The things you do for your children. Or rather, the things you unwittingly do for yourself. It was an early autumn Thursday afternoon, four days after the ten-year anniversary of September 11, 4:25 p.m. If we didn’t leave the house right then, we were never going to get to my seven-year-old son’s inaugural golf lesson…

The old red brick convent rises two big ghost-floors above the larger, L-shaped main level. It is not a romantic building in the classic, sprawling sense of what the word “convent” might connote, like the Sisters of St. Joseph’s giant Mt. Saint Mary Convent in Wichita, or the Poor Clares’ walled and flamboyant nineteenth-century complex…

The movie The Help has been out almost a month by now, but the surrounding hubbub seems in no way to be subsiding. Heated discussions about the film and its portrayal of the early civil rights era have raged across the internet, the style sections of the newspaper, and public radio call-in programs. Based on…

It’s been more than six weeks since my mother died, and the heavy cream-colored note cards are still sitting, reproachfully, in their pink box. The list of flower bouquets, delivered meals, and donations to my son’s Montessori school in my mother’s name—numbered 1-35 (and that’s just my portion: there are five other siblings), is scrawled…

First, perhaps most prominently, there was the dress I wore to my mother’s funeral: a cotton broadcloth shift dress, princess-seamed and with box pleats around the knee-length hem, that had been a hand-me-over from my sister-in-law. The dress was sleeveless, but I did wear high-heeled shoes, a black spandex slip, and stockings. It was around…

For Easter this year, my older sister gave my two-year-old daughter a potential future heirloom to wear to the midnight Paschal liturgy: a dress of cream-colored raw silk, with ruffles, pintucks, and little puffed sleeves that delicately ringed Anna Maria’s arms. The lined skirt puffed out from the high gathered waist, and in pale light…

At the end of next week, barring some kind of family emergency, my husband and I will load the children into the car and head up Interstate 95 to attend my twenty-fifth reunion at a boarding school in Massachusetts. For my husband, as is the case with most spouses, I guess, this is one of…

Each bright new weekday morning, I rustle the children into the car, pick up another neighborhood child, then drive across three ragged D.C. suburbs—past liquor stores, pawnshops, and storefront churches—to the crumbling eighty-year old former parochial school building that houses Christian Family Montessori School. It’s Rhode Island Avenue and busy, so parents park carefully, then…

Now that the time change has taken place, the season of fall has finally settled in, and buckled down. The weeks are barreling past now, downhill, bearing their inevitable way toward Thanksgiving and the grey months of winter. Here in Washington, DC, the tourists are gone and the ducks have flown away. More than anything…

The day before yesterday, my eighteen-month-old daughter grabbed the bent-pull handle of a kids’ plastic wagon more than twice her size, then ran down the sidewalk next to our house, the wagon bumping wildly behind her. It was a perfect breezy, sunny Indian Summer afternoon. I ran along beside her, both to protect her from…