As always happens when conflict and controversy and hurt feelings come gushing forth from the normally tame river of words that constitutes my writing life, I have done a lot of thinking in the past few days. I have been thinking about what I wrote and what I meant, about when to speak up and when to shut up, about all I don’t know and the colleagues and friends whom I am so lucky to know. I have promised to... Read more
Whether you choose to have one child or many, the children you end up with, and your willingness to embrace them no matter how they differ from the children you expected, will be the most important outcomes of your childbearing decisions. Read more
Whether we're telling stories or absorbing facts (or ideally, doing both), we are called to be compassionate listeners. Dale Hanson Bourke's book, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Tough Questions, Direct Answers is a vital tool for that endeavor. Read more
I was leafing through the New York Times last Saturday morning when, deep toward the back of the front section, I came upon this article about a gunman, armed with an assault weapon and nearly 2,000 rounds of ammunition, who shot and killed four people in Santa Monica. (The death toll has since risen to five.) I said to my husband, “Look at this. It didn’t even make the front page.” Six months after more than two dozen people, most... Read more
Sometimes I fall into the trap of believing that I already do everything anyway, that the minutiae in my head and the chores that I do on auto-pilot and the ways I most naturally interact with my kids are clearly the only minutiae and chores and interactions that matter. But they're not. Read more
The past thirteen-plus years for me have been one long exercise in welcoming the messy, noisy, needy people who are my children. They make it hard to get anything much done, especially writing. But without them, I'm not sure I'd have much of value to write. Read more
Parents love to judge each other for all kinds of perceived failures. Here are some common ways in which parents judge other parents harshly—and suggestions for replacing judgment with empathy and respect. Read more
As the school year winds down, my calendar greets me each morning with its list of assemblies and ceremonies and recitals and final thises and thats. Reminders about teacher and coach gifts to be group funded and bought, of summer camp bills to be paid and paperwork to be completed. My brain greets me each morning with words clamoring for release, aching for time in which to sit down and allow my fingertips to create something—a post, an essay, an... Read more
Last fall I pointed blog readers to my colleague Rachel Stone’s post on vaccination as an expression of neighborly love. Today, Rachel has a follow-up post of sorts, commenting on a Mother Jones article indicating that poverty and other family issues (such as working parents who struggle to get their kids to the doctor’s office during business hours) are significant factors in children going unvaccinated. I commend you to her post, as well as to an excellent new web site,... Read more
Significant lifestyle changes (or even small changes) for the good of our earth and its inhabitants become sustainable and adoptable by a large population only when communal values change enough that healthier, more humane practices become the norm. Big lifestyle changes for ethical reasons are best done in community. Read more
Ellen Painter Dollar
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