American - Writer | -
Sometimes we do things not because they're fun but because they're important.
Kim Brooks
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I worked as a restaurant hostess and tutored English-as-a-second-language without a formal work visa.
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I got an MFA in fiction.
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I always knew my mother was different, different from the other mothers in the way she dressed, the way she spoke, but most obviously, the way she mothered. I remember a slumber party where, instead of a sleeping bag, she urged me to bring a small, inflatable mattress because the dust on the floor was liable to aggravate my allergies.
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I've harassed pediatricians and nurses, demanded extra conferences with preschool teachers, contacted speech therapists and occupational therapists over delays other mothers probably wouldn't have noticed, stressed over magnet school applications three years before they're due.
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I've written out itineraries for baby sitters with years of experience. I've gotten up in the middle of the night and stood over my children's sleeping bodies just to make sure they're breathing, and breathing well. In short, I'm the worst Jewish mother in the world. I make Alexander Portnoy's mother look like a laid-back Earth mama.
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What an awful burden we mothers and fathers, Jewish and not, have to bear - to hatch a thing we love more than ourselves into a world so fundamentally unworthy.
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At times, our collective anger seems a worthwhile thing - it has a weight and shape and force we couldn't achieve as individuals - but at other times, I can't help wondering how much it really accomplishes, if in some ways it might even impede us in our attempts to be more thoughtful, 'enlightened' human beings.
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As an angsty teenager and college student, I used to mock people who lived in gated communities, who were so afraid of the unfamiliar world they had to erect a physical boundary to keep it at bay. But now I wonder, aren't the boundaries we draw with Facebook just as secure as a man-made moat or an underpaid security guard manning a booth?
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My husband and I both attended public schools. We believe in the benefits, both individual and communal, of supporting public schools.
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I'm sure all of us can find fault in our own education, and I certainly wished at times that I'd had other options. My own K-12 education may have been free and easy, but it wasn't necessarily very good.
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I always knew my mother loved me, but I also knew just as surely that there were moments, hours, days, when she could hardly cope with her own life, much less motherhood. Often, these episodes came without warning, like a change in weather, and so I became a meteorologist of her dysphoria.
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