>This morning, Baby woke up worse than ever. She slumped around for a while and refused to eat or drink anything. “Baby, does your throat hurt?” I asked her. “Yah,” she said mournfully. Strep throat! It must be strep throat! “Do your ears hurt?” “Yah, Mm hmm.” She tugged at her ears. Ear infection. Oh […]

>A single tear rolled down Lucinda’s alabaster cheek as she sank despondently into the down velvet pillows of her window seat and morosely stared at the formal gardens outside. “Oh Muse, Muse!” she muttered weakly. “Why have you forsaken me?” Crumpled bits of paper littered the Aubusson rug at her tiny feet. Lucinda rested her […]

I imagine that if I am a very, very bad girl, I will die and meet my eternal doom inside a Kroger supermarket, where the clock is forever set to exactly three hours before a blizzard is scheduled to hit. Like a suburban Scrooge, I was given a sneak preview of what my special hell […]

>I was four when I first heard The Voice. It swirled out of the speakers of my mom’s Oldsmobile like a balmy breeze, making my toes curl with pleasure. ”Sailing takes me awayyyyy to where I’ve always heard it could beeee…” “Who’s singing that, Mommy?” I asked, struggling up from my reverie and dangling my […]

> Noted Scientists Discover Center of the Universe in Tennessee PASADENA, Calif.– In a stunning reversal of theories widely accepted by the world’s top astronomical experts, planetary scientists at the California Institute of Technology now say they have pinpointed the exact location of the center of the universe to the brain of an unidentified 15-year-old […]

>I was at the grocery a few weeks ago when I noticed that one woman kept smiling broadly at me every time our paths crossed. Hesitantly, I finally smiled back. Who the hell was she? “Hi,” she said as I passed her in the frozen foods. “How’s that sweet baby?” Instinctively, I put my hand […]

>As most of you know, I have a husband. A husband who thinks he’s always right. This leads to periodic bickering, in which he tells me why he’s right and I’m wrong and then I tell him why he’s wrong and I’m right. Loudly. Almost all of our arguments fall into the category of “dumb […]

>Last night, my 12-year-old stepdaughter underwent a mall metamorphosis. I had dropped her and a friend off at our sad excuse for a neighborhood shopping center at 5pm. Makeupless, elf-sized, hair pulled back in a simple ponytail, eyes peering out from behind funky little glasses, you would have thought she was closer to 10 than […]

> It was another dreary morning at Suburban Turmoil, Inc. Lucinda sighed as she put her 1,247,504th load of laundry into the washing machine. Was this what her life would amount to? The ability to make a paste from Spray n’ Wash and Oxyclean that would eliminate even the toughest stains? She knew she should […]

>Starting a new job requires all kinds of training. You might receive a 500-page employee handbook that you’ll never read. You may be assigned to shadow a bitchy fellow worker for a few days who will set you back weeks with her false information. And you will likely find yourself tete-a-tete with the stringy haired […]