Parenting

People shying away from having babies because they heard that it’s so hard are making one of those category errors that are inescapable in this rotten decade in this awful century: they think that hard is the opposite of good.

Ritual prevents the ordinary from dissolving into invisibility. If you light a candle at dinner, the meal becomes an event. If you walk at the same time each day, it becomes more than exercise. Anthropologists will tell you that rituals function as technologies of attention: certain ordinary acts aren’t trivial, they’re the architecture of meaning.

The Weakness of Strength theory encourages us to see people’s weaknesses as the inevitable downside of certain merits that drew us to them, and from which we will benefit at other points (even if none of these benefits are apparent right now). What we’re seeing are not their faults, pure and simple, but rather the shadow side of things that are... See more

My parents didn’t host parties or celebrate holidays much as I was growing up and I always felt the stinging lack of community in my life... and what is motherhood if not a white knuckled attempt to redo your own childhood?

When my daughter looks at herself in the mirror, she is IN LOVE. She adorns herself with costume jewelry and worships her image. She tells me how she loves her hair and begs me to put lipstick on her. This is the same girl I refused to buy gendered toys for, whose mother has worn lipstick only twice in the last three years. I never taught her how... See more

. I am the dirty girl who over-analyzes culture for a living because it makes her feel in control. Most people in our industry have similar rejection-based mythologies, and many have a hurt high schooler living inside of them still.