Family

23andMe Informed Me My Husband and I Are Related, New York Magazine/The Cut

After 38 years of marriage, I thought I knew my spouse. Then I got an email from the personalized genomics company 23AndMe with the subject line, “You have new DNA relatives.” Which is how I discovered that my husband Marc and I are related through more than mere marriage. We’re third cousins.

We Celebrated Our 35th anniversary With An Unusual Gift: His-And-Hers Hearing Aids, Washington Post

My husband, Marc, and I celebrated our 35th anniversary this year. Did we mark the milestone by scuba diving off the Great Barrier Reef? Zip-lining through the rain forest in Costa Rica? Rafting the Colorado River? Nope, nope and nope. We got His and Hers hearing aids.

Why I’m Giving My Mother-in-Law a Book About a Tyrant, Next Avenue

For Mother’s Day, I’m giving my mother-in-law Beverly a book about Joseph Stalin. I’m not implying she’s a totalitarian tyrant, I swear.

Navigation Skills: A Mom Who “Likes” Too Much, Chicago Tribune

OK, I'm going out on a limb here. I'm a middle-age mom and I love Facebook. And no, I'm not playing games like FarmVille, Kingdoms of Camelot or Mafia Wars. I love it for networking. So when "Saturday Night Live" recently aired a fake ad for the "Damn It! My Mom's on Facebook" filter, I thought it was a hoot.  Until my 23-year-old son Jonathan cornered me. "You're all over Facebook,” he said. "You've been clicking 'like' on too many things."

36 Ways to Wreck Your Vacation, Huffington Post

1. Take your kids.

2. (Okay, forget number one.)

3. Rent a vacation house from people who don't have kids and don't like kids. Rent a house from people who are fond of model ships in bottles, glass sculptures, and white, wall-to-wall carpeting….

Never My-Zulled, Literary Mama

One Saturday afternoon, soon after I became engaged, I sat in the den at my parents' house, reviewing the brochures on silver and china patterns I'd collected. I picked up a pamphlet and read aloud to my mother:

"'Other silver makers will tell you that theirs is the original Queen Anne Williamsburg pattern, but don't be misled.'"

My parents' heads both shot up. "Could we have that again?" my father said. 

"'But don't be misled,'" I said.

"Let me see that," my mother said. Then she whooped. "That's not 'my-zulled', it's 'miss-led'," she said, and everyone -- mother, father, fiancé, and brother -- burst out laughing. 

"You mean M-I-S-L-E-D isn't pronounced 'my-zulled'?" I said. "Doesn't it sound like 'reprisal'?"

Everyone laughed harder. "Oh honey," my mother said finally, "we're not laughing at you." 

"Oh yeah? Well you're not laughing with me, because I'm not laughing." My face was hot with embarrassment. "It looks like my-zulled," I said. "My-zull" was part of my reading vocabulary (as opposed to a speaking vocabulary), one of many words I had seen or written but never spoken. My reading vocabulary was extensive: I'd majored in English, and at the time was finishing a Master's in journalism, and working as a copywriter for Simon & Schuster. I believed that whoever said "the pen is mightier than the sword" was the kind of guy who probably got picked last for the team, and as I was an athletically challenged child, I had turned to books early on. Got a question? Get the book. Or even better, books, and make that plenty of them….

Cherry Red, Brevity

John Gravely was our neighborhood house painter. He was never John, or Mr. Gravely. Just John-Gravely. He was always cheerful and whistled when he worked. Sometimes, while he scraped and painted, I’d climb the creaky wood stairs to the attic, where my parents kept an old office typewriter on an old metal stand that made a clackety racket whenever I struck the keys. Pecking happily, I would make up stories about my little brother and our fourteen first cousins; report on close escapes from Lancer, the Doberman Pinscher who terrorized us neighborhood kids; or invent adventures for Nancy Drew and her pals. I’d skip downstairs to read my stories aloud to anyone who’d listen. John-Gravely was always happy to put down his paint brush, wipe his hands on a stiff gray rag, and watch me intently with his crossed blue eyes. Those eyes made me a little uncomfortable, so I tried not to look too closely. I’d had surgery on my eyes when I was six, so they didn’t cross like his, but they weren’t straight either. Sometimes kids made fun of me; it made me shy. But I didn’t feel shy with John-Gravely. He always paid attention to me. When I read him my stories, he laughed in the right places. Each time he’d say, “You’re going to be a famous writer one day….”

Sotto Voce, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood

“If you could be anything in the world and talent and money weren’t an issue, would you still be doing what you do, or something else?”

My husband posed this question in an attempt to liven up a rather staid Upper East Side party one night. The gathered Wall Street wizards, lawyers and M.B.A. types thought about it. “Exactly what we’re doing,” most of them concluded. Finally it was my turn. I didn’t hesitate. “I’d like to be a torch singer,” I said.

Even my husband was startled. I don’t know why; he knows all about my years with a singer named John Kuhn….