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FEATURE ESSAYS Mom Writer Skye Hoppus: Rock Star Momma on Hip Maternity Fashions Is it possible for a mom-to-be to look hip while pregnant? The answer is most definitely. And the recent book, Rock Star Momma, by Skye Hoppus shows you how it is done. The book is an honest girlfriend-to-girlfriend pregnancy guide and focuses on fashion tips which will help you feel good about yourself the entire time. Skye Hoppus describes herself as a mom, wife, designer, stylist, writer, entrepreneur and real-life rock star momma. While Skye was a pregnant mom a short time ago (she has a four-year-old son), she experienced firsthand a gap in the marketplace for maternity clothing... Continue reading Mom Writer Skye Hoppus: Rock Star Momma on Hip Maternity Fashions Guest Features First Attraction The evening my 14-year-old daughter returns home from her first high school basketball game, I am curled up on the couch with my youngest, holding him close, listening to the even breathing of his peaceful seven-year-old sleep. She stands in the doorway separating the dining room from the living room, watching images flash across the screen of the muted television. I ask how the game was.
Continue reading First Attraction
Lucky Benjamin is in his room, playing “Sweet Jane” on his guitar and watching cable news. In the fall, he will be going to college. As we approach this milestone, I’m looking back more, remembering the days when I felt so much in the dark as his mother, when I didn’t know how we would get through his childhood, or what would become of him. March, 1993 Continue reading Lucky
Maternity Ward Memories Twenty-three years ago, my oldest son was born in Moscow, Russia, at a time when maternity wards in hospitals did not use pantiliners. They recycled the same stock of rags because medical officials considered cotton pantiliners, which were discarded after a single use, too expensive and not sanitary enough. Instead, they issued each new mother a dozen rags a day, and told her to fold and refold them a few times, so she wouldn’t need more than a dozen a day. The bloody rags were collected and sent to a laundry, boiled, bleached, sterilized, and delivered back to the wards for the next usage. The hospitals’ measures against contamination also included an iron rule: nobody allowed in, except medical staff, and no personal possessions were allowed into maternity wards. That meant no fathers, no friends – and no underwear... Continue reading Maternity Ward Memories
Look Kids, No Hands! That’s me on the neighborhood playground basketball court. I am trying to defy physics but so far I’m failing, well, falling, over and over again. Still, that’s what the instruction book says. If you want to learn to unicycle, you will spend approximately eight hours trying and falling.
Spiritual File Folders The questions and observations always come out of the blue, often while we’re driving in the car or at bedtime in that second after I’ve just turned out the light. “That’s an interesting thought,” I reply, suddenly finding myself contemplating reincarnation as I navigate my way through an intersection. “What would you choose?” My 10-year-old daughter breaks into the conversation, and I don’t have to check the rearview mirror to know she’s squirming in her seat... Continue reading Spiritual File Folders
Spring and Summer Journal Excerpts It is early May, with Mother’s Day soon upon us. I’m driving my two youngest to town, to the public library where we will return overdue library books and videos with bad tracking. I glance her out my car window, walking the rural roads, hair the flat black of cheap dye though L’Oréal would claim she’s worth far more. She clasps some certain significant paring knife in her dominant hand, staring down the ditches. I want to brake the car and shout out my shock of recognition. “I know you! I, too, search for wild asparagus.” I can’t possibly begin to explain any of this to my sons – it is all pink haze and hopeless unless you are a woman – hear us roar – even in adversity. The search for wild asparagus involves knowing where and when to look. City dwellers come in their cars and drive the country roads slowly, but that is cheating. True asparagus seekers walk or bike having memorized the spots from years and years of spring searching. The stalks thrust up with a green and purple certainty. Their arrow tipped heads hiding among weeds and canary grass. I want to escape the confining bubble of my four door Corolla and explain it all to this brunette stranger. I would tell her that I know just from looking that we’ve both survived angry fathers, childbirth, divorce and layoffs...
Of Sons and Ovaries The morning of surgery the temperature outside is 2 degrees Fahrenheit. At 6:00, we walk through a pastel carpeted tunnel connecting the hotel to the hospital. I have no purse. I don’t wear my watch or ring. I have on no make-up. On either side, holding hands with me, are two of my favorite men, my 67-year-old husband and my 39-year-old son. Both are here to help me through a “procedure,” as the medical community has dubbed the laity’s old-fashioned “operation” or “surgery.” Continue reading Of Sons and Ovaries
Gym Daze The mothers I know go to the gym for two reasons: One, they want to look more fit/toned/slim/attenuated/youthful. The other, they crave the endorphin rush brought on by an hour-long spin class wound down with thirty minutes of “Synergy Stretching.” Between the hours of 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. (the hours between school drop-offs and pickups), my gym, the Equinox Fitness Club on East 85th Street, is a testimony to female determination and discipline. It reels with squat thrusts and imported Russian weight bells, tasteful Lycra® and shiny ponytails. A few years ago, the gym became the place I went when I was momentarily out of strength. Life felt raw and messy since I had learned that my second child, Eden, had multiple and life threatening food allergies. He was eighteen months old and I had just found a specialist with a curative treatment. I had been unraveling Eden’s diagnoses since his birth. Out of the resulting tangle of physical symptoms sprang multiple developmental delays, among them – Eden threw up almost every day. Fortunately, when the sandbox mommies grossed-out at the sight of Eden vomiting his way out of the playground, I could reassure them that, “He’s getting feeding therapy!”
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