty. Gradually the children settle down and begin to focus on Hergerty’s lesson for the day—the second lesson in the Second Step Violence Prevention curriculum.
Textured for Brain Child
When my white friends argue that I shouldn’t “have” to adhere to black standards in styling Madison’s hair, they are refusing to acknowledge that this is a response driven by white expectations, created by a culture where the texture of black hair is considered a problem, an anomaly. When they say, “Would you do this for your biological child?” they ignore the fact that my bio son is white.
Open Adoption, Broken Heart for Salon.com (voted Best of 2006 and also reprinted in Adoptive Families)
Three days after Madison’s birth I watched my husband buckle her into the car seat, and then I climbed into the back seat beside her. I thought about Jessica, who we’d left sobbing in the maternity ward. I knew her arms were aching for her daughter, the daughter that was now ours.
“She’s beautiful,” I said to my husband. He glanced into the rearview mirror. “I know,” he said. We sped through the gray morning, heading home.
“I feel like a kidnapper,” I told him.
“I know,” he said.
Free to Be Me in Utne (originally “You”re Not the Boss of Me” in Brain Child; also reprinted in Ode)
Had I been Jane’s mother, I might have tripped out to buy a fancy electric toothbrush with an appealing cartoon character on the end of it, but I would still have insisted on nightly tooth brushing. They may be Jane’s teeth, but they’re my dental bills. Besides, I get embarrassed when my child goes to preschool with fuzzy teeth and smelly breath. Exactly, say the TCSers: I’m making it about me, not about my son. A parent’s duty, they say, is to help children achieve their own desires, not the parent’s.
Forgive Yourself in Yoga Journal
I’ll admit that I had fantasies about what might happen after Matthew got my letter. I pictured him calling me back, and I imagined us renewing the best parts of our friendship. That was one reason his response hurt so much; it wasn’t something I had even imagined. My first thought was to refuse it. “If he won’t forgive me,” I thought, mortified and angry, “then I rescind my apology!”
Falling in Love essay for ePregnancy
It wasn’t exactly my husband’s idea to have a baby. No, I’m afraid I begged and pleaded my way into motherhood. It wasn’t that Brett was against babies in general or fatherhood in particular, it was just that he always thought that fathering his own baby was something he would do in the future … the far off future. Me, I had other ideas.
Land of the Big Coasters for Disney’s Family.com
Fascination with Boxes for Wondertime
The Silent Type for Parenting
Expelled from Preschool for Parenting