About Me

I’m a freelance writer with a longstanding interest in parenting and related topics, including education and children’s health, and my writing has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times, Parents, American Baby, New Jersey Monthly, New Jersey Life, The Writer, Coastal Living, Scholastic’s Instructor, and Disney’s FamilyFun. 

Dispatches from the Nest is an ongoing story that was sparked when I realized how terribly fleeting childhood is.  That revelation came to me when my daughter and only child, Flora, turned ten.  “Wow.  Double digits,” noted my friend Noreen ominously.  (Actually, she didn’t say it ominously, but that’s how I heard it.)  Could it be that this maddening, thrilling, stultifying, exhilarating thing called parenthood was self-limiting?  Would there really come a day, sometime in the actually foreseeable future, when I was no longer a mom?  (A word, by the way, that I detested for the first decade of motherhood; “Mom,” I felt, was perfectly adequate as a proper noun, but with that lowercase m, it just demeaned us all.  ”Mom” lacks gravitas; ”mom” lacks dignity.  Then, as with almost everything else, I got used to it and stopped resisting.)  So there I was, a mom, about to lose my momhood.  In the end, I did what I always do when I need to work things out: I wrote.  I had a professor at Columbia who told us that writing was a form of thinking, and he was absolutely right.  For me, it’s the best form of thinking (except the kind that I do in the shower, which is not only free form and highly productive, but scented with shampoo and conditioner).

Of course, it took me years to get to the blog.  But here I am, with my daughter mere months away from leaving for college, trying to sort it all out online.  I suppose this isn’t entirely new for me.  My first published piece about Flora appeared in FamilyFun magazine when she was five and we built a water garden together.  (She loved the water garden but hated the photo shoot that went with it, which lasted for the better part of a sweltering June afternoon.  After 20 minutes of the photographer asking her to pick up and replace the same edging stone, she looked at me and declared, sotto voce, “Mommy, I want the photographer to go. Now.”  I thought this revealed great wisdom for so tiny a person, and I turned to the photographer — who, frankly, had been getting on my nerves for the past several hours — and told him, “You heard the kid.”

Over the years, Flora has appeared in many of my pieces, so it just seems natural that I should write about this phase of our life together.  Unlike those other works, however, this one is open ended: I don’t know how long it will ultimately be, and I have no clue whether the ending will be happy or sad.  I suspect that a theme will emerge, along with a message or two, and maybe even some snippets of useful information.  But I couldn’t tell you what they might be at the moment.  That’s why I want you to stay tuned.  And to stick with me.  And to cheer me along if you have the energy.  And to share your own experiences, and any wisdom you’ve gleaned from them.

Here we go.