If the secret to friendship is hours logged, mothers of school-age children have a distinct advantage. By Michelle Riddell
relationships
The truth is I dreaded my Friday playgroup as much as I craved it. I stood apart from the other mothers in ways I couldn’t quite communicate or change. By Laura G. Owens
As parents of older kids, socializing with other moms was apparently no longer part of the job description. By Anne Helena
“Ryan,” I say. “If you ever want to play with the girl dolls, we have them. In this house, you can play with whatever you want.” By Ann Wainwright
How exactly could I break this news to a kid who already went to bed every night scared of death to the point of tears? By Tanya Mozias Slavin
The hardest thing about divorce, I’ve found, is not the being alone. It’s the being alone when most of the people you know and love have a first port of call that isn’t you. By Lauren Apfel
We don’t want our boys to be “cured.” There is no cure; autism is a chronic state, like arthritis, or love. By Elizabeth Michaelson Monaghan
I’d been craving more one-on-one time with my kids for so long and now, thanks to those pesky parasites, I had it. By Kate Lemery
We would take a million pictures of our child but none of us. Forget to schedule date nights because we never needed them before. By Elizabeth Newdom
“Why is she like that?” my son asks. I hesitate. There’s no denying my mother’s passive aggressive disdain towards me. By Elizabeth Maria Naranjo
Is there any better teacher of life for a kid on the spectrum than a brother or sister? By Marya Markovich
How do I deal with my child’s social issues when I still haven’t worked through my own? By Amy Kline
“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