Children

Love Rolls Downhill

“Are you going to write about this, Mom?” my daughter Caroline asks me. (She knows I’ve written about her brother.) The question is half tease, half challenge. I can’t tell whether she wants me to write, or not. Maybe she doesn’t know, either. Caroline is 18, and she’s about to begin her freshman year at college. She’s moving across the Atlantic Ocean to spend her fall semester on another continent and another time zone from me. She left Tuesday night, on a red-eye flight. London is five hours ahead of Boston. She’ll be living in my future (literally) instead of in my present. Which seems fitting. The recent months have been an emotional time for us both. Today, when I was getting my hair cut, I heard a stylist say to someone in her chair, “Hasn’t the weather this summer been awful?” And I couldn’t for the life of me […]

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Follow The Fear: Do Things That Scare You

I used to think that being afraid of everything was a weakness. Then I learned how to “follow the fear,” and use fear to my advantage. This is an annotated version of a talk I gave on the Bold Talks stage at Hubspot‘s INBOUND event. I published the essay that became the basis for this talk over at LinkedIN. But here, ima give you the slide deck. It more efficiently tells the story of why a “Bold Talk” pushed me out of my comfort zone. (Speaking publicly about content marketing is a piece of cake. Speaking publicly about myself? Not so much.) (Note: This might be best viewed in Full Screen mode. But maybe your eyes can handle it. Your call.) #FollowTheFear: Do Things That Scare You from Ann Handley Thanks to: Amy Gahran, for articulating so well the idea that your comfort zone is your dead zone, which I

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‘My Imaginary Well-Dressed Toddler Daughter’: The Story and Content Lessons of the Best Pinterest Board Ever

This is the story of Quinoa, a small, trendy child who wears haute couture and a model’s aloof expression. It’s also the story of how a hilarious Pinterest board for a fake child blew up this week on the interwebs, growing its follower base more than 100-fold in 24 hours, from around 100 to almost 11,000 (at last count). First, the child: More than a legend in her own playroom, Quinoa is an icon in the fashion world who always has the perfectly accessorized outfit no matter her mood or activity: She wears a chevron maxi for a stroll through a field of wildflowers; an outdoorsy kilt and cloak for a damp stroll by a bog; and totes a spare “urban outfit” in her mother’s purse in the event they’re going to be around a lot of chain link fencing. Pleather crushes her tiny soul. So does the poverty, which

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‘If It’s Empty, Fill It’… and 10 Other Rules for Living Companionably with Teenagers, Kids and the Generally Clueless

I created this slide show a while ago, after a particularly interesting challenging irritatingly irritating few days when I felt like I was the only one in my household who recognized stuff that needed doing. And the only one who subsequently did it. Can you relate? I’m sorry.

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What We Carry

He’s freighted with two pairs of shoes, extra clothes that didn’t fit in the duffel, three sketchbooks, a camera, drawing pencils, a couple of books, a rent deposit for next fall, and film in a protective lead case. My arms are empty, but I’m carrying an uncontainable mix of baby boy joy; the sweet smells of childhood; and cruddy, exhausting, hilarious teenage agonies freshly capped with some annoyance from this morning, when he insisted he was ready to go when most of what’s now stuffed in those two bags was still roaming the house, itinerant. This he shouted over his shoulder at me as he scurried to retrieve it. Headed down to security, he’s forgotten all that. He doesn’t carry any of that with him, because his head is full of where he’s going, not what’s already behind him. He has 50 pounds strapped to his body, but he steps

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The College Drop-off: Can We Cut the Crying Parents Some Slack?

A story on MSNBC yesterday asked, Has the college sendoff always been so tough? Alongside the piece is a video from the Today show, subtitled, “As NBC’s Kevin Klein reports, when it comes time to say goodbye on campus, it’s the parents who’ve got issues.” I’ve noticed an abundance of these stories lately — including one a few weeks back in the NY Times, Students, Welcome to College; Parents, Go Home — perhaps because my own freshman son is freshly deposited in Baltimore, at the Maryland Institute College of Art. I understand the entertainment value of mocking these hyper-controlling “Velcro parents” who have a hard time letting go. Anecdotes abound of parents out of control — like the mother who camped out in her daughter’s dorm room to help the “transition” to college. Even less kooky stories are popping up: At St. Olaf College in Minnesota, incoming freshmen view a

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A (Sort of) Sentimental Post That I Tried to Make Less So

Yesterday I sat in the stands at my son’s graduation, smack at what would be the face-off line of the covered ice hockey rink, counting the rows of chairs on the floor below and trying to work out which mortarboard was his in a royal blue sea of 440 graduates. All of us parents standing shoulder-to-shoulder were doing the same thing, of course: Each of us seeking out our own kid, each of our hearts swollen within our chests to the point of bursting. (We parents are impossibly foolish, aren’t we? It’s easy to mock this brand of sappy sentimentality -– I want to mock myself right now –- but still you are powerless to resist the thing that makes you so happy, so joyful, so full of love that you are full to the brim, and overflowing, and all your bones are loose and floating in the syrupy liquid

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Parent Bingo

My 17-year-old will be in college next year, and right now he and I are deep in the process of applications and school visits and talks that spring up suddenly at dinner or in the car and begin with, “Maybe I should think about…?” or “Have you considered…?” It’s a process that feels very much how I once heard a writer describe the process of writing: Like feeling your way, a foot or two at a time, along a very long and very dark tunnel; you can’t fathom where it ends up. Sometimes it’s my son who starts the conversation, and sometimes I do. But either way, it’s clear that this is less a new topic than it is a thread of a conversation we’ve been having for many months, and probably years. It’s the same conversation every parent has first with a spouse and then later with the child

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At a Loss for Words

On Thursday, my son finished up his junior year of high school, and today his dad, little sister and I drove him 75 miles to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he’ll spend the next 6 weeks immersed in Art. He’ll spend much of that time muddying his clothes in the ceramics studio, with his hands elbow-deep in clay that turns magical in his two hands — hands that have turned sinewy and strong from all his time at the potter’s wheel. He hugged me and patted my back with those hands when we left to drive back home. He’s gone to summer camps before. But this was the first time that he didn’t push me toward the exit with impatience, counting the seconds before I would stop embarrassing him, or smothering him, or fretting too much, or whatever it is that I do that usually drives him absolutely

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