Mean Mom’s Thank-You Time: What I’m Grateful for This Thanksgiving
For some reason I’m feeling more squishy-sentimental than usual (I have this crazy dual-personality thing, which I claim to have inherited from my mom — hard-shell mean-mom exterior surrounding a gooey, nougat-y, cries-at-sappy-ads center.) So I figured it was time, it being just days shy of Thanksgiving, to make a little list. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, second only to Christmas, which I’m a total baby about because I love it with the same purity and intensity that I did as a kid. Well, a kid with big Visa bills in January, but anyway, I love it, so …Keep Reading
“The Middle”: A Sitcom Dad Actually Gets it Right
So, I was going to write about homework this week, but that will have to wait, because an extraordinary thing happened last night, sometime between 8:00pm and 8:30pm, while I was watching the ABC-TV sitcom, “The Middle.” I say extraordinary because this involved a TV dad, who was not Bill Cosby or Bill Bixby (is anyone old enough to remember “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father”? No? Yes? God, I loved him. He reminded me of my dad). This involved a TV dad who … wait for it … did the right thing. He stood up. He not only did a …Keep Reading
Men and Women, Work and Family: What Kind of Dad is a “Real Man”?
Well, here we are again. By “we” I mean my family; and by “here” I mean with one of us out of a job. Several years ago, my husband left a job that was literally sucking the life out of him (thanks to a bullying boss and a badly-run organization, he lost: 15 lbs. and his natural, glass-half-full outlook. What he did not lose, thank heaven, was his remarkable, resilient, family-forged work ethic). Anyway, though he made the correct decision to leave that job, he had no way of knowing that smack on the heels of it would come the …Keep Reading
