24/7

I've never been a big fan of the word "mommy" employed by anyone who is not referring to their own maternal unit. I don't use the word to describe myself in adult conversation. I skeeve when others do it. I think it's because, in my own eyes, that's not what I am. In my own voice, that's not me. I have a child, yes. I am her mother. I feed her and clean her and do the dishes while she wraps her arms around my knees and says "hug, hug!" It's in The Boss's big, blue eyes that I am "mommy." Today at lunchtime she was eating egg and bread. "Mommy!" she said, fried white hanging out of her mouth. "Mommy!" She looked to the window. She looked at the dog. Her eyes darted from side to side as if she was searching for someone. "Mommy?" "I'm right here!" I laughed. I pointed to myself with an emphatic finger to the chest. "I'm your mommy!" She started to giggle along with me as she...

The Partner and I have finally made the decision to relocate. After three years in our first place, we're ready to set up shop further downstate in a town built on the importance of education and community. As my Internet browser history begins to overflow with Realtor.com and Greatschools.net searches, I'm slowly getting a better picture of what that town will look like. Still, the image is fuzzy. One thing I know for sure is that the implications of any moving decision we make won't be clear until we get there. The mistake we made in buying our first home was basing the purchase totally on the house itself. We loved it then and we love it now. It has over 200 years of character seeping out of every crevice in its stone foundation. The rooms are spacious, if you don't count the kitchen. It's insulated with history. Open the doors, though, and there's highway as far as the eye can see. Our own street is a state road running parallel to the Interstate, and it...

I'm sitting here waiting for my dog to yak up slightly less than a pound of M&Ms after I administered 2 tbsps of hydrogen peroxide and 2 tablespoons of milk to bring on the barf. It seems that Roxie is no longer content with eating the garbage and has taken to climbing onto table- and countertops to find the most illicit of booty. I had been gone for three hours when I came home to find the M&M sack laying empty on the floor. I ran into the living room, fully expecting to find the family pet in the throes of a seizure on her dog bed. She looked up at me with one eye as I stepped through the threshold. There was nothing out of the sheepish ordinary in her gaze. I breathed a temporary sigh of of relief before I got on the phone with the vet. One sticky note filled with directions later, I was on my way to the store to buy hydrogen peroxide to induce vomiting. After Roxie lapped up her first dosage of the nasty stuff mixed with milk, she proceeded to run around the yard in h...

Today I arrived what I thought was twenty minutes late to the first class of a writing course I'm taking at an area art museum. Turns out I was actually one week, 6 days, 23 hours and 40 minutes early. I only wish I had taken the time to look a little more closely at the schedule before I lined up a babysitter and got in the car for the first leg of the hour-long round trip. Admittedly, I have never had a close relationship with the clock or the calendar. It is a mutual disrespect, to be sure. Time doesn't wait for me and I don't bother trying to catch up. It works out okay in day-to-day living (barring incidents like this), but in the grander scheme, we all know who will win the race. Time is a cosmic middle finger waggling in perpetuity just beyond my line of sight. It was subtle before I had my baby, but now I feel its presence almost as palpably as I do the literal digits being thrust in my direction every time I make an innocent merging mistake on the Interstate. Time ...

Straight from the same region of the state that helped tear apart the fabric of the US Constitution with the seam ripper of eminent domain , Eastern Connecticut can now boast another court case that is shocking in its implications for the average American. Julie Amero , a substitute teacher, was convicted on four counts of risk of injury to a minor for exposing middle school students to pornography on a school computer. The conviction came after she testified that the sexually explicit material on her computer popped up as a result of adware , not from any prurient searches of her own. She faces up to forty years in prison. The Internet is still a largely lawless frontier. The downside of its freedom is the prevalance of vigilante justice in the guise of the American court system. Lynch mobs are everywhere, kicking the bucket out from under noose-necked citizens and leaving them to strangle in the wind. Few people in a position to determine the fate of any given defendant truly under...

I was pulling out of the supermarket today when I paused in the parking lot to let two people traverse the cross walk. An elderly woman and the man I imagined to be her mentally disabled son plodded toward the store front, their pace naturally matched. He was large, she was small; they were both bent-shouldered over a shopping cart. One of the man's beefy hands joined his mother's on the cart while the other rested on her back. As I waited, I saw a lifetime of care make its slow way across the asphalt. Though it's hard to tell from a simple scene played out in front of Stop & Shop, I couldn't help but think that the woman's steps were buoyed by a constant source of comfort not available to parents whose children grow up and move out. Maybe she had spent all her years as a grown woman caring for this son with special needs. Maybe, with ninety years rendering her own needs more specialized, the tables were not so much turning as being pushed closer together. But t...

In the company of several bloggers I read every day and others whose opinions I look forward to discovering, I have climbed on board the new vehicle of Kristen and Julie known as the The Parent Bloggers Network . Based on the premise that bloggers are " savvy, intelligent consumers with the ability to influence the online community at large ," the PBN will pick up products and services being marketed by entrepreneurs and PR professionals and will drop them off with us bloggers, who will in turn do our best to provide informative reviews. These reviews will be posted on our own blogs and will be linked to in compilation on PBN. Hopefully it won't be too overt, this occasional infiltration of advertisement into the daily comings and goings of The Boss, The Partner and me. I often write about products and services as they relate to my family ( phones , the need for marital counseling , Cadillacs ) but the difference with these PBN reviews is that I will have acquired ...

In the best of circumstances, I do not relish talking on the telephone. But when it comes to using the phone to track down, coerce or finagle volunteers or sponsors for any of the myriad of non-profit organizations with which I am associated, well, then I use only the most derogatory words in my vocabulary to curse out Dr. Graham Bell. Today I left one of several phone messages with a person I am hoping to bring on board for a conference I am helping plan. My halting voicemail went something like this: "I am so sorry for bothering you again about this. I feel like such a pain. But our conference is coming up and I wanted to find out for sure if you might, uh, be able to help, uh, I mean, would you be able to, uh, share your expertise with us and..." Blah. Blah. Blah. I don't know why I am so averse to asking people for things. In no other aspect of my life do I hold my tongue or feel even remotely inclined to do so. But when it comes to soliciting anything--from advice to...

After The Boss was born and the morphine wore off, my midwife came in to sit beside my hospital bed on an institutional glider. She rocked placidly, her hands folded in her lap. First she said I would more than likely develop strong feelings about The Boss's delivery. She said it was okay to feel sad. Then she looked over at my husband, who was holding his daughter's head in his hand, The Boss's lithe body following the length of his forearm. "The fathers always hold them like that," the midwife said. "It's the most natural thing." She rocked in calm survey of the scene, her back and forth motion carrying the conversation out of the blue. I looked over at The Partner and saw the innate ease with which he supported our newborn. Behind him, panes of frosted glass muted the summer light. My bedside was dark. I might've sighed with contentment. I might've just laid there. Looking back on it, I see the football hold as the first proof of protectio...

It was 71 degrees in January. I was on the same stretch of highway I've traveled many times before . Sunshine was on my shoulders and the song was on my radio. It was one of those moments when the fact that something is in the air becomes clear. I've had those moments before, and the feelings have a strange concreteness. With each job interview I've gone on, I know from the car ride there if I will end up taking that position. I've never been wrong. I see a certain landmark, gas station or metal sign and I understand with certainty that it is something I will pass again many times. Beneath a highway overpass in the town where we bought our first home, I saw the words Providence and Worcester Railroad Company on rusty red metal as we traversed northeastern Connecticut in a lazy house hunt. I got the feeling. It was several months and several failed contracts later that we ended up purchasing our small antique cape in that very town. Now I see the sign daily. This time ...

My boss is a passionate 17 month old. She puckers up in a kiss when she wants one in return. She calls out "hug" and throws her arm around whichever of my body parts is level with her at the time. She says "wuv wuh" upon her retreat, always. That's "I love you," for those in need of a translation. Her rampant affection shows me I'm doing a good job. I am not wracked by guilt for my little misdeeds because I know that the whole of my actions has created the kind of environment in which she feels safe to express her attachment to the people in her life. She is as comfortable with others as she is with me. She is kind and mannerful. She is only beastly to the dog . I make mistakes all the time. I lose my temper. I have been known to listen to inappropriate material on satellite radio while she's in the car (Can anyone say " Bubba the Love Sponge "? The Boss can.) I blog when I should be playing with her. I can listen to her cry at bedt...

Gerald Ford's star shone in his wife Betty's light. She radiated modern American energy that helped bring an entire nation out of the pale back in the 70s, when suppression and secrecy were replaced by straight talk about recovery. What was muted turned bright as she shook hands, held hands, and, most recently, laid her own hands on her husband's casket. Betty Ford is powerful in a way that's easy for us to take for granted today. It's the power of free thought that combines with free speech to forge an honest depiction of what it means to be a woman. As First Lady, she talked about issues that affect more of us than those in the spotlight during the first 3/4 of a century would have liked us to believe: equal rights, abortion, addiction and cancer. My grandmother died of cancer at a time when the word was only beginning to take hold in vernacular. Betty Ford's candid fight against breast cancer had come to light several years before, but the message was slow in...

I read in today's newspaper that Ben Franklin once had this advice to give upon the onslaught of a new year: "Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man." Since Mr. Franklin is widely regarded as a guy who knew what he was talking about, I concluded that deeper reflection on these particular words was in order. So I thought about it, and two questions came to mind: 1. Do I really need to find a better man? and 2. Since that's probably not what he meant, then what can I do to become a better man? I pondered the latter and produced this list. Please feel free to submit any of your own ideas on how to become a better man in the comment section. A. As mentioned previously , I will be a better driver. To truly man it up, I will exercise my enhanced prowess at no less than 90 miles per hour while scanning the medians and wooded areas for carefully concealed cops-in-wait. I will learn to identify all unmarked...

During my freshman year of college, I fancied myself a Philosophy major. My heart would flutter, my mouth would water and my eyes would glaze over at the sound of such names as Socrates, Descartes, Hume, Kant and Nietzsche. Even though my career in Philosophy did not pan out, I still consider myself a novice philosopher. I take every opportunity to ponder the nature of the Universe and to theorize about my existence in it. This philosopher part of me has remained much the same these past 20 years... Unchanged. As I was driving into my office this morning, I heard the words of one of my favorite modern philosophers. He is an American philosopher who hails from Jersey. You may recognize his words… ...No one can save me The damage is done Shot through the heart, And you’re to blame. You give love… A bad name. The haunting lyrics of the venerated Bon Jovi gave me pause. I would hate to have the reputation of giving anything a “bad name,” let alone tainting the sanctity of the meaning of l...