Children
June 22, 2018
“Emotional Logic,” Children and Activism
How were they, who were once part of the fabric of society, the body politic, ripped asunder, extirpated?
Debórah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe, 1991, xlvi.
There are so many questions to ask about how a people reaches a point allowing its government to separate children from their parents and, for all intents and purposes, incarcerates them. And there is another set of questions to ask about what activates this people to insist that its government change course.
Making people feel, I’ll argue, is perhaps the greatest single factor in that activation process. more >
September 9, 2011
Rolodex
I’ve been cleaning, clearing, re-organizing, re-painting, even redecorating all summer. Re-claiming space with an eye toward living in an empty nest. I have come across scraps of paper from a zillion lives ago, kids’ kindergarten art projects, files from projects left dead by the road. Some of these reconnections have left me with a sense of sadness. Others have brought outright joy. By far the hardest? The Rolodex.more >
April 19, 2009
Kaddish
Today marks the 22nd anniversary of my mother’s death. She was diagnosed with two unrelated cancers in the space of five years. Survived the first. Was killed by the second. I was 24, she 56, when she died. I have lived almost half my life without her.more >
September 11, 2008
There Will Be a Quiz
Parents have so many important things to teach their kids: how to scramble eggs, how to do laundry, how to ride the T. Each lesson learned is a milestone moving them closer to independence. It’s the best kind of planned obsolescence I know. The milestone at my house this fall has been to teach our 16-year-old triplets Lily, Max, and Sam to use and manage their own bank accounts. more >
