Writer and journalist
My daughter’s hair cascades below her shoulders in an ocean of curls. I like to rake my fingers through it to fluff it up into a gravity-defying pompadour. It is a mild obsession, mostly, because it is so different from my stick straight hair. To draw her own self-portrait, she always uses the Burnt Sienna crayon to make curlicues around a …
That’s the funny part of human memory and traditions — we all believe what we want as inalienable truth. During the holiday season, especially, our daily lives can get consumed with habits and traditions passed down from our parents and grandparents. In the intersection of memory, manufactured traditions and commercialized holidays, how do we decide what traditions are real and worthy of carrying on?
Nothing has made me feel more marginally okay than being a mom. It is a job that consistently makes me set the bar of achievement higher and higher for myself.
True, at one time I did not have a middle name, but false, this was not who I was all the time. My identity is both trisected and overlapped, because my married name could not have existed without my birth name.