Veteran journalist Barbara Falconer Newhall riffs on life as she knows it.
Our family shrinks and grows. People die. People get born. People get mad and won't talk to you for a while. Kids grow up and find partners of their own, and pretty soon there are brand-new in-laws. And a grandchild or two.
Some people can’t resist chocolate. For others, it’s clothes. Some folks, oddly enough, will spend $110,000 on a Ferrari with no back seat and hardly any trunk. Imagine that . . . For me as the mother of young children, toys were my weakness. Read more.
There was no getting around it. Christina, who is 51/2, intended to wash our kitchen floor. She had been studying her “Cinderella” videotape for weeks, and now she wanted nothing more than to scrub. Read more
Jon and I loved our new house in the hills with the curving, no-sidewalks streets. But all that privacy and rural ambiance weren’t so great for raising kids. Read more.
You can’t fool me. I know a girdle when I see one. A stewardess on Mad Men did a strip tease — but how was she going to get that girdle off without turning hot sex into farce? Read more.
My friend Carol calls them “the little inequities.” She is talking about the small, countless ways that men fail to notice what needs to be done for their children. Read more.
Men’s No. 1 secret, Shepherd Bliss told me, the one they want to keep from women — and other men — is that they, too, feel powerless. Read more.
My daughter Christina discovered the art of rhetoric when she was being weaned from baby bottle to plastic cup. She’d say, “I want milk and I don’t want it in a cup” — an elegant illocutionary statement that usually got her what she wanted, her bottle.