I knew that my 48th birthday yesterday was a something when it even seemed to give my father pause. I called him the day before to thank him for the gift he sent, and he mentioned my age and how the calendar on his computer had told him it was “Amy Byrnes’s 48th birthday” andRead more…
This is what I am fucking sick of: People with opinions. Not you. You can have all the opinions you want. I mean, I’d prefer it if you kept them to yourself — especially if you watch a lot of Fox News — but I am open to people having beliefs other than my own,Read more…
“Okay, Mom,” said my 17-year-old daughter, totally out of the blue not long ago. “How ugly is this guy?” We had been lying around our den one afternoon – along with her older sister and best friend from across the street – laughing and chatting about nothing in particular, when she asked her question. IRead more…
One morning last week, my 21-year-old son came into the kitchen and asked if I’d help him make a cup of coffee. Now, if any of you own one of those newfangled Keurig machines, like the one I have, you know that it’s fairly simple to operate. You open the doohickey and stick the plasticRead more…
I am a world-class procrastinator. Really, don’t even try to compete with me. You won’t stand a chance. I’m awesome at rationalizing why I should fold the laundry and make my bed and wipe the kitchen counters before sitting down to write. And chronic indecisiveness often results in a stack of papers collecting in a giantRead more…
Lately, I’ve taken to sitting at the head of the big pine table in my kitchen to write, my black-and-white slipcovered chair backed into the bay window that bumps out that back corner of the room. Outside the window over my left shoulder, there’s a tremendous amount of chattering these days coming from the finchesRead more…
When my oldest was a junior in high school, I couldn’t wait to start looking at colleges. He and I drove north over his spring break that year to stay with friends just outside Boston to visit a couple of schools, and you would have thought I was going to Disney World. Libraries! Dining halls!Read more…
The following is based on actual events. This. Totally. Fucking. Happened. Let me begin by issuing a disclaimer: I have never purported here to be particularly smart. And while I often seem to by trying to prove quite the opposite in the stories I share on my blog, hopefully I come off – at theRead more…
Someone I know had a miscarriage last week and when I called to tell her how sorry I was for her loss, she said she never expected to be so sad, and stopped to cry some more. “Just in disbelief,” she texted later, and I totally got it. I had three early miscarriages in myRead more…
I didn’t leave the United States until I was 23 and out of college. Up until then, the extent of my air travel consisted of a handful of trips to Florida and a visit to St. Louis to stay with my aunt and her family the summer my parents separated when I turned 12. AsRead more…
