Three Times My Partner Deserved a Dad Award
2). When He Realized His Perfect Child Wasn’t Perfect
Doing My Part to End Racism for the Next Generation Means Coming to Terms with My Own
In the places I called home, racism blared with shouted slurs between cafeteria tables and revisionist history classes crafted by the Daughters of the Confederacy.
Maintaining an Emotional Bank Account for Special Needs Kids
The emotional bank account concept holds that we run unconscious tallies of “deposits” and “withdrawals” with every human-to-human interaction. Keeping your bank accounts balanced – financial and emotional – is a part of being an adult. But what about when that socially awkward person is your special needs child? Who balances the emotional bank account then?
Special Needs Means Special Sleep Needs, Too
Other moms would talk about the hours-long, sleep-of-the-dead naps their children took, or how by three months of age they were putting their kids down to sleep at 8 p.m. and not hearing a peep from them till dawn. I wanted to scream. Or throw something. Or both, except I was too tired. Instead I’d chew my lip and turn away, crying, wondering how I was screwing up so badly at mothering that none of us had gotten a decent night’s sleep in years.
Backing Into Reality: How I Learned to Let My Son Live with Consequences
I had to back into a police car to recognize that my son needs to live his own life. My son has been entangled with the law for nearly ten years. In a stomach-burning flip, I saw that in the guise of love, I’d been enabling him. Me. His mother.
*An earlier version of this post mistakenly listed Kathryn Hively as the author instead of Roberta Faith Levine.