We just got back from a drive across the country - 4,000 miles, twelve states, more than 36 hours of Harry Potter on tape - and our feat has been met by almost universal shock that we undertook such an arduous journey. "How many times did you smack your...

If youth athletics, as Bill Pennington said in yesterday's New York Times, is a church and parents are a congregation unified by the gospel of college scholarships, I'm happy to pray - and the reasons for my faith have nothing to do with money. While there are certainly a percentage...

On Saturday, I had a monster migraine headache. I tried every remedy ever invented, but still ended up weeping for mercy on the bathroom floor, pinned there for six hours by violent bouts of pain-induced vomiting, telling my husband that I wanted to die. My husband reacted the way most...

One of the things a writer is supposed to do is to strip away the surface of our everyday selves and get underneath what's polished and pretty to the more essential stuff of life. After writing three books about my own life -- about getting married; teaching my kids...

Natasha Singer's New York Times article on the long-term maintenance issues related to breast implants, Do My Breast Implants Have a Warranty? was a smart and insightful look at the aftermath of breast implant surgery. Singer raised questions about what happens to implants five, ten and fifteen years down...

I saw the movie Atonement last night, and while my companions were discussing the merits of the book versus the movie - a discussion I would have liked to jump into with enthusiasm -- all I could think about was that poor mother in bed with her migraine. There are...

All the love that Obama is feeling from Oprah these days makes me nostalgic for the times I was close to feeling it, too. I call them my almost-on-Oprah moments and I mention them at cocktail parties, fundraising events, and my kid's water polo games because they mean...

Desperate not to dread Christmas this year, I made a decision to be more mindful about my gift giving, and yesterday I put the policy into practice for the first time. I gave a beautiful 60-hour pumpkin-colored pillar candle in a frosted glass vase with its own little lid. I...

My mother doesn't like mother's day. She never has. She calls it "one of those manufactured Hallmark holidays," in which people are goaded into buying cards, flowers, and other sappy sentiments out of some misguided sense of obligation. Misguided, my mom would say, because a mother is always a mother....