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Largely because of a dog named Fred, who despised hats and joggers and anything that his unknowable mind deemed suspicious, Mateusz and I rented a farmhouse north of Toronto in the summer of 2010.
By Karen VogelOctober 2012The Tooth Fairy, a vibrator, a fiftieth wedding anniversary
By Our ReadersJune 2012I don’t identify with most other mothers — the conversations about clothes and music lessons and camps and milestones in development. The only mothers I truly feel OK around are the ones whose kids have something different about them. Something odd. Or wrong. Or worse.
By Lidia YuknavitchJune 2012There is an energy associated with labor and birth. Birth is holy and sacred. But you have to be respectful of mother and baby, or you’ll miss it. If we come to it with a sense of awe and treat the mother with kindness and respect, birth can be a truly spiritual, empowering experience.
By Pat MacEnultyJanuary 2012“The thing I remember most about watching my mother’s body burn,” my mother tells me in English, a language that has never quite served her, “is when I can smell her skin and hair as they are catching fire and crackling in the flame.”
By Jaed Muncharoen CoffinJune 2011What if we extended as much kindness and generosity to everyone as we do to our own children and grandchildren? It’s shameful that I still make a distinction between the small number of people who matter the most to me and the nearly 7 billion other humans on the planet.
By Sy SafranskyMarch 2011One December morning in 1967, in the early hours before a dull winter sunrise, I labored alone on the fourth floor of Immanuel Hospital in Omaha, Nebraska. I had expected labor to be work, more or less like it sounded: teeth-gritting effort, sweating, and grunting. Instead furious stallions stampeded across my eighteen-year-old belly, and no amount of shameless screaming in the direction of the fluorescent-lit hallway could quiet them.
By Lee StricklandNovember 2010At my former father-in-law’s funeral in November, I walked up to my ex-husband Billy and kissed him. It was our fifth kiss in thirty years: one when we finalized our divorce, one at his mother’s funeral, one at our son’s wedding, one at the birth of our twin grandchildren four months before, and now this kiss, with its hint of grief. I still loved his parents. And I had loved him once.
By Elizabeth TibbettsOctober 2010He has been making inferences, figuring out what it is to be. He invents a language that expresses his awareness. His sentences are marvelously efficient, each one containing a whole chapter of his philosophy. “Aglaglagl” is one. He says it when the dog’s nose comes to visit the bassinet.
By Bruce Holland RogersOctober 2010Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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