The Brutal Honesty of the Young
I love the brutal honesty of kids and teens. They don’t need to stand in front of the Bocca della Veritá to state the truth because the world hasn’t piled the rules of gracious manners on their doorstep yet. Have you ever noticed that kids always talk about everything that is going on in their house much to the parent’s dismay?
Spend a few hours with a child and you will learn that Dad said the “F word” last night, Mom cooked breakfast for dinner, Grandpa has a new girlfriend that Mom and Dad don’t like, and Sister had a meltdown because she forgot to lock the bathroom door and Brother walked in on her while she was on the toilet. One day my friend’s 4-year son walked out of the bathroom and announced to his family “I have a big butt and a little penis.” Forks dropped, laughter ensued and my friend pulled his son aside and said “son, you may not want to advertise that family attribute.” Read more 
How Would You Grade Your Partner In The Kitchen?
My husband often says “Honey, I emptied the dishwasher for you” which really means that he took the dishes out of the dishwasher and piled them on the counter top for me to put away. For years I thanked him although secretly I thought he was using the wrong pronoun in announcing he emptied the dishwasher for me because I never laid claim to the dishwasher. Read more
Do You Prefer To Be Called A MILF or a Grandmother?
A few weeks ago I was speeding through the parking lot in my 6 cylinder station wagon (which my daughter thinks is the most uncool car in the world) when I saw the big brown UPS truck come around the corner. I quickly pulled over, jumped out of the driver’s seat and ran over to ask if there was a package for Paddock. There were 2 UPS guys in the front seat , both of whom looked to be in their 20’s, one obviously training the other. Read more
“F in Exams”
My daughter was in a French school from 1st – 4th grade and a bilingual French/English school from 5th – 8th grade which used an International Baccalaureate grading system of 1-7, where 1 is the lowest score, 4 is passing, and 7 is a perfect score. When she came back to the US to attend a high school school where the primary language was English, she had to abandon the metric system of measurements, adjust to the language, and adopt a letter grading system which led to this conversation: Read more
New Jersey’s Gas Pump Problem
New Jersey has always enjoyed favored status with me because I grew up in the northeastern part of the state – an area known for farmland and as a bedroom community for those who worked in New York but wanted to escape the intensity of life in an urban city. Through the years, numerous jokes about New Jersey – the accent, the “joyzey shore,” the Cherry Hill water tower – have been repeated along with the question that always perplexed me: “What exit are you from?” as if New Jersey was a narrow state where all residents could claim an exit off the New Jersey Turnpike. Read more
“Olive Kitteridge”
When I was in high school, I worked in a local pharmacy and learned the secrets of everyone in town: the mayor was taking Valium, an overwhelmed mother had a prescription for 100 Percocet tablets filled monthly, a close friend’s parents never paid their bills (this was back when I thought everyone paid their bills), and a young girl voted “best looking” by her fellow classmates in the graduating class of the local high school was trying to break into modeling and getting hooked on diet pills to become the size 4 she would never be. Read more
Jeffrey Zaslow on Daughters
A few months ago, I bought tickets for my daughter and I to attend an author forum featuring Jeffrey Zaslow, who I knew of from his column in the Wall Street Journal and as co-author of “The Last Lecture:” a life lesson story of a Carnegie Mellon professor named Randy Pausch who was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and wanted to leave a lasting message to his young children. Read more
You Know You’re In The USA When…
Forty years of my life were spent primarily in the United States and so the culture of this great nation is at my core even though there seems to be more cultural diversity in the US than any other country in the world. Read more
You Know You’re In Madrid, Spain When….
Four of the best years of my life were spent in Madrid, Spain and there isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t think about the capital city, especially the climate, culture, and the food. The weather is incredible: there are four sunny dry seasons which means every day is a good hair day. Writing about hair attributes can sound shallow and frivolous but a city with a “hair ease of maintenance” grade of A+ is worthy of page space. Read more
You Know You’re in Switzerland When…
My great-grandmother was born in Soulalex, a village located in the French-speaking canton (similar to a US state) of Valais (section 23 in the map below) in Switzerland. Located literally on the side of a mountain, Soulalex was a small farming village a hundred years ago when she left and immigrated to Illinois in search of a better life. She was 16 years old. Read more
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