It’s 27 degrees in New York right now. I hate the cold, but I still want to move back there. Well, “move back there” is not exactly the right term. It’s not like I just left. I haven’t lived in New York since 1998, when I left for Washington, D.C. to take a reporting job. My first husband and I had just broken up, and Washington was the start of my new life. And it was. I set out on my own, made lots of friends, met my husband, and, by the time we moved, left lots behind. read more
Category Archives: relationships
Home repairs or “Hell freezes over”
Going to Hell? You’re in luck. It just froze over. I know it froze over because of what my dad said. He’s said a lot of bizarre things, and I’ve tried to document them all here, but this one is so out of his realm I’m still reeling.
Two weeks ago, my husband was talking to him on the phone, discussing our major home repairs, and my dad said, “Listen, if you need help, I have some money set aside for things like this.” While they were talking, I heard my husband say, “Well, we really appreciate that. I don’t know what to say. Thank you.” I had my doubts, but when they hung up, my husband confirmed that my prosperous-but-miserly Dad did indeed offer us money to pay for the repairs. read more
Christmas presence
We snuck off to New York last month. We didn’t tell my father. We visited my birth family and best friend, but we did not visit my dad. I wasn’t trying to punish him. He did it to himself. I told him that my birth mother wanted to buy us plane tickets to visit and he said, “Don’t go taking money from her. You’re getting too involved. She wants to mother you. She has a mother complex.” read more
Fifty Shades of Reality
My dad had a car accident a few weeks ago, and it’s all he’s talked about since. Every phone call, he tells me the story again. And every time he does, the story changes. Remember playing telephone – where everyone sits in a circle and each whispers a message to the next kid, and at the end, the message is totally different? Well, that’s what this game of telephone’s been like, but my dad’s the only one playing. read more
My worst parenting moment
There are lots of parenting moments that I’d love to forget, like the time my daughter was 18 months old and refused to take a nap. Tired, frustrated and counting on that nap, I yelled, yanked the pacifier out of her mouth and slammed her bedroom door. “You are the adult,” a friend said when I confessed. Well, I wasn’t that day. read more
