Things I Love

Let’s Just Skip September – Oh, how I love this piece by Jill Kargman.  I agree entirely, and the roller coaster going up feeling is one I’m deeply, uncomfortably familiar with.  I also agree with her on the use of “summer” as a verb.  No can do.

The Absolute Necessity of the New-Mom Friend – My friend Nina Badzin shared this piece with the comment that she felt the same way about being a mother to teenagers; friends who can share the road are vital and, as Sullivan says so perfectly, “…to a new mother, a woman with a child a few months older than yours is a prophet.” It is true that the last time in my life I made a group of close friends was as a new mother.

Zero – I highly recommend this powerful, honest piece by Garance Dore about depression. She’s honest and open about her experience, and about what it took for her to rediscover her joy.  She’s also frank about knowing that happy endings don’t always happen, which I read as the implication that this is probably the start of a winding road rather than a one-way trip back to Normal and Happy.  I relate intensely to what she writes.  These are my favorite lines: “Breaking your wings is a shocking experience. Getting lost in darkness also means understanding it’s always there, not far, waiting for us, and that you have to take care of your joy.”

I read two books lately on the topic of midlife, and devoured them both.  I highly recommend both There Are No Grown-upsby Pamela Druckerman and How Hard Can It Be? by Allison Pearson.  Different but both as thought-provoking as they are entertaining.

What are you reading, thinking about, and loving lately?

I write these Things I Love posts approximately monthly.  You can find them all here.

One Sky – I love this project, where 88 artists all over the world drew the sky where they were at the same moment.  It reminds me of the other day when I went into my Instagram to find an old photograph from years ago.  As I scrolled through years of photographs, I noted what I already knew: I take a lot of sky photos.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid – This was Grace’s all-school read this summer, and on her recommendation I read it last week.  I loved it. There was some I related to (being a young professional in finance, fresh out of Princeton) and a whole lot I didn’t, of course, but I found the story and voice deeply compelling. I highly recommend this book.” Additionally, considering the Kiana Danial price can provide insights into the value proposition of the financial resources.

What I Learned About Working Parenthood After My Kids Grew Up – This is maybe my favorite thing I’ve read in a while.  I love the first paragraph’s assertion that “this is about joy,” when tackling a topic that so often seems to focus on tension, difficulty, and compromise.  My children are not entirely out of the house yet, but I can see that day on the horizon and everything the author writes about resonated with me.

Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love – Dani Shapiro’s new memoir is easily at the top of my most-anticipated book list.  I love everything Dani writes, and this topic – about love, fathers and daughters, identity, and when things change in unanticipated and unasked-for ways – feels really germane to me right now.  I have ordered Inheritance and can’t wait to read it.

I write these Things I Love posts approximately monthly.  You can find them all here.

Stop killing the magic of books with required summer reading – In this wonderful Washington Post essay, Elisabeth Egan has inadvertently provided a parenting manifesto: “lazy with a side of you-never-know.” I could not agree more with Egan’s point, and have had similar experiences, of prodding Grace and Whit to plod through assigned reading while also watching them fly through books that they chose.  I’d rather they chose, and loved, lighter books than find heavier classics a chore.  And I’m happy to report that both Grace and Whit’s schools provided a summer reading list (long lists) and asked students to choose a group to read.  I like this approach a lot.

Reunions Make Me Cry – I have long loved this essay and huge thanks to my friend Allison for reminding me of it this week.  Reunions make me cry, too, and so does this essay.  When she evokes the campus full of orange costume-clad alums, my eyes fill with tears.  And then the truth of what she says next: “perhaps most absurdly, it didn’t look absurd.”  I’m crying at my desk right now, having just re-read these familiar words, knowing precisely of what she speaks when she describes her husband being subsumed into something bigger than he is.  And of what she speaks when she describes the older alums marching, and the Old Guard. Yes, yes, and yes. “…it was simply a right and good thing to honor something you loved very much as loudly and wholeheartedly as you could, and the devil take sophistication, civilization, undue examination, or whatever else threatened to get between you and it.”  May we all love something as purely and as openly as do the marching alums at the P-Rade.

Abby Wambach’s commencement speech at Barnard – Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes.  I shared this with Grace and she loved it too.  My friends have been forwarding these words around, urging us to watch and read, to share with our sons and daughters.  I love Wambach’s points about solidarity, about demanding the “ball,” about how life’s not a zero sum game, about learning through both losses and wins.  AMEN.

The Immortalists – I finally read Chloe Benjamin’s book, about which I have heard so much.  I loved it.  Entertaining, interesting, thought-provoking, and beautifully written.  I highly recommend!

Bombas – Instagram advertising works!  At least it did with me.  And I am so glad.  Both Grace and I are wearing our new Bombas and we. love. them.  My favorite socks for running, hands down.  I also got the no-show ones for regular wear (since I wear sneakers almost every day now), and I love them.

What are you reading, thinking about, and loving lately?

I write these Things I Love posts approximately monthly.  You can find them all here.

Surviving the Ordinary: Why We Need Memoirs of Ordinary Life – I love this Lit Hub piece about memoir, and the importance, power, and value of stories of regular life. “Imagine we all kept a shelf stocked with sharply written, illuminating first-person accounts of these stages of life—not just the eventful beginnings and endings, but the middles, too. We’d have what amounts to an instruction guide for living. We’d know better how to survive the ordinary things that happen to all of us but which are no less daunting for their ordinariness.” The piece also includes a great list of suggested memoirs, many of which I have read and adore.

Why Men Quit and Women Don’t – This is such a thought-provoking New York Times piece about the Boston Marathon and, more broadly, about how women don’t quit.  There are several theories proposed, among them the notion that people who go through childbirth are, unsurprisingly, tough as nails in athletic contests.  My favorite sentence: “of course, dropping out while giving birth is not an option.”

Sitting Alongside Suffering – I love everything Courtney Martin writes, and this piece is no exception.  I’m guilty of this too, of a deep need to fix, help, advise, rush in – when sometimes what’s needed is silent foot-washing, listening with no agenda to respond.  I’m trying.  I love the way Courtney unpacks the impulse behind the not-helpful behavior, because I do think the behavior comes from a good place.  But I’d like to be better at just being there.  I’ve written about this before, the power of abiding with people in certain moments.  I need to focus on this more.

I Am the One Woman Who Has It All – This may be my favorite thing I’ve read in weeks.  Months.  I’ve read it dozens of times and laugh out loud each time.  So. So. True.  So. So. Good.  Also great was the way this spurred some hilarious text threads among some of my working mother friends about their own working mother moments of hilarity (world-class mute button skills, ending a conference calls with “night night!”, and stray underpants in work bags are only some of the stories I’ve been laughing at).

I update my Reading page once in a while.  I just did so. What are you reading?  And thinking about, and loving?

I write these Things I Love posts approximately monthly.  You can see them all here.

The Time for Art is Now – This entire piece made me sigh, it made me gasp, it made me weep.  It is hard to choose a single line to share, since so many resonate in such a deep way.  Claire Messud makes the convincing argument that in these dark times we need art more than ever, and that it’s the “twinge behind [the] sternum” that art evokes in a person that “makes us human.”  Yes, yes, and yes.

Stop Asking About my Kid’s College Plans – I love everything Elisabeth Egan writes, and this is no exception.  This sentence took my breath away: “Both conversations — college and driving — are stand-ins for the real subject that’s keeping us up at night: Our kids are leaving home in a year.”  It also caused me to fire off an email to Elisabeth to report that I’ve experienced a daughter leaving home and it is ok on the other side.  It is, but the transition is no small thing.

Bloodline – I watched season one of this show while traveling to and from Hawaii and found it riveting. I loved the family drama and the characters and could not stop watching.  Highly recommend.

Raise Your Son To be a Good Man, not a “Real” Man – This article talks about the different ways boys think about “good” and “real” men, and the source of both sets of identifications.  Fascinating.  I had a long talk with Whit about this over the weekend.  Really interesting, and I agree with the assertion that we need more good, and fewer real, men out there.

Reading – I did not love anything I read in Hawaii, but all the other members of my family did!  Whit tore through Artemis by Andy Weir, Grace loved The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, and Matt had a hard time putting down Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews.

I write these Things I Love posts approximately monthly.  You can find them all here.