Social media, why must you torture me so? For someone prone to envy (me) and living on a wafer-thin budget (also me), this time of year is fraught with invitations to fall down the self-pity hole. Look, there’s my neighbor in France with her family! There’s a group of...
Since my 20s, I’ve been having the same conversation, more or less, with my girlfriends. Here’s how it goes: One of them paints a picture of how she was, say, at the stove frying chicken, while feeding the baby, talking on the phone to a doctor, and...
Since my 20s, I’ve been having the same conversation, more or less, with my girlfriends. Here’s how it goes: One of them paints a picture of how she was, say, at the stove frying chicken, while feeding the baby, talking on the phone to a doctor, and...
Not long ago, when the financial reality of my divorce was hitting hard, I had dinner with one of my oldest and dearest friends. Over wine and entrees, I kvetched about how most months it was difficult to pay the mortgage and the heating bill and groceries for four,...
In the late 1960s, when I was a newlywed, my mother-in-law told me what seemed like a quaint story about how her parents helped her out when she got divorced. She was a single mother of three, without any college or professional skills. She didn’t even have a...