Kid Stuff
Rebecca loves Nickel Creek. We all love Nickel Creek. When our family odyssey into country music began early this year, Nickel Creek was one of the first groups that caught our collective ear. Listening to …
We left San Marcos in the middle of the night. Well, not exactly the middle of the night. We left San Marcos at 4:45 on a still-dark summer morning. It just felt like the middle …
I wasn’t a very good mother on Mother’s Day. My husband Jack did everything right. He let me sleep in. He let me take a nap. He took the kids to the beach so I …
Every time I read about Andrea Yates, I shudder. She’s just like me. High school valedictorian, good grades in college, pursued a profession, stopped working outside the home when she had her first child, deeply …
I miss my dad at odd times. My father died last March. He was 72. For the 20 years before his death, he suffered from heart disease. He had two triple-bypass surgeries and more heart …
The phone rang around 7:40. I was standing just inside the open bathroom door tucking my black Land's End T-shirt into a gray knit skirt. Eight-year-old Rebecca and six-year-old Angela had dressed themselves in their …
There were days I didn't think I would make it to the end of the summer. I have five children. One is a baby. One is three years old and not quite ready for preschool. …
The Iast time my husband Jack and I took our kids to the Del Mar Fair was three years ago. Now I remember why we don’t go every year. Three years ago, our older son …
I remember my first bra. I was in sixth grade. We lived in Pine Valley out in East County. My mother did not over-romanticize girlhood rituals. When I was in third grade, in response to …
I had a hard time waking up on Mother’s Day. I’d been up until 12:30 a.m. folding laundry. With five children aged eight and younger, we generate a lot of dirty clothes. Every week, I …
The day before my 39th birthday, I went to the grocery store by myself. Normally when I go to Vons, I take some or all of my five children. We’re quite a sight. Rebecca and …
Angela gazed at my great naked body. From her perspective, eyes about level with my protruding navel, I must have looked like a super tanker viewed from the deck of a small sailing ship.
Jack still talks wistfully about the year he lived on Nautilus Street in La Jolla. At night if he left his bedroom window open. Jack could hear the surf building a block away at Windansea.
“Room for another baby” came into my head like someone whispering over my shoulder.
As I sped toward the hospital, I thought of the times Jack has driven me to the hospital in the middle of the night. Those times, when our children were born, the streets seemed strangely intimate.