My darlings Jake and Rose,
I’ve gotten this website together for you, because when I Googled myself, I found that after forty plus years of writing for magazines and newspapers, only two of my stories showed up on line. The first of these was one of the pieces I wrote for The New York Times, the story of our hiking trip in Oregon, Jake, where you fell in love with the llamas. (The other Times piece—an essay about how I got to love having the apartment to myself when your father was traveling—had gone missing, but you’ll find it here.) The only other piece of mine I found on line was “The Myth of the Male Orgasm,” which I originally wrote for The Village Voice, but which was reprinted in several other places and included in both Titters, The First Collection of Humor by Women, and a college textbook for a women’s studies course. (Go figure!)
And that, essentially, was it. The dozens and dozens of essays and articles and columns I wrote for Ms., Glamour, Family Circle, Redbook, McCall’s, New Woman, The East Hampton Star, Parenting, The Daily News, Child, Sesame Street Magazine, Health, etc., never made it onto the www. And so many of them, as you’ll see, were about you—your triumphs and shenanigans and all the ways you made my life so wonderful.
The site is not complete, unfortunately—because I can’t find every tear sheet I could have sworn I’d kept—but it should give you an idea of what I was doing all those times when you were growing up and came to my closed office door asking for one thing or another (money for something, permission for something, something for something) only to hear me yell, “Not now, Mommy’s working!”
All my love,
Mom