Others may have begun their parenting journey with a positive pregnancy test and parenting book, but I started mine in front of the television.

The other morning, I was digging around for something in the back of my closet when I found a framed photograph I’d stashed there in one of my fits of manic tidying.

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for all the lessons my parents taught me. I am grateful because those lessons are now all I have. I don’t get any new advice.

I'm going to confess something that might sound shocking coming from a writer who often takes as her subject the complex and sometimes dark experience of mothering young children . . .

Is there something the matter with me? As a wife? Because here’s the thing: I don’t always like to do my “wifely duty.”

When my oldest son started his first day of Kindergarten I, like many mothers, cried the minute he sat down in his classroom. He was a big boy now. He was entering a new phase in his life, yet I still remember the first day I held him in my arms as a newborn.

>“All aboard everyone, Spencer is leaving,” my older son calls out. But his younger brother, standing in the way, says, „Nein, das is Percys Platz!” A struggle ensues: „Geh weg, das ist Spencers Gleis!” Eventually a solution is found...