You know, there is not a day that goes by on Instagram that I don’t get asked one specific question multiple times by crowds of deficiently deducing dicks. In fact, I didn’t have one particular Poirot in mind to respond to when beginning this post – instead, I scrolled through my recent comments and it took me less than a minute to find the latest addition to the ever-flowing stream of this precise question: In this one idiotic question, there lies… Read more
I am away right now, visiting family in a whole other, far flatter province. I’m sitting Buddha-style in a tiny motel bed crowded with my husband and my dog, my little dude is in the other room of our suite sawing them off. There’s only a matter of time before my perfect silence is shattered with the busy-ness of family life on the road. As such, I’m here to offer you a throwback post from my pre-Patheos days. It is… Read more
I can’t imagine how it would feel to become aware that the home you’d made for your children left them feeling unsafe and unloved. Most mothers commit to backbreaking work, making their home a safe and loving place for their kids to grow. For eighteen years and beyond, we flop into bed each night exhausted not just at the physical work required to raise a child but the emotional commitment as well. We find reward in the growth of our… Read more
We all know nothing pisses off God more than a good old in n’ out sesh. He’s worried about your junk. He’s worried about where you stick it, how you touch it and how many layers cover it up. He’s concerned about what gender you stick it in, which hole and whether or not you’re married to said hole. God is so obsessively worried about your twig and berries, that he won’t even let you live with someone you love… Read more
A reader asked me, Hey GM, I’m expecting my first child in October. Naturally, my husband and I have been discussing how to raise our kids a lot more lately. We are both atheists, but it just came up in a recent conversation that he wants to expose our kids to as many religions as possible so they can make an informed choice. I disagree. I don’t think there’s a reason to expose them to religions. I believe teaching them… Read more
I’ve written a lot about the emails and messages I get from atheists in other countries who are in danger. You know, the ones who face death if it ever comes out that they no longer believe in god. There are heathens who I eventually stop hearing from and who may have suffered the ultimate punishment for their apostasy. I’ve written a lot about these sorts of emails that haunt me and hang over me like a dark cloud. They… Read more
For the sake of our first-time readers, I will repeat myself: I used to live in Australia. I spent 1986 in Adelaide. I was eight years old. I recall meeting Kylie Minogue at the Royal Show, then just a budding star on the riveting Aussie soap, Neighbours. I remember we ate a lot of lamb and mint jelly. To this day, the taste of lamb puts me right back in the dining room of our little spider-infested bungalow in Flagstaff… Read more
My son is all about his friends. He plays on a baseball team to be with them, and he likely wouldn’t play at all if they didn’t. He takes sailing lessons every summer and he probably would not if his friends weren’t there. It’s summer vacation and the kid, who is nearing eleven years old, asks to be woken up in the morning to maximize his time with friends. He will do just about anything if his friends are there… Read more
It’s dinner time. You’ve sweated in the summer heat over a pot of mashed potatoes just because it’s the only thing your kid seems to want to eat this week. You’re in the middle of a heatwave, the air-conditioner’s on the fritz, and you’re boiling potatoes and mashing them in a steam bath anyway because you’ve just got to get this kid to eat. Something. Anything. It’s the fluffiest, butteriest batch of mashed potatoes you’ve ever made, so good it’d… Read more
I used to have to clean puke out of aeroplane lavatory sinks. It always struck me as odd that someone would forgo the sick bag AND the toilet for the sink, but it happened. Way more than I care to talk about. I worked in an addiction recovery home, too, where we lost people we cared about to relapses. I worked in a grocery store meat department, cleaning the bone dust out of the nooks and crannies of all the… Read more
