I'm pretty sure my about-to-be two-year-old granddaughter, Kyla, loves me. When I'm visiting her and leave for five minutes to use the toilet, she cries. I've never been made so happy by someone else's unhappiness. For her, I rush through my morning ablutions, sit on the floor even though my...

Call me a wuss, but I can't sleep at night if I think I've hurt someone's feelings. I will stay up until I've formulated the perfect apology. Sometimes the person to whom I apologize has no idea what I'm talking about. For eight years, whenever I found myself in a...

I have had a longstanding fear of straight lines. This is ironic because my life has followed quite a traditional linear trajectory: school... job... house... marriage... kids... grandchild. Can a line get any straighter than that? Yet, straight lines and my inability to draw them have long been a personal...

My firstborn's bar mitzvah photos are in a large shoebox in a cabinet in the family room. At the time, we couldn't afford both the photographer AND the fancy album so we stowed the pictures in a shoebox until we recouped enough to purchase an album. My son is now...

You don't call. You don't write. What's a mother to do?

This lament of the neglected mother has become so familiar in the United States that we joke about it. The mother who incessantly kvetches about her children's lack of attention has become an unfortunate cultural stereotype. Yet, what is...

Whitney Houston died in 2012. So did Marvin Hamlisch and Mike Wallace and Donna Summer and Andy Griffith and Davy Jones and Sally Ride and Neil Armstrong and Sun Myung Moon, and the man who invented the first wireless remote control and the doctor who performed the first successful kidney...

A few days after the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado I wrote an essay about the need for stricter gun laws in this country. I never posted it because I felt it didn't add anything new to the conversation. I hadn't found an "angle" that would pique people's interest....

I was older by at least 30 years than the next oldest person in the classroom. Bill, one of the facilitators, was of my generation, but he didn't count because one expects the facilitator to be old and wise. I had come to Arcadia University to participate in a weekend-long...

To My Darling Children,

I hope you don't mind, but your father and I are spending your inheritance. Actually, it doesn't matter if you do mind because we are spending it anyway and we don't need your permission to do so. After a Thanksgiving that was delicious on so many...

So a middle-aged woman walks into a bar...

She's a reasonably attractive woman for her years. Not an ageless beauty like Sophia Loren, but it is clear that effort has been put into her upkeep.

She is Madison Avenue's dream customer, a sucker for beauty ads, who has wasted...

My children are all right. I can exhale. Hurricane Sandy was the first natural disaster my husband and I sweated out sans kids. Schools were closed throughout our area for a week, but in our home, there was no celebration of the unexpected bonus vacation. There were no pancakes to...

Sometimes on Fridays, 6-year-old Laura Miller stares out her living room window, waiting eagerly for BB to arrive. On other Fridays BB is already at the house when Laura steps off the school bus. The little girl's face lights up when she sees BB's car in the driveway. Laura's mother,...

On Yom Kippur Eve, a few hours before the holy Kol Nidre service began, I made the requisite phone calls I make every year... those suck-it-up-and-make-amends phone calls to anyone I might have hurt or slighted in the lunar year just past. I am not an intensely observant Jew, but...

As I bathed my 15-month-old granddaughter while babysitting last weekend, I found myself groping for a simile to describe her soft, smooth skin. I couldn't compare it to a baby's behind because she is a baby and it was her behind I was washing. Smooth as satin? Soft as a...

I've wanted to write about my dear friend Laura for almost twenty years. There is no one on earth like her. For one thing, she is brilliant... a poet, lyricist and novelist. Her notes to the kids' teachers could have won Pulitzers. She is also hysterical (think Jon Stewart with...

To all the elderly women who have tried my patience over the years:

Retribution is yours for the asking, for as you have known all along, I am becoming you. I've stood behind you in the supermarket line, tapping my foot and pretending to be absorbed in the details of...

Oh, if only grandparenting was a second chance to get it right! A spate of recent articles and blogs written by besotted grandparents would have us believe that our older, wiser selves can actually correct the missteps we took on our own parenting paths by avoiding eerily familiar parenting potholes...

I ate all the souvenirs from my spontaneous weekend driving trip to Maine and I have no regrets. Having downed the sumptuous goodies we purchased at The Bread and Roses bakery on the way out of the state, I have nothing to show for my mini-vacation but a phone full...

My husband and I rarely fight. We don't even bicker. I like him and he likes me, and now that the children are out of the house and the dog is dead and we no longer have orthodontia to pay for, a yard to mow or very much laundry to...

Midway through the last several election cycles I have found myself on the verge of depression. The talking heads on television make me want to take a tire iron to my skull. Both sides exhibit a shameful lack of civility in discourse. And the subjects up for debate are abundant...