Even though my parents are Holocaust survivors who left God behind in Eastern Europe when they emigrated, they retain two invisible creatures for us when we’re growing up:&nbs… Read full post »

   

In 1970, my father buys a brand new Ford Country Squire and he’s suddenly ready to hit the road, to take a vacation. This is a very big deal since he hasn’t taken a vacation since arriving in the United States in 1951. He’d been busy in the nineteen… Read full post »

This is how I sunbathe as a teenager: reluctantly.

The only reason I ever go outside in the summer is because my older sisters force me to. It's 1976, I'm sixteen and, after all, I’m too white to live, or something like that, and a tan is necessary for… Read full post »

It’s morning rush hour, February 1984.  I’m driving my 1967 Mercury Cougar on my way to work; the Cougar that has been passed down from sister to sister through my family and finally ended up mine.  I had been desperate, about to graduate college a few/… Read full post »

My ex-husband and I might have had sex more than once in 1988, though it’s doubtful, but the minute we started our marriage counseling in August, marriage counseling that went on for ten endless months, the counselor figured out that our sex life was so attrocious&/… Read full post »

It occurs to me as my mother disappears into Alzheimer's, that she's also losing her Yiddish. An 80-year-old Holocaust Survivor, she's watched her group of Yiddish-speaking friends dwindle over the years. And, of course, this makes me lament not learning it myself, the fact that I… Read full post »

We've all heard of body dysmorphia. What woman doesn't have a little of this anyway? A little "thin but think I'm fat; fat but think I'm thin" stuff going on when we look in the mirror?

My problem, recently identified? Book Dysmorphia.

Once upon a time, I wrote a… Read full post »

  

It was about three quarters of the way through my non-stop caregiving of my mother as she was recovering from her car accident injuries when my brain just clicked to an off position. I didn't mean to do it, but I want to be honest. It happened.

For… Read full post »

Here's what happens when your mom is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. At least if you're me. There's this total scoffing at the doctor's diagnosis. There's the trotting out of a hundred tiny facts your mother remembers even better than you and you're thirty years younger than her. Ther… Read full post »

I spent a large part of my childhood trudging around with dimes, nickels and quarters, because that's what comic books cost when I was a kid. And candy bars. And those little tiny bags of red pistachio nuts they had in the 1960s.

But what I really lived for were… Read full post »

Being one of seven sisters means a lot of things. It means that I grew up in a crowded house and found it downright eerie to be alone. It meant never eating out, wearing hand-me-downs; it meant having relatives look at me and always needing to guess "which sister" I was… Read full post »

First there was the plot: back in July, when my husband and I first got very disillusioned with Verizon, we planned and we schemed. We were going to leave Verizon for AT&T. We were going to get iPhones. We were finally going to join the rest of the world.

But first… Read full post »

I've spent a lot of time in MRI machines in my life. Or maybe just since I was 41 and found out I had a brain tumor.

It turns out that when you have a brain tumor doctors are suddenly fascinated with you. It's like a walking, talking, breathing tumor has… Read full post »

I've spent a lot of time in MRI machines in my life. Or maybe just since I was 41 and found out I had a brain tumor.

It turns out that when you have a brain tumor doctors are suddenly fascinated with you. It's like a walking, talking, breathing tumor has… Read full post »

Last night, I don't know exactly how it happened, but I found myself trapped at a table at a party with at least one and maybe two anti-semites. And they knew I was Jewish.

It started small. They have  a problem with a neighbor who just happens to be Jewish. I agree… Read full post »

I've spent a lot of time at my mother's house over the last two-plus weeks, since she and my stepfather were involved in a car accident. I'm kind of their own personal adjuster since my old job, when I had a real job, was handling bodily injury claims for a really… Read full post »

I've been a devoted voter for years. I didn't know I'd feel so strongly about it but it turned out that that when I was eighteen, in 1978, I felt more strongly about it than I had anticipated.

I was a college freshman in Tucson, Arizona and, for the midterm election that… Read full post »

On Sunday my BlackBerry died.

It's not like I had time to think about it right then. I had just walked in my mother's house with her and my stepfather, having gotten them from the emergency room where they'd been transported after a car accident. So right then I had… Read full post »

It's almost Halloween. This should be fun, right? Like since I have a son who is about to age out of Halloween and a daughter who's still young enough to get to trick or treat, I should just be having fun, right?

But no, at our house there's the Battle of… Read full post »

I didn't expect to be writing this post, especially hot on the heels of my last one. Sure, it's funny. First I know everything in the world about how to rejuvenate a marriage, and then I know everything about how to wreck it again. Yet, I didn't see it coming. Here… Read full post »

I just came back from 30 hours alone with my husband.

Too short? Not long enough to rejuvenate a marriage? While I agree we'd like more time alone together, amazingly enought it did what we needed.

We drove out of Phoenix on Thursday morning. Blah. Yeah, yeah. We've been married… Read full post »

Why can't I stand to write the words that my mother has Alzheimer's? I have a regular blog, a more-read blog, and I haven't uttered a peep about this. I don't know what to say about this. But here I'm going to talk.

Of course, I'm amazed by so much. I'm amazed that… Read full post »

I sit down to write.

This takes a while. I wander throughout the house. I clean, I fuss, I do laundry, I make phone calls. I wander and wander, give myself imaginary tasks and then, when I absolutely can't avoid it any longer, I get in here. Since I'm pretty… Read full post »

I come from a Holocaust Survivor family; my husband doesn't. So you'd think I'd be more sensitive than he is to issues involving What Every Country on the Planet Was Doing During WWII. But you'd be wrong.

When we were shopping for my new car a couple years ago and I had decided… Read full post »

Why have I been spending so much time sprawled, fascinated and horrified, watching reality shows lately? Is it because I'm avoiding my office where I'm supposed to be writing? Is it because I want to waste my life laying on my bed, watching my new flat screen television, the controller for which… Read full post »