How do I deal with my child’s social issues when I still haven’t worked through my own? By Amy Kline
relationships
“You’re a different person,” my husband said. This was years ago now. Thank god he was right. By Samantha Shanley
“I built it myself. What do you think?” My father didn’t look up, he just took a drink from his bottle and kept staring at the television. By John Graham
I wonder now why it came as such a shock to me that friends would get married, that wild nights out would become sleepless ones at home with a baby. By Claire Lynch
My mom took off her scarf and revealed her bald head. We all braced ourselves, but the woman at the shop didn’t flinch. By Kandace Chapple
I worry with the other moms about whether we’re good at it. Raising another person. By Marni Berger
So much of who we are has to do with how we think about our own parents and our own childhood.
I didn’t have my therapist hat on when my son went through his grief—I was just his mom, muddling through it alongside him. By Lori Gottlieb
My father was an every-other-weekend dad, then a once-a-summer dad and, finally, a phone-it-in dad. Then we lost touch. By Stephen J. Lyons
In the summer, I put my sunbaked arm down next to his hoping he will notice it’s not so different. By Adrienne Sciutto
These words by Joan Didion summed up my twenties, but they also capture the predicament of my current midlife crisis. By Elizabeth Newdom
We asked, you answered. In three words.
I am a woman who sometimes needs a glass of wine or two in the evening, because even though her boys are no longer babies, five to six o’clock is still the witching hour. By Fiona Leary Boucher
Our married life was no longer comfortable. There was no indulgence, no whispered promises of sweet dessert. By Hannah Grieco
I sent you a bowl of black stones because of the hardness of loving a child for exactly who he is. By Brianne DeRosa
I imagined my three daughters coming to me, full of their own insecurities, trying to explain they are beautiful the way they are, my fake boobs staring them down. By Katherine Prince
I wanted to believe that bringing teenagers into our life would make it easier to let them go. I was wrong. By Meredith Gordon Resnick
I saw him as I thought he was, an elegant young man for whom I could buy something expressly male. How wrong I was. By Penny Wolfson
When he was two, I spent mornings stuffing tubes of penne with scrambled eggs to trick him into eating something other than pasta. By Marianna Marlowe
“Oh, relax,” he says, ruffling my daughter’s wispy blonde hair. “We’re just playing.” By Lisa Norgren
My sister had asked me to bake. “Keep her busy” was the secret code among my family members that season. By Nancy Payne-Hambrose
It had been a long time since I’d heard her laugh. It felt like clouds parting. By Stewart Lewis
Time heals so much of what goes wrong in life, but the memory of what happened to Mum on that day still makes my body react. By Clover Stroud
You will be in your slippers, making waffles, and suddenly remember that your mother is dead. By Brianne DeRosa
After we gave it all to Goodwill, I lived in fear every day that I would see somebody else wearing my mom’s clothes. By Kandace Chapple