The other week I turned down the invitation to speak to a preschool. Politely, I hope. I said something like “my recent encounters with preschool groups have had unreliable outcomes.” There’s more (and less) to it, but I’ve applied the rule of three: when things don’t go quite the way you expect three times in a row, it’s a good time to turn in another direction.
I’ve suddenly realized I don’t have much to say about how to raise your kids.
You probably aren’t surprised, since I blew my own lid off about this topic a couple of months ago with a rant about the proliferation of cynical parenting advice and so-called scientific breakthroughs. The piece is reprinted in this month’s Get Born magazine, and that’s a good place for it. The rant is over now; my Tea Party moment has passed. My fury birthed a clarifying truth for me: parenting is not a project! At least, my parenting is not a project. Ten years into the blitzkrieg of late-life motherhood, I’ve recognized that kids do a pretty good job of growing up by themselves. Thank goodness, because parents like me can make a mess out of the simplest things.
This is not to say I don’t stand by Momma Zen. It is as sweet and disarming a book of no-parenting advice as any out there, and more popular than ever. I’m happy it turned out okay all by itself.
My daughter is 10. We are likely to be enemies any day now, then wary survivors, before our amity is once again restored. I can attest how wonderful 10-year-olds can be: how purely emotional, brutally honest, sincere, enthusiastic, coy, shrewd, and worldly wise. And I can tell you that my daughter at 10 years is exactly the same girl she showed herself to be at 10 months. She has never been anyone but wholly, recognizably herself, all the while I have been occupying myself with pushing a wooden bead along a circuitous route. (Hey, they said it was educational.) read more
That you could spend nearly a thousand dollars we don’t yet have, to save the crippled cause of a poor public school, for a clutch of stuff that you didn’t much want, a blurry galaxy rendered through the bottom of a bottomless champagne glass: a tripod telescope, Dodgers seats, a studio tour and four seats at a TV show taping. That you could pan this fool’s gold and thus deliver our daughter to a stretch of celestial awe beyond the arc of the moon. All to see the stars! The stars!
Chapter One: Full Basket
One of my readers is 
It was not only Rodin’s fame that brought Rilke to him. Rilke had a passionate desire to know a master, a figure who could fill his imagination with a kind of authority that his father no longer had for him. When Rilke prepared for his trip to Paris in the summer of 1902, his expectations were high. He arrived in August, waited a few days, and finally presented himself at 182 rue de l’Université. The two blue-eyed men sat opposite each other.
I’m reading a 
You’re here! You’re here! Welcome to my new home on the web where I’ve put everything on the kitchen table. Take a moment and 
