Faith Gong: Living the questions

There was a moment in my mid-20s when I realized that I might not have my own opinions about anything.

Faith Gong: Things we don’t talk about: The Sadness

It feels like various things at various times: a lump in the throat, a bitter feeling on my tongue, tears springing to my eyes, the sense that if you peered into my chest you’d see a visible crack running down the center of my heart. 

Faith Gong: Why you should watch ‘Barbie’

I ended up watching “Barbie” the very next night, with my two youngest daughters. And then, although I rarely see any movie in the theater once, I went back a week later and watched “Barbie” a second time, because my husband needed to see it. 

Faith Gong: Things we don’t talk about: Parenting teens

I recognized this path: I’d walked it before, and I knew it wound its way in hairpin turns along a steep ridge, so that one misstep could send you right off the mountain.

Faith Gong: My daughter, the lifeguard

My 15-year-old daughter just completed lifeguard training and will soon be looking down upon the splashing masses at our town pool from atop the official lifeguard chair. 

Faith Gong: Things we don’t talk about: Work, family and mortality

I often feel embarrassed about the seeming lack of constancy and direction in my life story. Am I simply lazy? Unmotivated? When I expressed these concerns to a friend recently, she said, “I think you’ve just had too many choices.”

Faith Gong: Things we don’t talk about: Being the anti-hero

I have an uneasy relationship in my head with singer/songwriter/cultural icon Taylor Swift.

Faith Gong: A Mother’s Day reflection on ‘The Giving Tree’

Herein lies my real beef with The Giving Tree: It’s not just that the tree’s form of giving was bad for the tree, it was also bad for the boy.

Faith Gong: Parenting teens in middle age: Here be dragons

My fourth child turns ten in June, which means that I have been writing this column for over a decade; this is my 299th column. 

Faith Gong: On dyeing eggs… again

The thing about special holiday traditions is that they are often stressful and messy.

Faith Gong: The bird that lived

In the middle of a March snowstorm, a lot of people put a lot of effort into saving the life of one mourning dove.

Faith Gong: The therapeutic benefits of… ironing?

“Vacuuming can be therapeutic,” the middle-aged woman told my 22-year-old self.

Faith Gong: Letting go of balloons

With five children aged three to fifteen, my parenting radar sometimes get twitchy, oversensitive. My trigger finger gets itchy at every blip that shows up — and believe me, there are a lot of blips.

Faith Gong: A story of marriage in three beds

I wanted to write about love for Valentine’s Day. When I thought about love, I thought about my marriage beds.

Faith Gong: How to be an undertaker

Our family said goodbye to two remarkable women this past December: My grandmother and my aunt died within two weeks of each other.

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