Parenting
In Human Parts. More on Medium.
Remember, one day in the not-too-distant future, you’ll be begging her to slow down
First, scope out a quiet neighborhood where she can practice driving with minimal distractions. The roads should be wide enough that she doesn’t feel squeezed by oncoming traffic. Make a mental note of potential obstacles like pedestrians, cyclists, off-leash dogs, and trash cans.
Quiet locales with meandering cross streets are perfect. They’ll remind her of where she grew up which may help calm her fragile nerves. It also ensures that she’ll begin to make a positive association with leaving you forever.
Once you’ve settled on the perfect neighborhood, pull over and take a deep slow breath. Gaze at a worn…
THIS IS US
Of all the haunting remnants of the past year, the one I can’t shake is my daughter’s eerily real doll
We were falling deep into our pandemic winter, and after the better part of a year of fully online or hybrid school, my daughter’s noneducational hours had become dominated by additional screen time so that I could keep working. She transformed into a third-grader with a casual online “window shopping” habit and a growing obsession with Reborn Babies, strangely realistic, silicone baby dolls.
I wasn’t sure how I’d survived the better part of the year as a freelance writer in shutdown with a throbbing ball of stress growing and contracting somewhere over my heart, my nervous stomach. …
THIS IS US
We’ve all been stuck in some way or another
Last summer, my eight-year-old got trapped inside a couch. Under the couch, technically, in its undergirding. It was complicated, the way scenarios involving children often are, especially in the middle of a pandemic.
See, this is a story about a kid in a couch, but it is also an allegory.
It was August, a time when, normally, our family of five would be undertaking epic summer adventures, casting off from Brooklyn to shores unknown. But like everything else — school, sleepovers, birthday and holiday celebrations — summer adventures had been canceled. Both of our attempts to visit my husband’s family…
EXPRESS YOURSELF
Turns out you don’t need a room of your own in order to write after all
I had always wanted to cook, but my first kitchen, no more than a 6-foot-by-6-foot linoleum-tiled square in my tiny walk-up apartment, stopped me from cooking anything more than couscous salad and the occasional batch of pumpkin muffins. I had always longed for a green thumb, but my first garden was a strip of shady, rocky soil, so I halfheartedly planted a few pansies and basil plants and waited patiently for another house that would have a garden with direct sun. I had always wanted to write, but I didn’t have a room of my own.
For a long time…
LIVED THROUGH THIS
Car crashes, quarry jumps, and the friends we love despite everything
I put my feet on your dashboard, sand and beach tar between my toes; we are old friends.
You pull out a Marlboro and fumble in your pocket for your lighter, holding the steering wheel with your knees. “Don’t,” I say, reaching out for the wheel, nodding toward my child in the backseat. You nod and drop the cigarette out of your lips to your lap and grin at me. “Fine, but only for you.”
“Not for me,” I say.
“For him, because he is yours,” you say.
“Yes, but also for you.”
I’ve been trying to save you for…
HUMANS 101
The key is to support your kids as they figure out who they are, without backing them into a corner
I was unprepared when my 12-year-old daughter told me she might be bisexual. We were on a hike, and she confided that she “knew she liked boys but also found girls in the locker room very pretty.”
My daughter and I have always been close, and I was probably overeager to show her my support for her sexual orientation. Over the next few months, I would occasionally ask if she had crushes on any boys or girls. I think I overdid it a bit. About two years later, she started dating a girl and told my wife, “Don’t tell Dad…
THIS IS US
Not all children grow up
The first playdate was the product of an infant/toddler reading hour at my local library in the fall of 2002. I’d been freshly laid off from a dot-com job that had consumed me. My daughter Ana was 18 months old.
I’d been adrift, aimless, caught in the purgatory between unemployment and whatever came next. Suddenly I was in the company of a toddler all day, every day.
And so I found myself in the library at 11 a.m. …
You’re older and more mature. But your parents are just older.
This essay is part of Medium’s Mind the Gap: Generational Differences series.
My parents are two of my best friends. Please do not tell 15-year-old me that, in 30 years, Mom and Dad are going to be two of his best friends. He will find that fact depressing. But it’s true. I’m proud of it.
The Leitch parents moved from rural Illinois to Winterville, Georgia about four years ago, after they retired, so they could be near my two young sons, their only grandchildren. After missing most of the boys’ first two years, they get to watch them grow up…
This Is Us
On having faith, and giving permission to let go
“How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again.”
— Henry Scott Holland
Dear Mom,
The light is different here. If you saw how this place shines, I think you’d stop worrying about me. The light connects the landscape to every part of itself. It moves. It sparkles.
It links the souls together like pearls knotted in an endless strand. You know how pearls hold iridescence inside all those layers of shell? Well, if you look into the center of a pearl, you’ll get a taste of the light that surrounds me. Go do that now…
With our son out of the house, my husband and I provide our own teenage ambience
My son, completely at wits’ end with Zoom education, left for boarding school last month, so my husband and I became, a few years ahead of schedule, empty nesters. I had not yet given this phase of my life much thought; my son is in 10th grade, so I had assumed I had three more years of hands-on parenting. …
Human Parts
A publication from Medium about humanity: yours, mine, and ours.
