The Cloister and the Cradle
2007. I’m teaching at Stella Maris, a small girls’ Catholic high school in Queens. Many of my colleagues are nuns.
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Lilac Stitches
I met my future stepmother in a Leningrad subway when I was eight. Luda was a twenty-year-old transplant from a small Ukrainian town…
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My Husband Travels
It was eight minutes before the taxi arrived to take my husband to the airport. We were in the bathroom, throwing toiletries into a tartan sponge bag.
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Women We Read This Week
Helen Hayward’s “My children, my life,” in Aeon Magazine In this thought-provoking personal essay, Hayward challenges the assumption that a woman can’t dedicate herself…
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Private Ceremonies
I had only a minute while I waited for the doctor to meet my patient. I grabbed a plastic cup and a pregnancy test from the lab and slipped into the bathroom.
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Map to Motherland
This morning, Steven and I woke up late and tired because our two-year-old had been up twice in the night dreaming about scary dinosaurs…
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A Letter to My Thirties
Dear Thirties,
You are a centrifugal force to be reckoned with: this, I concede from the outset.