“Why do moms make all the plans and dads just follow directions?”

My six-year-old daughter asked me this astute question during a time in my life when I was very much wondering the same thing. I don’t recall my answer; clearly, it was not profound.

On that particular morning, we were packing for a camping trip. I had made a massive list and had been working steadily since 7 a.m. gathering various items into various piles, pausing now and then to ask myself why in the world I continued to operate under the stubborn illusion that camping was “fun.”

My…

When I dropped off my stepson at high school, I felt eminently grateful that I was no longer 16 years old. Just the sight of all those moody teenagers, hunched under the weight of their backpacks, made my blood pressure rise.

It was the first day of my stepson’s junior year, and his first day at this particular high school. He knew no one. He had grown up over 3,000 miles away. At the comfortable age of 35, I simply could not imagine having to navigate the strange new hallways, having to meet all those strange new people. …

SATIRE

Are you a go-getter who can independently make task lists, set priorities, and execute projects without being micromanaged? Do you love solving daily logistical puzzles? Does the prospect of managing multiple schedules excite you? If you answered yes to all of the above, we encourage you to apply.

The position will include extensive research on a broad variety of topics, including but not limited to: childcare providers, date night options, freezer meals, vacation destinations, children’s shoes, and fourth wave feminism. Husbands Who Get It will be expected to regularly engage in both secondary and primary research, leveraging online resources as…

PANDEMIC REFLECTIONS

A little over a year ago, I found myself lying face down on our backyard lawn. I was having, for lack of a better word, a tantrum.

My husband and I were in the thick of our quarterly fight. At work, I had quarterly planning meetings; at home, I had quarterly fights. We weren’t a couple that did much daily bickering. Sure, tense words were exchanged from time to time, and temptations to slam doors were resisted, but the agitation generally dissolved without too much collateral damage.

Then, about every three months or so, it didn’t. Of course, the bickering…

My father and I were always the early risers. On Saturday morning at 7 a.m., I was usually sitting on a kitchen stool eating a bowl of Shredded Wheat. My father was a few feet away from me, sitting “lotus-style” on the window seat. He donned robes that used to be black, but after multiple decades had resigned themselves to a milky gray.

Amidst snaking pillars of incense, my father closed his eyes and for 20 minutes he simply sat there and breathed. Then he started chanting — deep, throaty chants — while kneeling on the floor and bowing repeatedly.

…

It’s easy, as an adult, to romanticize childhood. So many hours of unfettered time, so few to-dos fluttering around the brain. No meals to plan, no customer service calls to make, no water bills to pay, no dentist appointments to schedule, no insurance claims to file. So much possibility. Worlds to imagine, foods to taste, questions to ask.

You should enjoy it while it lasts, my parents always said. Someday the world won’t revolve around you. Someday you’ll understand.

Maybe they were right, but at the time I remember rolling my eyes. Even as a happy child, I felt grossly…

In 2005, two people met in an unlikely place under unlikely circumstances. They chatted for a bit, and then parted ways to return to their respective significant others.

One of those people was me. The other was the man who would become my husband.

At the time, I was bartending at Captain Seaweed’s, an establishment in Providence, Rhode Island where mostly working-class, middle-aged men, converged almost nightly to drink Coors Lights and shots of blackberry brandy.

The first time I set eyes on the man I’ll call Rory — the man who would become my husband — the bar was…

HUMOR

Ever wonder how new moms spend all their free time during those luxurious two to 14 weeks of unpaid vacation that their employers so g̶r̶u̶d̶g̶i̶n̶g̶l̶y̶ generously give them?

A childless coworker of mine recently wondered aloud, “What would I even do with all that time off?”

First, let’s not forget that we’re keeping a tiny new human alive. So there’s that. But aside from this small detail, I honestly don’t remember doing much of anything. I sat around a lot. I thought about doing things. I felt overwhelmed. …