I always thought I wanted a daughter, but the time was never right for a second baby. I had one excuse after another—until at last I realized that one child was enough for me. It was time to make absolutely certain that my birthing years were over.
Read more →I was 14 years old and in the ninth grade at Oyster River High School in Durham, N.H., when I wrote this short story, a prizewinner in the Scholastic Magazines annual writing contest for young people. My first published work, it was later featured in the long-vanished Read magazine and has since appeared in countless anthologies for high school students. After more than 40 years, I still get inquiries about “The Fan Club.”
Read more →I feared that my son’s adolescence would reduce me to screaming, fist-shaking fury. I had no idea that the dread teen years would be my best years as a mother.
Read more →Thirty years before my sister and I told our widely read story of rivalry and love in More magazine, she inspired my very first feature article. I was 28, she was 24, two young women taking their first steps toward a truce in their lifelong conflict.
Read more →You don’t just make friends; you keep them, one guess-what phone call or soul-baring confidence at a time. But the reality is that you can’t keep a friend forever. One of you will die and the other will mourn. And the odds are that no one will send a condolence card. In the hierarchy of loss, friends are thought to rank last, even though a friend’s death changes a woman forever.
Read more →I’d been hoping for a daughter who would play with dolls as I used to do. Instead I had a son with a passion for trucks (the noisier, the better). It was not what I expected, but I’ve learned to like surprises.
Read more →My new beauty role model is well into her 60s, and neither lifted nor Botoxed. She has given up stilettos, sheath dresses, eyeliner and a husband. When I’m having a bad face day, she reminds me what beauty really is: the artless confidence that comes with letting go of whatever constricts a woman’s best self.
Read more →When we rented a getaway cottage in Maine one long-ago summer, we pictured ourselves eating fresh-caught lobster on a deck overlooking the water. Little did we know we had rented the homeliest of yurts.
Read more →A new breed of woman entrepreneur is proving that sometimes the best employee is your husband. Rona Maynard gets the inside story from four of the pathfinders.
Read more →The scars and sags on my body are like dings on a well-used car. But to me these so-called “imperfections” are mementos of where I’ve been and what’s happened along the way.
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