Scenes From A Marriage: January Kill | Flux Capacitor
I want the bedroom to still. I want my sons to move quietly and my daughter to stop talking and asking and claiming and my baby to stop begging for breast every half hour and I want to lay on the mattress and feel adored and adoring. I want the mean slow freeze of January to release my husband. January is hard for him. Which makes it hard for me. I watch his angry, frustrated face, tired of being exhausted and struggling against himself. Sometimes I want to throw something at him, at his arm, where it would hurt but not kill, hard enough to make him furious, to break the ice and bring the entire river to a boil and release us from winter. During a quietly furious ten minute argument I am horrified to find myself thinking I hate you I hate you I hate you. I want to run away. I want to say something so final and so hurtful we could never recover from it. I want to so badly my arms are trembling.
Apple, America and How America is Losing | Blurbomat
There is no place on earth at this moment with the culture, supplier proximity and a seemingly endless supply of workers willing to work like hell, sleep in cramped dormitory quarters and expose themselves to harmful chemicals for what we consider to be a pittance except China. The kicker for me from the NYTimes piece is that it wouldn’t cost Apple that much more per iPhone to make it in the United States. Cost isn’t the problem. The problem is one of infrastructure. We don’t have enough people with the right knowledge and/or skill sets necessary to compete. We don’t have the supplier chain scale or companies who can make things like screws or other machined parts and make them quickly. Systemic failure to adapt. This failure starts with education and reaches deep into the pysche of this nation starving for jobs and wanting to build things at home.
I Blame Post-Feminism | My Fascinating Life
I hope that I will look back and see, through memory’s soft-focused, gilded lens, how incredibly privileged I was to mother these two beautiful human beings through their infancy. But I also hope that, as I am looking back, I will still be mothering these two beautiful human beings. They might not need me to choose their clothes and cut up their toast any more (and please, oh please let them take care of their own bathroom needs eventually) but this, here, isn’t the only way to be a mother. And being a mother isn’t the only thing worth doing, either. My life didn’t start when I became a mother. It won’t end when they leave home. If we had never had children at all, I would still be a person. I love my children, but they aren’t what makes me worthy of my space on the planet.
Penetrable Happiness — The Exceptional Man
At the end, the meetings accomplished, the children put to bed, the time for the two of you. The twilight hours for rest, or romance. But usually rest. The day has stolen your energy, your will to make an effort. Decision fatigue has left you incapable of doing the right thing. Or of doing anything.
Closer To Fine | Momastery
My first instinct is to freak out. My first instinct is to remember that yes, this chaos is proof that I have ruined my life and the lives of everyone in my home and that we are a disaster of a family and that no mother, in the entire history of mothers, has ever been forced to endure the drama, decibels and general suffering of this moment. My instinct is to tear my clothes and throw myself on the floor and bawl and cry out worthless declarations like “I can’t TAKE this anymore!” My first instinct is to allow my anxiety and angst to pour out like gasoline on a raging fire and indulge in a full-on mommy meltdown.
New year’s day | Laurie Writes
When Mary Oliver asked what I was to do with my one wild and precious life, I doubt that this pattern of behavior would make it into the desired multiple choice options from A to ZZ. This is some nonsense right here. This is self-torture of an outstanding degree, my own personal lunatic fringe. If you were doing this, I would take you out for beers and tell you to run, run, run in the opposite direction from the insanity. I would tell you to go, consequences be damned, because wasting one more day on this was not advisable. I give excellent advice to other people.
Other People’s Children | Sam Chaltain
In this way, the events in Garfield Heights are a poignant window into a larger issue about what we value, and don’t value, in modern American society. And the reality is that despite our historic commitments to both liberty and equality, American education policy reflects our willingness to honor liberty at the expense of equality.
On being an object, and then not being an object | Finslippy
There were other incidents, too; so many incidents. Every one underscored the message that I wasn’t safe, that I deserved whatever was coming to me, because I was young and a woman and that was how it was and also I should appreciate it. I tried to look unapproachable, but I don’t think my face works that way; I just looked sad and then men barked at me to cheer up, to give them a smile. I wanted to look hard and angry. Lord knows I wanted to be intimidating. It just didn’t work.
Joe Paterno and what legacies are made of | Elizabeth Esther
Lastly, I also read Shaun King’s tribute (honestly, what ELSE am I supposed to call these articles?) to Joe Paterno on Relevant Magazine’s website wherein he actually claims that Paterno was “so great that I think the ultimate story about him will eventually outshine the awful ugliness of a child molestation scandal.” Yes, Paterno was SO great! Except for that one thing. But hey, no worries! That one thing will be easily outshone.
And Finally, A Post | Meg Miller
Speaking for myself, I probably watched one too many “gotcha-day videos” when I should have had a few more cups of coffee with adoptive moms in my community and asked, “So, tell me what it’s really like.” The pictures of happy multi-racial families, like the one at the top of this post, don’t tell the whole story. But the stories need to be told—the hard ones and the happy ones.
