As the Boston Marathon week of questions and grief winds down, the face of the youngest bomber is everywhere. His classmates have been interviewed. They are surprised, taken aback and alarmed that their quiet classmate had slowly been transformed into a foot soldier.

Youthful zealotry, unchecked, is dangerous. Eighteen-year-old's make...

I sent adorable holiday cards for years. My friend Gina would come over and take pictures of my kids snuggling like Care Bears. Then I began grabbing candid pictures of them, one's I thought more accurately depicted their relationship. One year they were covered in mud. I was in charge...

My son, the same kid who a year ago preferred action movies to political discourse has become a one person fountain of political facts. The problem? There isn't really a problem it's just that he's really enthusiastic and doesn't talk about much else. He's filled with righteous rage at the...

I pulled my back out on a date with the a-hole from "Bridesmaids." You know, the Jon Hamm character?

A perfect storm of vanity and self-consciousness converged on a bench, when I tried to make my bare legs (100 percent humidity had me in shorts) look their best. I alternated...

There are plenty of topics I could spend my time writing about:  health care, abortion rights or Santorum...

Jane Roper of Babble blog Baby Squared has written a memoir that you'll want to read. Why read yet another memoir? Because when a person writes honestly, their story is automatically filled with humor, the discomfort of change and the delight in living to tell...

My first Weight Watchers leader, back in the late 1980s (I was the only high school student there) was named Candy. She had "before" and "after" pictures.

"Before" WW, she was immense. "After" WW, she was deflated with the round face of a person waiting to be filled.

I thought...

This is the story about my friend being brought to her knees.

Amy was invincible and then she wasn't.

She went to bed on a Monday night four years ago and woke the next day, at 7:30 a.m., with a migraine. She'd never had one before and she hasn't been...

The other day my daughter and her friends were talking about what they would like to be when they grew up (surgeon, teacher, geneticist, dancer, photographer), where they would live (Boston, California, England) and how many children...

In Chardon, Ohio, T.J. Lane killed three classmates and injured two others on Feb. 27, 2012. I am always, and I'm sure I'm not alone, left wondering what provoked a child to take the steps to acquire a weapon and go berserk.

A child doesn't wake up one...

The other night my eldest yelled that his father and I suck at divorce. We had spent the afternoon at a dance recital and all the disparate pieces of my children's extended family had converged. My ex's family and my family. We had come together to celebrate. But tensions, awkward...

My house has a dishwasher full of dishes and the winter coats are in a heap rather than hung up on the listing coat rack from The Dollar Store. There is a film of dust on the coffee table, and the blanketing, the bookcases, and the floors all need a...

My ex got the kids for Thanksgiving.

They were metaphorically placed between us on an overly-polished, black mahogany conference table that was the length of a football field. I saw our children inside the...

My co-blogger Hayley Krisher discussed the breaking Penn State news here the other day. Since we love discussions at Femamom, I'm going to tackle the football scandal, my a.m. coffee still kicking.

I asked some teenage boys...

I have a soft spot for slackers, they are individualists. But as a mother, I'm stumped. I have one slacker and one perfectionist. My slacker was born a few weeks late, my perfectionist on time -- the exact calculated time of arrival.

As a parent I'm supposed to guide them...

It's Halloween-crazy in my neck of the woods. Salem (of The Salem Witch Trial's) is gussied up. And I swear, I saw Halloween lights. As in Christmas lights for Halloween.

One year my son was an astronaut. One year my daughter was a bumble bee. Then we had a few...

In a recent post on motherhood uncensored, some startling statistics on spanking from the 90s were cited. BTW, the author was not pro-spanking. She re-told an uncomfortable tale which made me wonder, are we obligated to step in when a parent is losing it on their child?...

In a regrettable moment of over-sharing, I admitted that I'd considered yoga teacher training to the women I take daily yoga with. Last week, when our yoga teacher was on a pilgrimage to New Mexico, I was called upon to substitute. I had said I was thinking about the training....

For me, one of the most difficult tasks of early parenthood was learning not to swear. I missed saying f**k this and f**k that and the always satisfying, f**k you.

I missed spitting out the word s**t any time something didn't work. Like, immediately.

Not when my children were pre-verbal...