I finally bought my kid some overalls last week. It was time. And not because it was Halloween, although that was her excuse – this time. Sophie’s been asking for overalls for years, and for years I’ve been changing the subject. That’s not to say this isn’t a kid who gets what she wants, particularly […]

    This morning, Sophie’s high school classmates are taking the PSAT. Sophie is home, sleeping in. When she gets up, she’ll do math homework, get her bangs trimmed, watch some YouTube videos. Later in the day, she’ll go to ballet class. I’ve never let her miss a test before. For 15 years, this kid […]

  Fall is here, but I’m still thinking about my summer gig. I spent the hot months of the year with my nose in the dictionary — rifling through medical journals, Googling the history of words, jotting down notes. And clapping my hand over my own mouth several times a day. I’ve been a journalist […]

    Not long after Ray dropped Sophie off at school yesterday morning, I got a text from my friend Elizabeth. Her daughter and Sophie attend the same high school. The text included an image of an exchange Elizabeth had just had with her daughter: Mom, there’s apparently this thing going around social media that someone […]

  I couldn’t fall asleep last night. That’s unusual. Most nights I crash hard, then I’m up at 2, 3, 4, 5, finally really sleeping when the alarm goes off at 6. But last night I was prowling the house at midnight, looking for a photo from Annabelle’s first day of kindergarten. Twelve years ago, […]

  So there’s this Facebook status update that’s been rattling around in my head for weeks now. I’ve been afraid to actually write it down because I don’t want to jinx it. But – what the hell. It goes something like this: For as long as I can remember, pretty much since she’s been able […]

  The dust is settling around Sophie’s freshman year of high school. It was one of the messiest yet. And also pretty awesome. Sometimes in life, all it takes is one phenomenal moment to make you feel like you’re doing the right thing. I spent much of this last year looking for that phenomenal moment, […]

  “HEY ARE YOU ALMOST DRESSED?” I yelled out from the bathroom one morning last week. Sophie appeared in the doorway, wearing a tee shirt that said Hopeless Dreamer on the pocket, chewing hard on her well-worn thumb, almost twice the size of a normal thumb from years of sucking. Fifteen years. “This is what […]

  Several weeks ago I asked readers and friends and readers who are friends to share stories of inclusion — what works, what doesn’t work. I got a wide range of answers with some repeating themes, and today I’d like to share them with you. I left names out on purpose, since not everyone is […]

Once upon a time, in a land scorched hard and dry by the sun, public education was in trouble. For decades, the state’s leaders had starved the schools — underpaying teachers, letting buildings decay, and concocting elaborate schemes to create shadow school systems to replace the ones they’d all but destroyed. These leaders founded and […]